A forgotten navy: fish, fishermen, fishing vessels and the Great War at sea

Recent discussion, academic publications and many of the national exhibitions relating to the Great War at sea have focused on capital ships, Jutland and perhaps U-boats. Very little has been published about the crucial role played by fishermen, fishing vessels and coastal communities all round the British Isles. Yet fishermen and armed fishing craft were continually on the maritime front line throughout the conflict; they formed the backbone of the Auxiliary Patrol and were in constant action against U-boats or engaged on unrelenting minesweeping duties. Approximately 3000 fishing vessels were requisitioned and armed by the Admiralty and more than 39,000 fishermen joined the Trawler Section of the Royal Naval Reserve. The class and cultural gap between working fishermen and many RN officers was enormous. This book examines the multifaceted role that fishermen and the fish trade played throughout the conflict. It examines the reasons why, in an age of dreadnoughts and other high-tech military equipment, so many fishermen and fishing vessels were called upon to play such a crucial role in the littoral war against mines and U-boats, not only around the British Isles but also off the coasts of various other theatres of war. The book analyses the nature of the fishing industry's war-time involvement and also the contribution that non-belligerent fishing vessels continued to play in maintaining the beleaguered nation's food supplies.

This chapter describes Sir Edwin Lutyens's memorial to 35,000 fishermen and merchant seamen killed in the Great War, which have no grave but the sea. It recounts the crucial role the fishermen played that was often acknowledged by key figures in the country's political and military establishment immediately after the war and in the first years which followed. It also discusses the publication of a small number of books that highlighted the fishermen's activities in the Great War that told much of the scale and scope of their contribution. The chapter refers to the new navy known as the Auxiliary Patrol that had been dispersed and disbanded very rapidly after the return of peace. It summarizes the scale and scope of the engagement of fishermen and coastal communities from around the British Isles on the maritime front line during the Great War.

This article challenges claims by revisionist historians that in July 1914 the Royal Navy was on the verge of instituting a ‘naval revolution’ based on the ideas of Admiral Sir John Fisher. Winston Churchill, the first lord of the Admiralty, was not prepared to rely on Fisher’s concept of ‘flotilla defence’ in the North Sea, as revisionists contend. Nor did he wish to send capital ships to distant waters. He increasingly looked to submarines to protect Britain’s interests in the Mediterranean, a secondary theatre, but he still believed that Britain must maintain a preponderance of strength over Germany in capital ships in the North Sea. Churchill’s strategic views were generally conservative. He hoped that new designs or new technologies would one day allow submarines to supplant battleships, and he actively supported measures that might help to make this possible. But there is no evidence that he and his naval advisers were ready to gamble on a radical departure in force structure or naval strategy on the eve of the First World War.

Reviewed by: The German Fleet at War, 1939–1945 Keith W. Bird The German Fleet at War, 1939–1945. By Vincent P. O’Hara. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2004. ISBN 1-59114-651-8. Maps. Photographs. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. x, 308. $32.95. The German Kriegsmarine in World War II remains a highly popular subject, as the numerous recent studies of the U-boat war and the major engagements of surface raiders, the Bismarck and the Graf Spee, demonstrate. [End Page 1242] In this work, the author attempts to show how the surface navy's role was more complex and critical than has generally been appreciated. He summarizes "sixty-nine" surface actions of the "large" warships (which he defines as "purpose-built surface warships" of 500 tons or more) supplemented by a statistical analysis (engagement by type, opponents, location, results, etc.) that provide a useful perspective on the scale of the war at sea and a reminder of the gritty day to day efforts of those in the naval "trenches." Relying on the standard secondary English sources (with some notable omissions) and works translated from German, along with some primary sources from the American and British navies, he has produced a highly readable book which will satisfy the general reader with its focus on the stories of the crews and commanders who carried out their duties with the weapons and conditions (and orders) at hand. However, the absence from its bibliography of most of the standard German secondary sources, such as Michael Salewski's indispensable three-volume history of the Seekriegsleitung or the German Military History Research Office's comprehensive ten-volume history of the Second World War (also published in English by Oxford University Press), raises a question as to whether the book should more properly be titled "Actions against the German Fleet, 1939–1945." His descriptions of the sinking of the Glorious on 8 June 1940 and the Battle of the Barents Sea, 31 December 1942, for example, are told more from the perspective of the British than the Germans and do not reflect current research from the German sources. A more complete analysis of the motivation behind the decisions of the naval command, 1939–1945, and its two commanders, Admirals Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz, particularly Raeder's struggle to justify his capital ships, while, at the same time, preserving the "core of the fleet" for a future "rebirth," would have provided a richer context for the individual engagements described in this work. Utilizing the published War Diary of the Naval Command (Kriegstagebuch der Seekriegsleitung 1939–1945, Part A) would also have greatly added to the author's attempt to blend the micro and macro character of the naval war. The exclusion of the auxiliary cruisers (Hilfskreuzer) from this work is also surprising considering their contribution for most of 1939 and 1940 in prosecuting Raeder's sea commerce strategy. More importantly, their role presaged what increasingly became a war of "improvisation" for the navy and after 1943, a necessary "miniaturization" of the navy following Dönitz's appointment as commander and the strains of total war. For the specialist, this book points out the need for a broader new general history of the German navy in World War II that covers all the operations of the naval war, especially the "forgotten navy"—the 3,000 ships of the security forces that protected the coasts from Norway to the Baltic, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea. Keith W. Bird Lexington, Kentucky Copyright © 2005 Society for Military History

Sonar research began in the First World War to curb the U-boat menace. Radical methods had to be devised both organizationally and technically to combat this new form of warfare. Civilian scientists were drafted into naval research. A new field of science was created: underwater acoustics for passive listening, and ultrasonic echo-ranging for active detection of submarines. If the war had lasted only a few more months, prototype Asidic equipment (the Royal Navy’s name for sonar) would have gone operational. During the interwar years the American and Royal Navies developed their sonar “searchlight” systems, while before 1935 the German Navy concentrated on sophisticated passive listening arrays (incorporating American WWI research) to protect their capital ships from enemy submarines. Searchlight sonar technology evolved sharply in WWII. The nuclear submarine in 1954 required a complete rethink of the sonar scanning techniques developed over the previous 40 years. This lecture is based on full access to naval documents and interviews with scientists involved in this work in Britain and the USA for my book Seek and Strike (HMSO, 1984).

Military Technology and the Demise of the Citizen-Soldier Morris A. Pierce (bio) Katherine C. Epstein. Torpedo: Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. 305 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00. Barry Parker. The Physics of War: From Arrows to Atoms. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2014. 320 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $25.95. David M. Kennedy, ed. The Modern American Military. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xix + 332 pp. Notes and index. $29.95. These three books continue the trend among military historians of focusing away from battles toward a wider view of technology, people, policy, and politics. Although their subjects are quite varied, they shed light on the many strands that make up American military history and, taken together, could suggest that improved military technology is one reason why citizen-soldiers have disappeared from the American military. Katherine C. Epstein's Torpedo: Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain explores torpedo development prior to the First World War to highlight the intellectual property issues that arose from collaboration between military and industrial entities developing complex technical systems. Although self-propelled torpedoes—also called automotive or locomotive torpedoes—were only invented after the American Civil War, they had undergone remarkable improvement in less than fifty years. These early torpedoes were very complex machines, well deserving of Epstein's description as “systems of systems” (p. 144). Epstein focuses on improvements to three major systems: propulsion, vertical guidance, and horizontal guidance. This book adds significant knowledge to the historical development of these systems, the resulting intellectual property disputes, and the interactions between government and private entities collaborating on complex technology. The narrative covers a wide range of material from business and legal sources, including extensive archival research, and it will be most valuable to the small [End Page 300] torpedo history community. Other readers will need to look elsewhere for a complete history of torpedo development in this period.1 Although the author recognizes the complexity of torpedoes and their individual systems, her narrative would have been aided by simple descriptions of how torpedo guidance systems actually functioned by means of pneumatic, mechanical, and electrical feedback mechanisms. Additionally, a summary and timeline of these three major systems would have further aided comprehension of very complex technical and legal issues. A few shortcomings are worth pointing out. In discussing the different reasons the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy had for adopting the gyroscope in the late 1890s, the author mentions that the latter “had fired thousands of submerged shots” (p. 220), which seems like an enormous number given the contemporary rates of torpedo production and the relative parsimony of the British government. Discussing the history of torpedo development in the U.S. Navy, she suggests that “the Spanish-American War might as well not have happened” (p. 18) but only a few pages later mentions that “emergency purchases of torpedoes from foreign companies” during that conflict had revealed that the foreign torpedoes had “many new and valuable features, none of which had ever been brought to the notice of the Bureau [of Ordnance]” (p. 26). Also unmentioned is the U.S. Navy capture, during that war, of several torpedoes that were added to their inventory. Likewise, no mention is made of the Russo-Japanese War, during which combatants fired a total of 300 self-propelled torpedoes, sinking three capital ships and two destroyers in actions that were closely studied by foreign navies. Lastly, the author does not discuss the use of torpedoes in World War I, as that “is incidental to—and may even distort—the story being told here” (p. 17). Whatever one's opinions of the current military-industrial complex in the United States, it has produced very effective weapons that have been proven in combat. Accepting the obvious fact that torpedo development clearly falls within the bounds of the early military-industrial complex, it would seem reasonable to determine the efficacy of this collaboration by evaluating military effectiveness of the weapons that were developed. In other words, what was the actual value of the intellectual property...

In the German Navy, as in the UK and America, the development of underwater acoustical detection was shaped by institutional, political, and technical constraints and in response to tactical events. German hydrophone development in WWI was less advanced than that of the Allies, who focussed on combating an all-out U-boat war. The German Navy did not develop the variety of hydrophones developed by the Allies in particular the towed hydrophone array of the American Navy, which nevertheless inspired their passive sonar arrays known as “Gruppenhorchgerät” (GHG), German for “group listening device” in the interwar years, developed for the long-range protection of their capital ships, until 1935 with the signing of the Anglo German Naval Agreement when they commenced their submarine building program. For strategic reasons, Germany continued to concentrate on pro-submarine research so that at the start of WWII the German Navy had developed sophisticated GHG systems available which they improved further into the “Balkon” system of the later high-speed U-boats, Type XXI and XXVI. Their operational echo-ranging Asdic equipment was tactically inferior to that of the Royal Navy, and some interesting prototypes in development did not reach active service.

Pacifist utopias: humanitarianism, tragedy and complicity in the Second World War

Since the end of the Second World War, scuba diving has given new perspectives to marine sciences and, in particular, to marine biology. Before the advent of diving, our knowledge about biology, ecology and behavior of subtidal organisms and the structure and dynamics of hard bottom communities were very superficial. Diving enabled marine scientists to collect biological and geological samples, observe organisms and their behavior directly in situ, study species interactions, and evaluate the marine communities’ structures and dynamics. This method has helped to refine the distribution maps of many species and coastal communities. Moreover, scientific diving became an essential tool to explore environments challenging to reach otherwise, as submarine caves. Thanks to non-destructive methods, scientific diving became essential in Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and, more in general, in field studies promoting conservation purposes. Other opportunities regarded the use of underwater devices as benthic chambers, landers, photo- and cinematographic time-lapse systems, or in situ experimental manipulations aiming at testing scientific hypotheses. The direct access to the underwater habitats determined a scientific revolution, by allowing a considerable advancement of the knowledge about the marine world and constituting an approach that no instrument operated by the surface could ever match. Scientific diving assumed an importance comparable to that of the electron microscope in cell biology, and today it is a standard tool in many marine biological research activities. This work aimed to summarize the history of scientific diving and show its role in the development of marine biology and its importance in opening unexpected horizons in science.

For decades, many Australian coastal communities have been changing, in varying degrees, from traditional “fishing towns” to “mining”, “tourism”, or “retirement” towns. However, environmental changes, such as climate change, have increased the vulnerability of these communities and their capacity to continue to successfully adapt is unknown. A framework for the assessment of socio-ecological vulnerability is used to provide information on the response to change in Geraldton, Western Australia. Geraldton has traditionally been a port and fishing town and has recently become a hub for the expanding mining industry. An innovative historical assessment of adaptive capacity using sustainable livelihoods analysis with indicators of social, economic, human, financial, physical, and natural capital is used to calculate socio-ecological vulnerability over time. The framework integrates adaptive capacity with environmental change, resource dependence, and the socio-economic importance of the fished species during four census years: 1921, 1954, 1981, and 2011. The earlier years are characterized by high adaptive capacity and low socio-ecological vulnerability in keeping with strong economic growth and low unemployment rates following the First and Second World Wars. The years 1981 and 2011 showed markedly higher socio-ecological vulnerability and lower adaptive capacities. This result was due to progressively greater exposure to climate change and the high socio-economic importance of fished species, as well as relatively poor physical, social, and natural capital. With continuing environmental and economic change, the fishing industry and the broader Geraldton population is likely to become increasingly vulnerable. Proactive rather than passive adaptation may speed the recovery and reduce a decline in the fishing industry and local economies. The paper briefly discusses potential adaptation in Geraldton which may be useful as a guideline for other coastal communities.

Much has been written about that continuity between the two world wars which seems immediate and direct: the second world war broke out as a result of the failure to restore an equilibrium after the violence, cost and passion of the first world war. The continuity between the first world war and the inter-war years has struck not only modern historians, but was on the minds of both the victims and the instigators of violence. Thus in 1934, the newly exiled German theatre critic Alfred Kerr wrote that what he was witnessing was not war once more, but a mental confusion and universal chaos which were an extension of the first world war. At the same time, one of his nazi persecutors wrote that the war against the German people was continuing, that the first world war was only its bloody beginning.2 I do not intend to make a general comparison between these wars in keeping with such perceptions of the continuity between them; instead, I want to centre my analysis upon a comparison between the wars through a consideration of some of their consequences. While I will confine my analysis to examples drawn mainly from England and Germany with some attention to France, my conclusions could then be applied, modified or rejected by those familiar with the history of various individual nations which took part in both wars. Moreover, I will not be concerned with the perceptions of those soldiers who were at the rear and never experienced fighting at first hand, but only with front-line soldiers. The front-line soldier in the first world war created the Myth of the War Experience, and, as a 'new race of men', symbolized the war's promise. When the borders between the front line and the home front became blurred, as in the second world war, it affected the way in which the conflict was seen in retrospect. This essay is intended to put forward certain hypotheses about the impact of the wars upon people's perceptions, which might help to explain some of their political consequences. The first world war was an unprecedented experience in men's lives, one which had to be confronted and dealt with on a personal,

Editors’ Introduction:Children’s Culture and the First World War Gills Stacy (bio) and Esther MacCallum-Stewart (bio) As the centenary for the First World War approaches, interest in how this conflict has been—and continues to be—articulated, represented, and interrogated has been growing steadily. Of all the wars in the twentieth century, this has been the one that has retained the strongest emotional pull on the popular consciousness. The figure of the solider-poet still remains a key part of our understanding of the conflict. One of the results of other wars—particularly the Second World War and the Holocaust—has been the widespread acknowledgment that wars are not only experienced by those on the front lines. How noncombatant and combatant (albeit often unacknowledged as such) women and children experienced the First World War has formed some discussion since the 1970s. Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig's Women and Children First: The Fiction of Two World Wars (1978) was one of the first projects to identify the ways in which the wartime experiences of women and children were articulated. More interest, however, has been paid to re-examining the history of women in wartime, from the essays in Margaret Higonnet et alia's seminal collection Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (1989) to Jane Potter's Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women's Literary Responses to the Great War, 1914–1918 (2005), than to the experiences of children and war. While Holocaust studies have recently foregrounded both the war experiences of children as well as writing the Holocaust for children, the First World War remains little studied by scholars of both war and children's culture.1 The essays in this special issue are concerned with how the war has been retold: how "the story of their war, in its local, particular, parochial, familial forms, can be told and retold" (Winter 40). In the telling and re-telling of the relationship between children and the First World War, it is revealed that the "construction of the narrative . . . is itself the process of remembrance" (40). In this way, these narratives produced during [End Page v] and after the war are just as much artifacts of war as are the trenches or Blackadder Goes Forth. The articles that make up this special issue are equally concerned with what occurred in children's culture during the war as with what has occurred in the century since. Andrea McKenzie's article examines the responses made by children to the war through their contributions to St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folk, a widely-circulating magazine for children in America. McKenzie argues that children's contributions forced the war, initially a subject suppressed by the editors, onto the magazine's main pages. She points out that, by the time of the entry of the United States into the war in 1917, writing by readers about the war had gained priority in the pages of St. Nicholas. In turn this caused a reversal by St Nicholas, so that by 1917, writing by readers about the war had gradually gained priority. In this case, reader autonomy suggests that the war was of direct concern to young people. Krista Cowman's piece is concerned with a reading of the foreigner in British novels written for children: Bessie Marchant's Molly Angel's Adventures (1915) and D. H. Parry's With Haig on the Somme (1917). Cowman argues that notions of Britishness are modelled in these texts, not only through the image of the British at war, but crucially through its civilians and the foreign "other." This articulation of British nationality is, for Cowman, key to reconstructing how the heroic was understood during the war. Margaret Higonnet's article focuses on French and Belgian children's picture books, drawing connections between the images therein and ways in which children were widely expected to absorb the conflict. Through investigations of several texts, she traces the ways in which war toys, specifically soldier and doll figures are "made" and "unmade" within each story. Each of these articles points to ways in which specific genres conceptualize the war as an ideological event for their child...

Fully illustrated, this book pits US Navy submarines against the aircraft carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy at the height of World War II. Before World War II the world’s navies envisioned the submarine as a tool to hunt and kill cruisers and capital ships (aircraft carriers and battleships). Instead, they became best known for their abilities as commerce raiders. Yet hunting capital ships remained an important auxiliary role for the US submarine force in World War II. Featuring specially commissioned artwork and mapping alongside carefully chosen archive illustrations, this absorbing study focuses on five revealing battles between US submarines and Japanese aircraft carriers during 1942–44. At first, a combination of factors – bad torpedoes, poor US tactics, and plain bad luck – foiled every US submarine attack on a Japanese capital ship in 1942 and 1943. But over the space of six months in 1944 – from June through November of that year – US submarines sank three of Japan’s largest aircraft carriers as well as a battleship. Thereafter, Japanese capital ships clung to port or sheltered waters beyond the reach of submarines. In this book, Mark Lardas explains how the technologies and procedures employed by both sides helped to determine the victor in five revealing clashes, from the battle of Midway in June 1942 to the sinking ofShinano, the largest warship sunk by a submarine, in November 1944.

1) Introduction Jessica Meyer I. Trench Cultures 2) The Propinquity of Place: home, landscape and soldier poets of the Great War Keith Grieves 3) A War Unimagined: Food, memory and the rank and file soldier Rachel Duffett 4) 'Tailoring in the Trenches': Production and consumption of First World War British army uniform Jane Tynan II. Women and Culture 5) 'All That is Best of the Modern Woman?': Representations of paramilitary women war workers in British popular culture, 1914-1938 Krisztina Robert 6) 'Play at Being Soldiers'? British women, fashion and military uniform in the First World War Lucy Noakes 7) 'Wartime Hysterics': Alcohol, women and the politics of wartime social purity Stella Moss 8) Best Boys and Aching Hearts: the rhetoric of romance as social control in magazines for young women Carol Acton III. Memorial Cultures 9) The British Veterans Movement, 1917-1921 Douglas Higbee 10) The Old Front Line: Returning to the battlefields in the writings of ex-servicemen John Pegum 11) 'A Sting of Remembrance!': Collective memory and its forgotten armies Eugene Michail 12) The Last War: The legacy of the First World War in 1940s British Fiction Victoria Stewart IV. Cultures of Memory 13) 'Reaching out to the Past': Memory in Contemporary British First World War Narratives Virginie Renard 14) Popular Mnemonics of the First World War: The Unknown Soldier and Distant Bridges Claudia Sternberg 15) 'How much of an 'experience' do we want the public to receive?': Trench reconstruction and popular images of the Great War Richard Espley 16) 'If It Had Happened Otherwise': First World War exceptionalism in counterfactual history Stephen Badsey

This article briefly reviews the evolution of medical support during wars and conflicts from ancient to modern times and discusses the effect warfare has had on the development of civilian health care and emergency medical services (EMS). Medical breakthroughs and discoveries made of necessity during military conflicts have developed into new paradigms of medical care, including novel programs of triage and health assessment, emergency battlefield treatment and stabilization, anesthesia, and other surgical and emergency procedures. The critical role of organizations that provide proper emergency care to help the sick and injured both on the battlefield and in the civilian world is also highlighted.