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Throughout the war, the most noteworthy are two aspects, one is the British rogue general Q-ship tactics, which in a fashionable phrase, does not talk about martial virtues;

The second is mine tactics, which are also hooligans in theory, but they cannot stand up to the legitimate.

It is equivalent to one is a hooligan who greets, and the other is a hooligan who disguises himself as a woman and does not say hello, with the same nature and different degrees of vigour.

Let's start with Q-ship tactics.

When German submarines ravaged the Atlantic, in 1915 alone, they sank 431 Allied ships of all types, almost cutting off the sea lines on which Britain depended.

In the face of the elusive U-boat in the sea, the British pondered and broke their brains, but they did not come up with a feasible plan, and nonsensical plans emerged one after another.

For example, some staff officers of the Royal Navy believed that German submarines had to be observed through periscopes before attacking, and that if their periscopes were damaged, German U-boats would do nothing.

Based on this, they formulated a battle plan to smash the periscope with a hammer, and prepared to recruit a group of experienced and skilled blacksmiths from Britain to complete this task on small ships.

When the plan was handed over to Churchill, the Secretary of the Admiralty, he was so angry that Churchill slapped the table and greeted the eighteenth generation of the ancestors of these staff officers, and then threw the plan into the garbage basket.

With the intervention of Churchill, the staff officers of the Navy carefully studied the attack methods of the German U-boats, and they found:

In the face of armed Allied merchant ships, U-boats were often sunk with artillery or torpedoes without warning.

In the face of unarmed merchant ships, especially sailing ships, the U-boat first ordered the crew to abandon the ship, and after all of them boarded the lifeboats, they sent people to the ship to loot some supplies, and then sank them with artillery.

According to the tactics of the U-boat, the British developed the tactics of the Q-boat that were not above board.

The so-called Q ship is actually a submarine hunter with strong firepower, but it is disguised as an unarmed merchant ship.

From a distance, the Q ship was no different from an ordinary merchant ship, but it was equipped with artillery and anti-submarine bombs, and some were equipped with torpedo tubes.

In order to deceive the Germans, the British also installed fake railings and shell plates on the Q ship, and also piled up some cargo boxes or something.

The captain of the Q is usually from the active duty officers of the Royal Navy, and the crew is all from the British Navy's reserves, volunteers or merchant seamen.

For example, British Navy Captain Campbell once commanded the Q ship to sink four U-boats, becoming a well-known anti-submarine hero in Britain.

Campbell captained the Q ship Farnborough, which he disguised as a coal carrier and then trained all the crew members to perform so that they looked like real coal carriers, and in many cases, could fool British sailors.

Despite his preparations, Campbell did not go well on his first mission, commanding the Farnbrough to sea, where she drifted for 10 months without encountering a single German submarine.

Just as all the crew members were preparing to abandon their mission and return to England, the opportunity for actual combat finally came.

On that day, the "Farnborough", as usual, was adrift at sea, when suddenly, a shell screeched over the hull.

Campbell was overjoyed and knew that he had finally encountered a German submarine, so he immediately looked around, and sure enough, he saw a U-boat floating on the surface of the sea in the distance.

Campbell ordered the crew to lower the lifeboat and pretend to be in a hurry to escape, and some of the crew actually boarded the lifeboat and sailed away, while he and the other part of the crew hid on the ship, ready for battle.

The German submarine believed it, and the captain stood on the bridge to direct the submarine to approach the merchant ship, and ordered his men to prepare to board the ship to loot supplies.

As soon as the German submarine approached, Campbell ordered the British naval flag to be raised, then removed the camouflage and aimed the guns at the submarine.

The German sailors were taken aback when they saw the British flag and realized that they had been deceived, but many sailors stood outside the submarine and could not dive quickly, and in just a few minutes, the submarine was hit by more than 20 shells and countless machine gun bullets, and finally sank.

Except for a few sailors outside the submarine who survived and became prisoners of the British, the rest of the sailors sank to the bottom of the sea along with the submarine.

The British did achieve some success with the unauthentic Q-ship tactic, but this tactic could only work if the Germans knew it, and once leaked, it would be completely ineffective.

A German spy lurking in England, named Eules Heber, stumbles upon the secrets of the British Q-ship and hastily sends the information back to Germany.

The German navy top brass was taken aback and immediately changed its previous combat methods, ordering the German U-boats to attack all Allied merchant ships without warning, and no longer send people to board the ships to search and plunder, and directly sink them.

Since then, it has been very difficult for the Q ships to achieve results, and the British have refitted more than 180 Q ships, but most of them have no results.

According to post-war statistics, the British Q ships sank a total of 11 German U-boats, damaged more than 60 boats, and sank 27 themselves.

Although the British adopted the tactics of the Q-ship, which lacked Germany, they did not stop the German unrestricted submarine warfare, and only caused more innocent merchant sailors to lose their lives.

Relatively speaking, the tactics used by the German side were more upright and bright, and they sounded very imposing.

During the operation, several ships are usually sent to the sea to go on a safari, and when the target is found, it is tracked underwater.

A "head wolf" ship to direct the unified actions of other "pack wolves". Submarine groups generally attack at night, with each submarine stealthily passing through gaps or flanks of the opposing convoy, as multiple submarines attack the same target at the same time.

In this way, the hit rate was increased, and at the same time several torpedoes could appear to hit the same target.

Hence the name "wolf pack tactics".

When Germany first began to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare in World War I, "wolves are not packed, and sheep are not packed", and neither side has much tactical awareness.

At that time, the situation was like sprinkling a handful of sesame seeds on a football field, and then letting a group of ants eat sesame seeds, the ants have a high probability of encountering sesame seeds, and they can eat one of them.

If there is only a pile of sesame seeds on the huge football field, the probability of encountering ants will naturally decrease, and even if one or two ants happen to eat two grains, they will not be able to gnaw on them, which is the simplest metaphor for the escort system

Then there was the mine tactics, the British set up a lot of steel wire on the seabed in order to trap German submarines, and the mines and high-speed warships would take advantage of the fact that the submarines were trapped to blow them up into the western sky.

When the war first broke out in August 1914, there were no ship-based weapons in the world that could damage submerged submarines.

The British were particularly afraid of such underwater warships, so they began to build their submarine defense line very early, that is, to build some fences on the bottom of the sea, to create the so-called "anti-submarine fence". A fenced submarine generally has two options left:

One is to float to the surface to accept the bombardment of enemy naval fire or the impact of the enemy's warships;

The other is to carefully navigate between the mines tethered to the fence, and whether or not they can avoid it depends on the creation.

At that time, the Germans had two submarine bases, one in Germany mainland and one in Belgium, which they occupied.

No matter from which base the submarine came from or which base it was going to return to, it would have to either pass through the English Channel or the North Sea, and there could never be a third way.

The most successful thing about the anti-submarine barrier was that it blocked both roads, which made it impossible for the Germans to act recklessly in the waters of the eastern Atlantic.

In August 1914, in order to protect the French fleet from attack, the British built their first fence between Dover and the Belgian coastline.

As the first phase of the fortifications did not look very strong, the British built a 25-kilometre-long fence between Dover and Ostend in February of the following year.

In this line of defense, there is a 100-meter-long "indicator net", which is still entangled on the seabed according to the depth and has to be surfaced; And if the submarine tries to retreat quietly from underwater, it will also tear off some buoys on the surface of the net, which the high-speed warship's radar will respond to and use as locators.

Then either carry the enemy submarine and fire at it, or simply ram it and force it to surface.

Gradually, this anti-unloading system began to be widely used, and the addition of mines completely moved away from the simple anti-unloading level.

Early trigger mines were less reliable, and submarine captains could take advantage of the darkness to command submarines to sneak over the fence, but the Dover Line was still very successful.

For a year after April 1915, German submarines were annoyed by these fences, exhausting mines, frequent night cruises, and full-powered searchlights, but still unable to find any effective solution.

In August 1918, after at least 12 submarines had been destroyed by Dover's underwater defenses, the disheartened German Navy finally abandoned the route altogether. However, the underwater sea route through the North Sea into the North Atlantic was not blocked until July 1917.

Senior naval officer and fleet commander of the ugly country. Mayo proposes to build a giant line of defense between Orkney and Norway's coastline, and claims that Ugly's new magnetic mines can directly blow up all submarines that intrude into its magnetic field, which is much stronger than trigger mines.

Between July and October 1918, about 69,000 of these mines were buried to the bottom of the sea, 80 percent of which were done by the U.S. military.

In this case, Mayo is really an amazing salesman.

But the documented contribution of these mines was nothing more than the sinking of three submarines.

As for the Otranto Line, in view of the fact that Austria-Hungary and Germany had naval bases in the north and east of the Adriatic Sea, the Allies chose the construction site of the third submarine barrier in the Mediterranean, hoping to prevent the surface fleets and submarine forces of the two countries from entering this sea area.

Construction of this line began at the end of 1915, starting from the position of the "heel" of the Italian boot-like territory, and stretched across the entire Strait of Otranto to Fabana, Albania.

But the 100-kilometer-long line of defense never functioned as a true defense, with countless ships shuttling up and down it, and only one submarine was blown up here from start to finish.

In contrast, the British were still hooligans enough, and their Q-ship tactics did achieve certain results.

The "Q" ship is Smit's joking name for the "mystery ship" in his plans.

As the chief of the Naval Operations Department, Smit was well aware of the offensive methods of the German submarines, which secretly tracked and suddenly surfaced, and immediately attacked with fire, and an important reason for the repeated success of German submarines was the speed of their attacks.

To subdue the Germans, it was necessary to fight fast with speed.

Smit had been conceiving a quick solution, but he couldn't find a suitable ship.

He was inspired by the fact that German submarines were far less compact and fast than they were to merchant ships. They usually sent people on board merchant ships to pick out useful things before sinking them.

As a result, Smit had the idea of installing heavy weapons on merchant ships, and when German submarines came to the surface mistaken for ordinary merchant ships, they annihilated them with lightning speed.

After Churchill supported the Q proposal, Smit began meticulous preparations.

Soon, a "Q" ship was unveiled.

At first glance, it looked like nothing more than an ordinary merchant ship called the Farnborough, with a deck full of large wooden crates for loading.

In fact, the large boxy wooden crates were empty, and they were not used to load cargo, but to conceal the ship's large-caliber artillery and depth charge launchers.

Two torpedo launchers were covered under a veil at the stern.

In order to enhance the camouflage effect, Smit also selected a group of sailors to act as "actors" and repeatedly "rehearsed" the panic and hectic when encountering German submarines.

When everything was ready, the ship "Q" set off.

Before departure, the Admiralty sent a telegram in a code that had long been deciphered by the Germans, which stated:

"The 'Farnborough' departed on March 2, please protect and count the cargo."

When the German naval high command learned of that telegram, it issued an order to capture or sink the British merchant ship "Farnborough".

The German submarine force felt that it was just an ordinary merchant ship, so it did not take it seriously at all, so they randomly sent one to carry out the mission.

It's finally time for the show.

On March 2, the English Channel was calm and the sky was high and cloudy.

The "Q" ship was like a fully loaded coal merchant ship, cruising with difficulty in the English Channel.

On the deck, sailors were busy coming and going, and from time to time there were a few first-time sailors taking pictures with their cameras, reveling in the vast sea.

The German submarine had already discovered the British merchant ship in the predetermined sea lane, and it was another piece of fat to the mouth, and the Germans were overjoyed - a merchant ship without the protection of any frigate could not withstand any attack by the submarine at all.

"The fish is hooked!" The sailors who took pictures soon discovered the periscope that probed the brain.

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