British Trade Convoys From 1915 Instead Of 1917

What if the Royal Navy introduced a comprehensive system of trade convoys during the first period of unrestricted U-boat warfare? That is what would the effect on the course of World War One be? And what would the long term consequences be?

For example during World War One reduced merchant shipping losses mean that fewer replacements need to be built and that releases shipbuilding capacity for other purposes. The most obvious other purpose is to build more warships, which might mean more progress on aircraft carriers and the other 3 Admiral class battle cruisers. Or it might be possible to use the steel and labour to build more tanks.

Or might it backfire on the Entente powers? That is reduced American merchant shipping losses mean the United States remains neutral.

I think the economic damage World War One did to Britain would be reduced. The larger merchant fleet would earn more foreign currency and generate more tax revenue for HMG which would also have to pay out less compensation to the shipping lines so the UK would come out of World War One with a smaller national debt. It would not be a very large reduction, but a reduction of 5% would mean a reduction of £15 million a year in debt interest payments between 1920 and 1935, which also happens to be about the average annual expenditure on the RAF over the same period.
 
Convoying immediately reduces imports by 1/3 due to inefficiencies, so rationing of food and raw materials will have to occur much sooner or much more drastically than OTL. Were losses in 1915 such that a 1/3 reduction in seaborne trade is required?
 
Convoying immediately reduces imports by 1/3 due to inefficiencies, so rationing of food and raw materials will have to occur much sooner or much more drastically than OTL. Were losses in 1915 such that a 1/3 reduction in seaborne trade is required?

I have seen this claim made here and it has to be said only here on this site many times. Never with a source to back it up.

Given that the World War I target of Unlimited Submarine Warfare by the Germans was to reduce Britain's effective tonnage by 39% in order to force a capitulation within six months then ought not the convoys have done their job for them and yet clearly they did not.

Somewhere between perhaps the original source for this claim and either its employment here or reality there is a disconnect.
 
Convoying immediately reduces imports by 1/3 due to inefficiencies, so rationing of food and raw materials will have to occur much sooner or much more drastically than OTL. Were losses in 1915 such that a 1/3 reduction in seaborne trade is required?

I don't know enough about it. One of the things on my to do list is read the copy of the British official history of Seaborne Trade in my local reference library. However, it does sound like the type of argument that was used against the introduction of trade convoys IOTL.

One of the things I have heard was that in 1915 the Board of Trade was buying up all the ships it could on the second hand market at inflated prices to replace the ships that had been sunk.

Also at this time the Royal Navy was putting a lot of money into setting up the Auxiliary Patrol force. Would an Auxiliary Escort force have been better value for money?
 
I can't recall where I saw it but it isn't hard to work out that the 1/3 number isn't a total fantasy. In normal circumstance a ship gets loaded and re-provisioned and pretty much heads on its merry way, but in a convoy system it has to wait around for a convoy to be gathered which mght be days or it might even be weeks. Once a convoy is formed, and bigger convoys are a better use of escorts, it must sail at the speed most suited to the slowest ship, in formation and make tactical maneauvres. Once it arrives at its destination it then must wait its turn in a now overcrowed port to be unloaded. If you add all of this together you get a sort of 'virtual' attirition in lost days waiting for the convoy, slower journies using more fuel for faster ships and then days lost waiting to unload at the other end. A slow ship might lose a week or 10 days on a typical trans-Atlantic voyage and a fast ship might lose another day or two on top of that. 15-20 lost days on a typical trans-Atlantic round trip means the ship is doing 1/3 less work. A simplified example I know, but that's the nature of the beast more or less.
 
I can't recall where I saw it but it isn't hard to work out that the 1/3 number isn't a total fantasy. In normal circumstance a ship gets loaded and re-provisioned and pretty much heads on its merry way, but in a convoy system it has to wait around for a convoy to be gathered which mght be days or it might even be weeks. Once a convoy is formed, and bigger convoys are a better use of escorts, it must sail at the speed most suited to the slowest ship, in formation and make tactical maneauvres. Once it arrives at its destination it then must wait its turn in a now overcrowed port to be unloaded. If you add all of this together you get a sort of 'virtual' attirition in lost days waiting for the convoy, slower journies using more fuel for faster ships and then days lost waiting to unload at the other end. A slow ship might lose a week or 10 days on a typical trans-Atlantic voyage and a fast ship might lose another day or two on top of that. 15-20 lost days on a typical trans-Atlantic round trip means the ship is doing 1/3 less work. A simplified example I know, but that's the nature of the beast more or less.

AFAIK the RN was running troop convoys from day one of the Great War and that trade convoys were introduced piecemeal as required, e.g. there was a Dutch convoy, a Scandinavian convoy and coal convoys to France.

Therefore I was thinking of a faster extension of the trade convoy system and not necessarily the introduction of a blanket one in 1915. Therefore a convoy system would be introduced for the east coast in 1915, then then extended in stages to the English Channel and finally the Western Approaches as the U-boats operated further and further west.

I also thought that if the German Government could see that the Royal Navy was taking adequate precautions against a possible U-boat offensive they might decide that one didn't have a realistic chance of succeeding and not launch the second and third unrestricted campaigns in the first place.
 
I can't recall where I saw it but it isn't hard to work out that the 1/3 number isn't a total fantasy. In normal circumstance a ship gets loaded and re-provisioned and pretty much heads on its merry way, but in a convoy system it has to wait around for a convoy to be gathered which mght be days or it might even be weeks. Once a convoy is formed, and bigger convoys are a better use of escorts, it must sail at the speed most suited to the slowest ship, in formation and make tactical maneauvres. Once it arrives at its destination it then must wait its turn in a now overcrowed port to be unloaded. If you add all of this together you get a sort of 'virtual' attirition in lost days waiting for the convoy, slower journies using more fuel for faster ships and then days lost waiting to unload at the other end. A slow ship might lose a week or 10 days on a typical trans-Atlantic voyage and a fast ship might lose another day or two on top of that. 15-20 lost days on a typical trans-Atlantic round trip means the ship is doing 1/3 less work. A simplified example I know, but that's the nature of the beast more or less.

I'll agree with the idea of "not a total fantasy" but after that you can quickly spot a number of factors that push it towards the something of a fantasy territory.

First off shipping in peace time tended to spend most of its time not moving. It was either being unloaded or loaded or waiting for a cargo. Often it was waiting to be unloaded because of...

Secondly ports in peace time could often be overcrowded and there is no objective reason why they should become more overcrowded if handling convoys due to the fact that absolute number of sailings remains the same. Of course with convoys it is easier to ensure that priority ships are dealt with first rather than being stuck in a first come first served queue but that is actually a point in favour of convoying.

Thirdly predictability; a ship might easily spend two weeks on turn around (that is unloading and loading for its next voyage), a nine knot convoy or vessel would spend a similar stretch of time crossing the Atlantic (you can check this using this handy gadget ). It thus becomes a relatively easy matter to mate sequential convoys, something that was done in both world wars with escorts covering multiple convoys in sequence.

The thing is that the period under discussion a lot of cargo would be break bulk and the rest bulk cargoes and so ships spent far more time in port than on the seas...meaning that even fast ships lost significantly less time to travelling slowly than might seem apparent. Break bulk loading and unloading rates were highly variable but lurked between 10 and 30 tons per hour. Thus the limiting factor on a port's capacity would have been the number of berths.

The fact that controlling arrivals and departures might actually ensure a better match up between number of ships waiting and number of berths should be readily apparent.

Thus as NOMISYRRUC pointed it matches an argument that might be made at the time but I would contend should not be regarded as a fact in and of itself.
 
RodentRevolution,
The other factor to consider is what people believed to be true.

If very many believed that convoying would reduce efficiency, then it will take a pretty large scale of losses to convince them that the assumed loss of efficiency was worth it. Which brings us back to the question, Was the scale of losses in the first campaign great enough to convince them? OTL suggests that it was not.

Maybe you need some respected expert who lays out the numbers and proves to the satisfaction of the influential folks, that convoying does not reduce inefficiency so much as believed.
 
The other factor to consider is what happens when a heavy surface ship comes across a convoy, it's the trade war equivalent of a Vegas buffet. Until the surface threat is managed the sub threat must be weighed against it and in this environment productivity (or assumptions about) becomes a clinching argument.
 
RodentRevolution,
The other factor to consider is what people believed to be true.

If very many believed that convoying would reduce efficiency, then it will take a pretty large scale of losses to convince them that the assumed loss of efficiency was worth it. Which brings us back to the question, Was the scale of losses in the first campaign great enough to convince them? OTL suggests that it was not.

Maybe you need some respected expert who lays out the numbers and proves to the satisfaction of the influential folks, that convoying does not reduce inefficiency so much as believed.

Yes that makes sense.

The main factor arguing against convoys. though seems not to have been the efficiency question but the vulnerability of convoys to attack by surface warships.

There was in the First World War at least two instances of convoys being intercepted and destroyed almost in their entirety by cruisers in one case and destroyers in another of the German Navy while sailing from Bergen for example.

Of course it can be argued that part of the problems was that cruisers were being 'wasted' on aggressive patrols but at least early in the war one of the targets of those patrols was merchant traffic headed for Germany. It can also be argued that surface warships were not much of a threat outside certain waters but in 1915 there were still some German cruisers lurking outside European waters.

PS RR saves keyboards (though possibly not the R key), I have also been known to respond to 'hey you'

PPS also see Riain's post above
 
RodentRevolution,
The other factor to consider is what people believed to be true.

Or what public opinion believed to be true. Say press and public reaction to the Lusitania's sinking forced the Admiralty into taking more extreme action than it thought necessary IOTL, i.e. a convoy system.

I thought one of the possible economic effects of an earlier convoy system might be lower freight rates.
 
Keep in mind that although the British War Cabinet proposed convoys in March 1917, the Admiralty still refused. It was not until after the big losses of April (wheh British Isles grain reserves had dropped to a six-week supply) that the Admiralty changed his mind.

You need a big reason to have convoys in 1915.
 
Keep in mind that although the British War Cabinet proposed convoys in March 1917, the Admiralty still refused. It was not until after the big losses of April (wheh British Isles grain reserves had dropped to a six-week supply) that the Admiralty changed his mind.

You need a big reason to have convoys in 1915.
Agreed, in 1915 the RN needed every ship it could and the destroyers needed were for the fleet to help stop the 440 torpedo massacre the German navy could deploy.
 
This is probably dumb, but...

During this first period of unrestricted sub warfare, have an American ship headed toward a British port in order to be searched (a measure which I believe neutrals resented). (Edit: not sure if the British had implemented this measure yet?)

A U-boat sinks the ship, causing a lot of deaths.

The U.S. is, of course, wroth with Germany. However, it also holds Britain partly responsible, because it claims that the ship was only sunk because it was following Britain's much-resented rules.

It insists that Britain either take measures to ensure the safety of neutrals traveling to the ports, or rescind its demands for search. The pis is really intended as a diplomatic ploy to get Britain to respect international agreements on blockades.

At this point, maybe that's just the extra push needed for Britain to decide to convoy all (or at least most) shipping.

I dunno, it's the only "outside the box" idea i could come up with.
 
AFAIK the RN was running troop convoys from day one of the Great War and that trade convoys were introduced piecemeal as required, e.g. there was a Dutch convoy, a Scandinavian convoy and coal convoys to France.

Therefore I was thinking of a faster extension of the trade convoy system and not necessarily the introduction of a blanket one in 1915. Therefore a convoy system would be introduced for the east coast in 1915, then then extended in stages to the English Channel and finally the Western Approaches as the U-boats operated further and further west.

I also thought that if the German Government could see that the Royal Navy was taking adequate precautions against a possible U-boat offensive they might decide that one didn't have a realistic chance of succeeding and not launch the second and third unrestricted campaigns in the first place.

The thing to note about those early convoys is that they're going into the dragon's den, close to German naval bases in Flanders and Germany where the array of threats is much greater. Going the other way, from ports further from the danger zone, changes the calculation and IOTL based on threat evaluations and some misconceptions made from bad calculations and ignorace it was decided that productivity would win out.
 

Errolwi

Monthly Donor
Yes that makes sense.

The main factor arguing against convoys. though seems not to have been the efficiency question but the vulnerability of convoys to attack by surface warships.

There was in the First World War at least two instances of convoys being intercepted and destroyed almost in their entirety by cruisers in one case and destroyers in another of the German Navy while sailing from Bergen for example.
...

Blog post on one of the surface intercepts (from just a couple of days ago, as it happens).
http://dawlishchronicles.blogspot.co.nz/2016/04/guest-blog-by-chris-sams.html
 
Just to give some sense of scale to the issue but per Abraham Berglund The War and the World's Mercantile Marine (which can be found on JSTOR for those interested), the British had 3,747 steamers of 1,600 gross registered tons or more apiece totalling some 16 million gross registered tons between them in 1914. Annoyingly he does not specify how many of these were on oceanic routes rather than coastal ones but given their size probably the majority.

Blog post on one of the surface intercepts (from just a couple of days ago, as it happens).
http://dawlishchronicles.blogspot.co.nz/2016/04/guest-blog-by-chris-sams.html

Oh and cool thanks!
 
From the replies received so far I'm getting the impression that trade convoys were introduced at exactly the correct time and an earlier introduction would do more harm than good.

Is that correct?
 
IIRC the main reason given for not introducing convoys was the total number of arrivals & departures from British ports compared to earlier wars and the impossibility of providing sufficient escorts. However, this figure was for ALL sailings the bulk of which were coastal Once the oceanic only sailings were extracted the figures became much more manageable.
 
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