The German merchant-submarines

Whenever I read about German's merchant submarines of the Great War I imagine an alternative world in which the Germans were more ambitious - instead of simply carrying cargo back and forth, they constructed undersea bases on the edge of the continental shelf and learned how to farm seaweed and extract fuel oil from kelp.

Inevitably the Royal Navy would step in, and by 1917 there would be pitched underwater battles between squads of soldiers dressed in brass diving suits. The German suits would of course have spikes on top of their helmets, which would have a practical use underwater for cutting the enemy's air hoses.

On a more serious note, and perhaps it's because I'm British, but I've always assumed that Germany's propaganda war was doomed from the start; despite our past disagreements with America viz taxation the simple fact that we shared a language with the American legislature made it impossible for Germany to win over America, and the best they could hope for was a grudging and reluctant neutrality. But I could be very wrong. I can't feel the sentiment of the typical American circa the 1910s.
 

DougM

Donor
I think the real advantage to trying this is keeping the US truly neutral. Once England cut the US off from Germany it controlled the whole story and all the US industry’s and financial institutions all where basically turned in favor of England and France as that was where the profit was.
But if you can keep even a relatively small percentage of this pro German then you have a good chance to keep the US out of the war,
Let’s be honest here the US entered the war at least as much because of the Propaganda and the amount of money US companies stood to loose if England and France fell (and arguably the money was THE big reason) as anything else, the Submarine warfare was just an excuse to sell it to the Americans. And the BS about save for democracy is a bigger joke considering Germany vs England.
So if you can keep some businesses doing business with Germany then perhaps you delay or prevent the US from allowing the banks and companies to so heavily get in bed with England and France.
On top of this if you can get the English Navy to do something stupid in an effort to sink these subs then you may well flip the whole picture.
The US getting pissed at England over the freedom of the seas is not a new argument. Picture what happens if some English skipper does something dumb at the edge of US territorial waters? You could easily see an international incident happen.

So ignoring the actual value of the imports I think the best thing Germany can do is keep the US neutral. And this does it three ways. 1 it allows better pro Germany propaganda and interaction. 2 it brings some resources to Germany 3 it denies those resources (however few) from being bought by England. And if England violates the US neutrality then Germany hits the jackpot.
 
So ignoring the actual value of the imports I think the best thing Germany can do is keep the US neutral. And this does it three ways.
1 it allows better pro Germany propaganda and interaction.
2 it brings some resources to Germany
3 it denies those resources (however few) from being bought by England.
And if England violates the US neutrality then Germany hits the jackpot.
I have to agree with you here. The USA was in the Entente pocket from 1914 on historically, and if the Germans can make the American public aware that the change from cruiser rules to USW was the fault of the UK treating their merchantmen as combatants, and that this was in part designed to bring the US into the war on their side...
 

DougM

Donor
Yeah the ‘Q-Ships”. And Raming rules and such made the “non combatants “ in to “combatants “ and basicly gave up the right to protection but with England controlling most of the news/propaganda Germany was screwed,
Add in the way so many companies started off basically in bed with England and the how as the war progressed so many more companies started doing so much business with England and France and it was just not going to go Germany’s way.
Then once the financial institutions started getting involved it was inevitable that the US would act before they let (all that money) England and France go down.
Even back in the early 20th Century the US federal government was in the back pocket of the wealthy. (Maybe not like today but still in thier pocket).
So the only practical way to prevent the US from being a de facto ally of England and France is to make sure at least part of the country/companies/banks/wealthy had a vested interest in keeping the US at least truly neutral. It is not like Germany need to make HUGE changes. They just need to US to be a little less cooperative with thier enemies and not loan them money and to stay out of the war. Heck even a delay of 6 months or so in doing all those could see a noticeable change in fortunes of the war.
How much worse is the financial situation of France and England if the US stays truly neutral and insists on cash and carry? How much worse does this get if Germany is competing for buying stuff? Even a LITTLE competition could see a price increase. And being as England was buying more it would hit them hard.
Also if the US stayed out longer how much worse does the French mutiny get?

I am not saying it would see Germany win, but it could have possibly seen a true negotiated peace.

That being said it could be interesting to see a timeline where Germany was more active in propaganda and buying things from the US. It would be interesting to see a “Propaganda War” and or a “Perchasing war” in the US where the two sides are doing everything they can to gain influence and public opinion. Picture Germany framing England by making it look like England was attempting to bribe a Senator or something. It could get interesting. And merchant submarines could play a huge roll in that.
A German merchant sub is sunk and England claims it was armed while Germany claims it was innocent. Etc.

For that matter how exactly would cruiser rules be enforced on a merchant sub? You can’t realy hail them in WW1. And how is blowing them out of the water with no “warning” any better then the German Subs blowing English merchant ships out of the water? This could get very interesting. Of course that assumes that anyone can find the subs in the first place. England didn’t have great success finding subs unless it was close to shore or unless they were stalking a ship themselves, finding a lawn sub in the middle of the Atlantic is not a given.

And if England does anything to close to the US or anything that the Germans can use to show how nasty England is (even if they have to exaggerate). Then while unlikely to happen, you could see the US siding against England. Maybe not to the point of declaring war but at least to the point of shutting down all sales.

Try this. A German merchant sub hires on a couple American crew members. Maybe one of the US papers decides to send a war corispondent to Germany via the sub (either or both) and right at the line between international water and territorial waters an English ship catches the German sub. It has no way of contacting the sub so it begins its depth charge run (or if the sub is just submersing it rams it). Meanwhile on the sub the crew sees the English ship in the distance and is so busy that no one updates the chart.
The sub is badly damaged and tries to surface but only one lone crewman gets off before it goes down. He manages to crawl into a small inflatable raft. Clutched in his hand is the chart with the recorded position showing that the Sub was still inside US waters. The English lose site of the crewmen in the mist and the growing darkness as evening sets in.
The next morning a US coast guard ship responding to reports of an oil slick finds the crewmen badly injured and unconscious in his raft. Well inside the territorial waters of the US.
The Germans are going to parade this guy all over the place, depending on what news paper company we are talking about and thier views in the war and how pissed off the owner is the newspaper may very well run a string of articles and start being a bit more pro Germany. Remember this is not exactly a long time after the “Yellow Journalism” of the Spanish America war.

It doesn’t take a lot of this type of thing to radically change the opinion of people.

So this could get very interesting
 
I think the biggest effect of these merchant submarines if they could make "successful"(making it back with cargo they intended and in one piece) voyages would be a huge blow to British public morale. It would send a message that the blockade was ineffective, it would still be crippling Germany but that's not what it would seem like, and could cause the British to grow fears of a Germany unhindered by British attempts to starve them and maybe bring them to give Germany a negotiated peace, probably Germany pays reparations in exchange for getting their colonies back and they don't get any land in the West.
 
with a cargo of 341 tons of nickel, 93 tons of tin, and 348 tons of crude rubber (257 tons of which were carried outside the pressure hull). Her cargo was valued at $17.5 million, several times the submarine's construction costs.

If the blockade has made these goods unobtainable in the German market then scarcity has artificially elevated their ‘value’. I doubt this cargo hitting Liverpool would be worth $17.5m. This type of operation highlights more the success of the blockade than any real successful outcome that could be achieved from tiny submersible merchant ships.
 
The price of the commodities purchased will have been set in the USA market, not Germany, and will have been the same for any buyer. If anything, the ability of the Germans to pay cash on the barrel head might get them a discount, while the Entente would be trying to pay on credit.

The fact is that Berlin seems to have dropped the ball in all aspects of its naval policies, and especially WRT US neutrality and industrial production. This one imaginative submarine mission suggests a different possibility if the German government had been less militaristic in its outlook towards the war. US resources weighed in for the Entente at a Great Power scale even before the US declared war. Had Germany been more willing to trade with the US, then at a small cost (in comparison to Germany's overall war effort), they could have more effectively driven a wedge between the US and the Entente.
 

DougM

Donor
Driving a wedge between the US and the Entente or at least slowing down the relationship was a missed opritunity for Germany, And while it would have been a long shot it is one that would not have taken a large amount of resources so it could have been attempted without giving up anything. Unlike say building more Tanks where the steel would have to have came from someplace.
The problem is that for whatever reason Germany appears to start the war with either the belief that the US (and to a lesser degree most of the rest of the non affiliated world) is either irrelevant or already in the back pocket of England
 
In 1916, just the regular obfuscation of manifests and such by neutrals, and perhaps the running of the patrol line to Norway with conventional merchants, that happen without much notice, probably brought in way more supplies than these 2 merchant sub trips.

I suspect the German merchant visits were more about, look how smart we are, and oh by the way USA, since we can get here, we can so easily sink the maritime traffic right off your shores (reinforced by the fact on the second trip they sent a military sub along too, to do just that), so be afraid of us, and don't join the war, that this was more ham fisted German diplomacy (like the Zimmerman telegram), that they got lucky was interpreted differently by the USA press.

While driving a wedge, and encouraging USA neutrality would have been good things to do, not sure our OTL Germans just were capable of thinking like that.

Perhaps if the Bremen got through too, the buzz would have been so great, that a prominent American citizen takes a ride back, gives some speeches in Germany, that even guys like Ludendorff might have to give up the lies about unrestricted submarine warfare, and go along with this concept.
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
Any effort spent trying to evade the blockade would be put to better use on fertilizer production, mechanization of agriculture, and food distribution.
 
The price of the commodities purchased will have been set in the USA market, not Germany, and will have been the same for any buyer. If anything, the ability of the Germans to pay cash on the barrel head might get them a discount, while the Entente would be trying to pay on credit.

The 782 tons of cargo listed is $22,000 per ton or £4,600 per ton! At it's peak, Tin in the UK was £181 per ton, crude rubber £18 per ton.
 
Any effort spent trying to evade the blockade would be put to better use on fertilizer production, mechanization of agriculture, and food distribution.

The idea that the German merchant marine trapped in New York was more productive sitting in New York than running the blockade is not one that occurred to me. How did you arrive at that conclusion? That is to say, how exactly does 500,000 tons of idle shipping in New York in 1915 contribute to the production of nitrates in Germany in 1915?
 
The 782 tons of cargo listed is $22,000 per ton or £4,600 per ton! At it's peak, Tin in the UK was £181 per ton, crude rubber £18 per ton.

If the market price in New York for rubber was 75 dollars per ton to any American, then the Germans should be able to buy in the US market using American intermediaries somewhere around 75-150 dollars per ton.
 
If the market price in New York for rubber was 75 dollars per ton to any American, then the Germans should be able to buy in the US market using American intermediaries somewhere around 75-150 dollars per ton.

I'm not disputing market rates that the Germans would buy US goods, to be loaded in US ports. It's the 25,000% markup on goods reaching Germany to justify the venture as a 'success'. Has Marks been swapped for $ at some point in the tale(just like V2 Rocket development costs)?
 
I'm not disputing market rates that the Germans would buy US goods, to be loaded in US ports. It's the 25,000% markup on goods reaching Germany to justify the venture as a 'success'. Has Marks been swapped for $ at some point in the tale(just like V2 Rocket development costs)?
That is actually a good question. Upon further research, I found some additional information, but I'm doing something else at the moment, and so will have to check that out at a later time. Do you happen to know the dollar/marks exchange rate in 1916? I'm guessing that it is going to be between 3-5 to one.
 
That is actually a good question. Upon further research, I found some additional information, but I'm doing something else at the moment, and so will have to check that out at a later time. Do you happen to know the dollar/marks exchange rate in 1916? I'm guessing that it is going to be between 3-5 to one.
The 1914 exchange rate when Germany abandoned the gold standard was 4.2 mark per dollar. I don't believe there was sufficient exchanges to generate a market during ww1.

I would imagine that many of the factors which resulted in paper sterling weakening against the dollar would have also applied to paper mark weakening against the dollar so let's assume a value of around 8 mark per dollar.
 
Found this TL today...

...Intrigued, because in my book HMS Heligoland I have a bunch of German merchant submarines (the Fluss or River Class) transport high-value cargoes between the Caribbean and Germany, and one run supplies to von Lettow-Vorbeck in German East Africa. At the same time, the Royal Navy Shellfish class runs supplies to a besieged Heligoland from the UK. Losses on both sides. Scheer later regrets not doing more with the idea and an ex-German sub acts as a surface diesel oil supply ship to Heligoland into the 1930s; on being scrapped, it actually returns to Germany and is significant for WW2 sub development.

Just thought this might interest you.
 
Do you happen to know the dollar/marks exchange rate in 1916? I'm guessing that it is going to be between 3-5 to one.
USD German Mark exchange rates
1913 23.79c per mark
1914 23.64c per mark
Aug 1914 - 25c per mark
1915 20.63c per mark
1916 18.20c per mark
1917 17.32c per mark

1919 3.044c per mark
1920 1.75c per mark
1921 1.21c per mark
1922 0.23c per mark
1923 0.01c per mark
 
USD German Mark exchange rates 1916 18.20c per mark
Thank you Sir! Now we are getting somewhere. Ok, so lets plug this new info into the number crunching we did up thread, and...

£ X 4.7 = $
$ X 5.5 = Marks
£ X 4.7 X 5.5 = Marks
£ X 25.85 = Marks, so...

17,500,000 / 25.85 = 676,983

£.........................$........................Marks
1500....................1500...................1500
£140....................658.....................3619
210,000................987,000..............5,428,500

Now, we are thinking that somehow the value of the cargo was originally in Marks and then incorrectly listed in Dollars instead, so: cargo/profit = {Marks}17,500,000, and then when we do the conversions we end up with something like $3,181,181 profit first voyage, or £676,847 profit first voyage. Put a better, more readable way;

The Deutschland would have a building cost of 5,428,500 marks, and would have made a profit of 17,500,000 marks on her first voyage, which would mean they made more than three times the cost of the vessel on the first voyage, and not the more than 15 times previously reported. When doubt was shown upthread, I started digging into the cost, in 1916 rubber, nickel, and tin, but could not duplicate the stated value, and was stuck at that point. It frankly never occured to me to wonder if in fact that the profit had been input as dollars rather than Reichsmarks, and without @Dorknought asking the question, I would have just dropped the whole thing, as I couldn't get the 17.5 million value of the listed tonnage. So thanks to @Dorknought, we are getting closer to the actual payoff rates these OTL submarines achieved in 1916.

I then was sloppy in my search query, and typed in "Merchant Submarine", and got a second wiki page, with quite a bit of additional information, and one such bit was the profits value indeed being listed as 17.5 million Reichsmarks rather than dollars! Some other interesting bits of information"

[Quote "wikipedia"]On its first journey to the US, departing on the 23 June 1916, Deutschland carried 163 tons of highly sought-after chemical dyes, as well as medical drugs and mail. Passing undetected through the English Channel she arrived in Baltimore on the 8 July 1916 and soon re-embarked with 348 tons of rubber, 341 tons of nickel, and 93 tons of tin, arriving back in Bremerhaven on 25 August 1916. She had travelled 8,450 nautical miles (9,724 mi; 15,649 km), though only 190 nmi (219 mi; 352 km) of these submerged.

The profit from the journey was 17.5 million Reichsmarks, more than four times the construction cost, mainly because of the high prices of the patented, highly concentrated dyes, which would have cost 26,844 US dollars per pound adjusted for inflation. In return, the raw materials brought back covered the needs of the German war industry for several months.[/quote]

The reason for the disparity is that the Germans were not using currency, but rather trade goods, and thus made more of a profit. It also tells us that the raw materials received defeated some of the materials effects of the blockade for 'several months', and I take this to mean that regular voyages could have eliminated strategic materials shortages entirely. That doesn't feed the German population, but does feed the German war effort.
 
It appears that the Deutschland was built as a private venture with plans to have more built in the USA. So could Hapag sell off interned merchant ships to raise Dollars to pay for their construction? And if built how does that advance the American submarine technology and industry?

If we have seven of these each making a 6-day round trip with at least one getting deeper maintenance so only six are effectively running cargo, how big an effect is that? I estimate 2,100 tons of cargo per month on average (690 tons of that rubber). Plus mail, persons, gemstones, ciphers and other things that are likely impossible to transmit otherwise. Is that enough to offset the blockade impact in the critical materials? And with this higher effort how much more does the RN target them?

At first blush it seems just six active ships could begin to unravel the blockade enough that it is perceived lost, further aggravating Anglo-American tensions, lessen the isolation German had in news and diplomacy, a rather good use of the resources. As it stood I think patience with blockade was stretching thin, if Wilson cuts credit in 1916 as he did and keeps that in play, do we get Germany an opening to negotiate before getting desperate for victory (assuming some sane head rasps the ring)?
 
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