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At the start of World War I in 1914, Germany had 48 submarines of 13 classes in service or under construction. During that war, the Imperial German Navy used SM U-1 for training. Retired in 1919, she remains on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
Submarines were among the important new technologies that came to the fore during WWI. Although work on submarines had been underway for decades, it was the first time they were really influential. Technology had reached a point where hostile nations could deploy reliable fighting submarines.
Submarines played a significant military role for the first time during the First World War. Both the British and German navies made use of their submarines against enemy warships from the outset. Franz Becker commanded German submarines – known as U-boats – from 1915. He recalled an encounter with a British ship.
Submarines quickly became the most prolific killers in the Fleet of the German Empire. In 1914 surface ships sank 55 ships against only 3 sunk by U-Boats. The following year this was reversed and Submarines sank 396 Allied ships compared to only 23 by surface craft.
Submarine warfare in World War I was primarily a fight between German and Austro-Hungarian U-boats and merchant vessels bound for the United Kingdom, France, and Russia. British and Allied submarines conducted widespread operations in the Baltic, North, Mediterranean and Black Seas along with the Atlantic Ocean.
The F-class submarines were based in the Pacific, serving at Hawaii and off California. F-1 sank in December 1917 when she accidentally collided with F-3. The H-class submarines, the majority of...
During World War I, Germany’s unprecedented use of Untersee-boots (U-boats for short) significantly changed the face of the conflict.
The United States L-class submarines were a class of 11 coastal defense submarines built 1914–1917, and were the most modern and capable submarines available to United States Navy when the country entered World War I.
On May 7, 1915, German submarine U-20 torpedoed the Lusitania, a Cunard passenger liner, off the coast of Ireland. Nearly 1,200 men, women, and children, including 128 Americans, lost their lives. The Allies and Americans considered the sinking an act of indiscriminate warfare.
The most formidable naval weapons in both world wars, German submarines devastated trans-Atlantic shipping while sinking 8,000 merchant vessels and warships and killing tens of thousands.