In the autumn of 1906 at Portsmouth Royal Dockyard, a warship was in the last stages of construction that would take the ongoing Anglo-German naval race to a new level. HMS Dreadnought was about to make all existing battleships obsolete, including not only the Imperial German Navy’s latest Deutschland Class, then completing at her North Sea and Baltic shipyards, but even the Royal Navy’s own pair of Lord Nelson Class battleships on the stocks at Jarrow and Dalmuir. Nevertheless, Dreadnought was not the largest vessel under construction at a British shipyard. At Swan Hunter on the Tyne, the huge hull of the super-liner Mauretania had just taken to the water. Further north on the Clyde, her sister was also being built, the Lusitania. At almost 800ft these vessels were 25% longer than any existing battleship, and were at 31,000GRT the largest moving structures ever built. Thus, 1906 was not only a fulcrum in the Anglo-German naval arms race but also a turning point in a parallel maritime competition that would have its own repercussions in the Great War; to build the largest and fastest passenger liners.
The Anglo-German naval arms race can be traced to 1898 and Admiral Tirpitz’s newly introduced First Naval Act that proposed the building of up to sixteen battleships. However, the oceanic liner race had begun much earlier. The British passenger companies Cunard and White Star had been competing with European counterparts for the transatlantic immigrant trade since the 1850s. These competitors included two German lines Hamburg America Line (HAL) and Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL). HAL operated out of the River Elba port of Hamburg, while NDL was headquartered in Bremen on the River Wesser. Whereas nearly all the Irish immigrant trade in the late 19th century passed through the port of Liverpool, the majority of immigrants from central and northern Europe were processed through these two German ports.
With passenger steamships also doubling as mail carriers, speed was a key driver of this competition, leading to the award that has since become known as The Blue Riband. The introduction of twin-screw engine designs in the late 1880s made it possible for passenger ships to reach averages of 20 knots. Three competing pairs of liners competed for the prize during this period; City of New York and City of Paris, owned by Philadelphia-based International Navigation Company; Teutonic and Majestic, belonging to White Star; and Cunard’s Campania and Lucania.[1] The Teutonic’s first act after her completion in July 1889 was to participate in the Spithead Naval Review. For this she was temporarily fitted out with quick-firing guns of the type used by British cruisers. One of the VIPs invited aboard ship was Queen Victoria’s eldest grandson Wilhelm II, and the German Kaiser took note. At 13,000grt and 620ft, Campania and Lucania were the largest ships in the world at the time of their commissioning in 1893 and the latter marginally faster ship would hold the Blue Riband for the next five years.
However, prompted by their Empire-aspiring head of state, Germany’s two major shipping lines had already begun constructing liners of potentially prize-winning speed. NDL’s Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse was the first of four liners given royal names, which were later dubbed the ‘Kaiser Class’. In addition to outsizing the Cunard sisters, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse also outnumbered them in funnels. She was the first liner ever to have four smoke-stacks; a feature that proved popular with passengers even though the fourth was a dummy. Within six months of her maiden voyage in September 1897, she had claimed the Blue Riband for Germany for the first time. Not to be outdone, HAL commissioned the Deutschland, which set another record for size and claimed the Blue Riband in 1900, having made the crossing in just over five days, averaging 23 knots. However, at such unprecedented speeds ship designers began to confront serious problems with vibration, Deutschland receiving the ironic epithet ‘the cocktail shaker’.
As passenger comfort began to suffer, some passenger lines opted to withdraw from the competition for the Blue Riband. White Star’s ‘Big Four’ – Celtic, Cedric, Baltic and Adriatic – introduced between 1901 and 1907, emphasized luxury over speed. However, being the first vessels to exceed Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s anomalous Great Eastern in both tonnage and length, they augured in a new competition for size. Cunard’s response, the Carmania and Caronia, both of which had their maiden voyages in 1905, continued this trend. They also ushered in a new age in engine design. While Caronia was fitted with a quadruple-expansion engine, her sister was given a state-of-the-art steam turbine. Trials of the new engines proved the Carmania to offer a faster, smoother and more economical ride. (It is surely no coincidence that steam turbines were fitted in Dreadnought the following year.) Even before these two liners went to sea, Cunard had laid down their successors. The construction of Mauretania and Lusitania was expedited by a £2.5m loan from the British government, conditional on the ships being convertible to Royal Navy use in the increasingly likely event of war; not the first time Cunard had received contingent public subsidies. In 1909, Mauretania reclaimed the Blue Riband for Britain, a speed record it would hold for the next 20 years.
However, the prestige of owning the world’s largest liner was short-lived for Cunard, as first White Star and then HAL introduced three-ship classes of unprecedented and incrementally increasing size and ostentation. The lead ship of the Olympic Class exceeded 45,000gwt and 880ft in length. HAL’s Imperator, completed in 1913, surpassed 50,000gwt and 900ft. In an act of commercial retaliation, Cunard ordered Aquitania, the belated third unit of the company’s ‘grand trio’, to be lengthened to exceed the German behemoth by a few feet. To this, HAL unsportingly responded by adding a large bronze figurehead at her prow, thus preserving her advantage. Arguably the acme in ‘national monuments’ of imperial ambition and ‘floating symbols’ of progress and modernity[2], Imperator and her two sisters, Vaterland and Bismarck, were the last group of superliners completed before the Great War, bringing to an end a race that had mirrored the parallel development of dreadnoughts and ‘super-dreadnoughts’.
The practice of arming passenger liners for war, which had been trialed in Britain with the Teutonic, and a few years later in Germany using the HAL liner Normannia, was under way well before the official commencement of hostilities. Both governments had made covert agreements with their major shipping lines to requisition vessels for military purposes, and many liners had been designed for rapid conversion, and structurally reinforced for the installation of guns. Germany began covertly arming merchant ships as early as October 1912. Shortly afterwards, the British government initiated the oxymoronic practice of ‘defensively arming merchant ships’ (DAMS) beginning with Royal Mail Steam Packet Company (RMSPC) ‘A-liners’ such as RMS Aragon. In March 1914, Churchill reported to Parliament that forty merchantmen had already been armed using 4.7 inch guns mostly taken from obsolete RN cruisers. The Carmania was among the first group of liners converted to Armed Merchant Cruisers (AMCs), days after returning to Liverpool from her last peacetime transatlantic voyage. By December 1915, more than 750 British civilian ships were thus weaponised.
The use of liners as warships was not without its mishaps, most notably the loss of the Oceanic, another White Star giant, only weeks into her naval career. The former ‘Queen of the Ocean’ was wrecked off the Shetland Isles on 25th August, apparently the result of a navigational disagreement between her commercial captain and the naval officer placed in temporary charge. Three days earlier, Aquitania had collided with a merchant ship on only her second patrol. Very soon it became apparent that these superliners although fast, were unsuited to naval patrol owing to their size and high consumption of coal. However, smaller passenger vessels formed the backbone of the 10th Cruiser Squadron, which would help enforce Britain’s Atlantic naval blockade until September 1917, and the old Cunarder Campania would become one of the Royal Navy’s earliest aircraft carriers.[3]
Nevertheless, it was as troopships that Britain’s fleet of liners arguably performed its most useful wartime service, enabling the country to conduct war, in Churchill’s words, as ‘The Great Amphibian’. In October 1914, no fewer than 32 liners and smaller passenger vessels, among them Cunard’s Franconia and White Star sisters Megantic and Laurentic, were assembled in the Quebec port of Gaspe to transport 30,000 much-needed troops of the Canadian expeditionary force to the western front. A large escort force comprising old cruisers and the battlecruiser HMS Princess Royal accompanied this precious convoy when it departed on 3rd October, arriving without incident at Plymouth eleven days later. An even larger number of vessels were involved in the transportation of troops during the Gallipoli Campaign. These included two of Cunard’s ‘grand trio; the Lusitania having been unwisely retained in commercial service; and White Star’s two extant superliners, each with the capacity to carry up to 8,000 soldiers. A pair of smaller NDL liners which had been captured by the British at Port Said also participated in this colossal misadventure, being mockingly rechristened Huntsend and Huntsgreen.
With no overseas armies to transport (although German liners had been used as troopships during the Boxer Rebellion.) the German government had devised plans to use its fleet of fast liners for commerce raiding. However, the sudden outbreak of hostilities meant that the majority of these ships were caught at sea, and were forced to seek refuge in a neutral port. Many German liners ended up at their company piers in Hoboken, New Jersey or other ports on the American east coast, while others took shelter in South American ports such as Permanbuco in Brazil and Buenos Aires. Vaterland was stranded in New York, while Imperator remained in Germany along with her still incomplete sister Bismarck.
The four ‘Kaisers’ exemplify the difficulties the German authorities had in executing their raiding strategy. Kaiser Wilhelm II was left permanently interned at New Jersey, having ported two days after war was declared. Meanwhile, a few days into her return voyage to Germany, Kronprinzessin Cecilie was chased back to Boston by Allied warships, disguising herself along the way as the Olympic to fool her pursuers. She too would never sail again under a German flag. Fitted out for war in Bremen, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse was sunk off the coast of North Africa by the cruiser HMS Highflyer on 26th August 1914, only three weeks into her raiding career. Kronprinz Wilhelm had by far the most substantial impact on the war at sea. Already in port at New Jersey, she was ordered to make immediate preparations to sail. Leaving hours before war was officially declared, and being armed at sea by the cruiser Karlsruhe, the liner had an eventful 250 day voyage as a raider, capturing and sinking more than a dozen British merchant vessels, and leading the Royal Navy a merry dance until a shortage of coal and maintenance problems forced her to return to American shores.
The Germans had identified the remote Brazilian island of Trinidade as a potential base for their transatlantic raiding operations. It was here that one of HAL’s newest liners, Cap Trafalgar received two 4 inch guns and six one-pounder cannon from the old colonial gunboat Eber. However, the German liner was spotted in the act of coaling there by the Carmania. The two ships were evenly matched in terms of size and speed, but the Cunarder, having been equipped with eight 4.7 inch guns was much the better armed. Both ships carried naval officers and gun crews in addition to their original commanders and merchant crews, and neither backed out of the fight.
What succeeded on September 14th 1914 was described by the wireless operator of the Carmania as ‘a ding-dong struggle as to who had to go under’. In spite of the British ship’s superior armament, greater accuracy on the part of the Cap Trafalgar’s crew caused substantial damage to her as the range fell dramatically from 7,000 to a barely one hundred yards. Grievously holed below the waterline by the AMC’s heavier weaponry, the Cap Trafalgar finally capsized and sank after a brave resistance. Meanwhile, the Carmania suffered a furious fire on her bridge and other parts of the superstructure, which killed ten sailors and wounded some two dozen others. The British later counted 79 shell hits and more than 300 holes.[4]
The Carmania had scored a notable victory over a ship of the same class. However, perhaps the greatest success achieved by a former passenger liner during the Great War was that by the SS Berlin. The 17,000grt ship had been built for NDL in 1908, and had been working the Genoa-New York route prior to the outbreak of hostilities. Back in Wilhelmshaven, she was converted into a minelayer and equipped to carry 200 mines. Berlin was directed to lay her deadly cargo off Tory Island at the northern tip of Ireland. This island was close to a busy shipping lane and marked the entrance to the deep water naval anchorage of Lough Swilly. By coincidence, at the time of Berlin’s sortie part of the British Grand Fleet had been relocated to the Lough while underwater defenses at its base in Scapa Flow were being upgraded. On 27th October, during a gunnery exercise, the ‘super-dreadnought’ HMS Audacious struck one of the mines which resulted in serious flooding. A day-long attempt was made to prevent the ship from sinking. Rescue ships included the liner Olympic, then on route to Glasgow on her last commercial transatlantic voyage. However, the battleship could not be saved; the liner helping take off around 250 of her crew. The Berlin played no further part in the war, being interned in Norway shortly afterwards, but her contribution had been significant; Audacious would be the only modern British battleship lost during the entire war.
In virtually all other cases during the Great War, passenger liners were the victims of warships rather than their slayers, caught up in a conflict where the line between the military and civilian use of such vessels had become dangerously blurred. The signal loss of the Lusitania, and to a lesser extent, the Britannic – Titanic’s sister mined during the Gallipoli campaign – has tended to obscure the totality of destruction of Britain’s pre-war fleet of passenger liners. The Cunard Line alone lost 20 vessels, representing more than half its overall tonnage. All but one of these fell victim to submarine torpedoes, including the Ivernia, sunk on New Year’s Day 1917 while transporting 2,400 troops from Marseilles to Alexandria, over a hundred soldiers and sailors being drowned.[5] White Star also suffered severe losses, most tragically the Laurentic. The ship was another victim of mines off Lough Swilly, this time laid by the U-80. Around 350 passengers and crew perished on a bitterly cold night in January 1917, many found frozen to death in her lifeboats the following day. Upwards of 900 troops were lost at sea when the Royal Edward was torpedoed by UB-14 in the Aegean in August 1915, the first and most deadly troopship sinking of the entire war.
In contrast, most of Germany’s great liners survived the war. Indeed, they contributed in no small measure to the country’s defeat. Lusitania was one of the several liners sunk without warning by U-boats in which American civilians had perished that prompted the country’s entry into the War in April 1917. The US government’s immediate concern was how to get General Pershing’s US Expeditionary Force to the Western Front, and the rusting German liners at Hoboken and other American ports were an obvious partial solution.
Among those taken over for the task were the three surviving ‘Kaisers’ and Vaterland. The Kronprinz Wilhelm was rechristened Von Steuben, in honour of a German-born hero of the American Revolution. Kaiser Wilhelm II became Agamemnon; Kronprinzessin Cecilie, Mount Vernon. Vaterland served as the Leviathan. Along with the surviving British superliners, these four ships helped transport approximately two million ‘doughboys’ to Europe between June 1917 and war’s end without significant loss. The former Kronprinzessin Cecilie fell victim to a U-Boat torpedo in September of 1918. The blast killed 37 men but the ship was able to make it safely back to a French port.
By the later stages of the war, the peacetime company liveries and uniform greys of these ships had been replaced by striking ‘dazzle’ camouflage. The Royal Navy had begun painting ships in ad hoc camouflage during the Gallipoli campaign, based partly on the recommendations of the zoologist John Grahame Kerr. However, the more systematic geometric patterning that commenced in May 1917 was an idea attributed to RNR Lieutenant and amateur artist Norman Wilkinson. By war’s end, more than 4,000 merchant vessels and 400 warships had been camouflaged in what must have been a huge undertaking for crews. Unlike Kerr’s zoological notion of reduced visibility, Wilkinson’s designs aimed to distort the ship’s outline when seen through a U-boat’s periscope. The efficacy of dazzle camouflage was highly doubtful but the policy was believed to have lifted morale among sailors.
‘Dazzle ships’ became a subject for post-war naval artists such as the Canadian Arthur Lismer, whose 1919 painting of the Olympic at Halifax Harbour is arguably the most famous example of the genre. Olympic visited the port 14 times during the war and transported an estimated 132,000 North American servicemen. In May 1918, the surviving unit of White Star’s ‘big three’ was herself nearly lost. While on route to Cherbourg with American troops, she was evidently hit by a torpedo by U-103, which failed to detonate. Quick action by Olympic’s crew allowed her to ram the U-boat before it had time to dive, the only occasion during the Great War that a liner directly sank an enemy warship.
While the bulk of the Imperial German Navy was sunk, scuttled, or scrapped, the nation’s great liners were to have a curious afterlife. Although two of the surviving ‘Kaisers’ were left to rust in Chesapeake Bay, the third, as Von Steuben, reclaimed her pre-war status, as did the Leviathan; both being returned to commercial service by the United States Line in the early 20s. Leviathan’s sister, Imperator, was ceded to Britain, where as the Berengaria, she served as Cunard’s flagship until the mid-30s. When completed, Bismarck entered service alongside Olympic as the Majestic. All of these giants were scrapped shortly before World War Two, to be replaced a new generation of superliners.[6]
Studies of the Anglo-German naval race have tended to obscure and de-emphasize the parallel maritime competition to build the World’s fastest, largest and most luxurious liners. As has been shown, the outcome of the Great War was substantially impacted by the operations of Britain and Germany’s fleets of commercial passenger ships; primarily in their role as troopships but also their use as offensive adjuncts to their respective navies.
[1] The two British companies appear to have had a tacit naming agreement; Cunard named many of theirs using the suffix ‘ia’ while White Star used ‘ic’.
[2] Russel, M. (2016), ‘Steamship nationalism: Transatlantic passenger liners as symbols of the German Empire’ The International Journal of Maritime History, Vol. 28(2) 313–334.
[3] Campania was given a 160ft flying-off deck forward, from which on 6th August 1915 one of the first successful at sea take-offs was achieved by a Sopwith Schneider floatplane, mounted on a wheeled trolley. The ship trained with the Grand Fleet but did not take part in any of the Royal Navy’s aerial combat operations. She sank at her moorings during heavy weather in November 1918.
[4] The only other comparable action was between the former RMSPC A-liner Alcantara and the German merchant raider Grief in February 1916, an engagement that saw both vessels eventually sink.
[5] Invernia’s captain William Thomas Turner gained the notoriety of having survived two U-boat sinkings; he’d also been in command of the Lusitania at the time of her loss.
[6] The hulks of Berengaria and her great rival Olympic were bought privately by the Conservative MP John Jarvis. Their scrapping provided much needed work for the shipyard workers of Jarrow during the last years of the depression.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 