![]() ![]() Despite these strikes, the Germans lost more U-boats than they sank during the first month of the war. Seventeen days later, U-9 sank three British battle cruisers with an hour, killing nearly 1,500. The U-boat fleet made its first strike on September 5, 1914, with an attack on a British light cruiser off the coast of Scotland that killed more than 250 sailors. ![]() Back row (left to right): U-14, U-10 and U-12. Front row (left to right): U-22, U-20 (sank the Lusitania), U-19 and U-21. German submarines parked in harbor, circa 1914. WATCH: WWI: The First Modern War on HISTORY Vault U-Boats Come of Age in World War I Its 20 combat-ready U-boats were more sophisticated that other countries’ submarines and could travel 5,000 miles without refueling, allowing them to operate along the entire British coast. By the start of World War I in 1914, however, Germany had caught the competition. Submarines were still primitive naval weapons when Germany became the last major naval power to build one in 1906. “I feel like Jonah inside some huge shellfish whose vulnerable parts are sheathed in armor,” wrote German war correspondent Lothar-Günther Buchheim on patrol in 1941. ![]() Mildew blossomed on their shoes, and charts even rotted from the oppressive heat and dampness. U-boat crews inhaled a foul cocktail of bilge water, sweat and diesel fumes. Fifty men shared two toilets-one of which doubled as a food locker at the start of patrols-that couldn’t function when 80 feet or more below the surface because of the outside water pressure, according to The U-Boats by Douglas Botting. Inside the dimly lit, claustrophobic submarines, sailors couldn’t shower or even change their clothes during patrols that could last two months at sea. These U-boats (an abbreviation of Unterseeboot, the German word for “undersea boat”) prowled the oceans in search of prey and could attack ships 20 times their size from both above and below the surface with their deck guns and torpedoes. 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. ![]()
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