Harrier by Mike Spick

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During the first six months of the year, German and Austrian submarines sank about 600,000 tons of shipping, but their losses rose to ten boats, twice their total losses for the previous three years. The submarines’ success rate fell dramatically in the months before the Armistice: they sank less than 250,000 tons of shipping and lost an additional four boats in the process. Moreover, these diminished accomplishments came about despite the fact that almost twice as many submarines were operational as in 1917.

Navies in general sought to produce faster, stronger, more powerfully armed, and longer- r a n g e boats to fulfill these tasks. The improved submarine types shared many features. Functionally they were submersibles, rather than true submarines; their designs were optimized for operation on the surface, with only limited capabilities submerged. Underwater, they relied for propulsion on electric motors fed by large storage batteries; on the surface, they used diesel engines for propulsion and to recharge the batteries.

The first French oceangoing submarines, the Requin class, benefited substantially from their designers’ study of U-cruisers. S. Navy fleet boats owed a great debt to the German boats (including even their diesel engines, in some cases), and German engineers were intimately involved in the development of the early Japanese kaidai and junsen types. German design influence spread to lesser fleets too, largely through the activities of the Ingenieurskantoor voor Scheepsbouw (IvS). The IvS was established in July 1922 at Den Haag in The Netherlands by a consortium of the Krupp and Vulcan shipbuilding yards to circumvent the Versailles Treaty’s prohibition on submarine design and construction.