Admiralty advises neutral flags

The British chronology of the war records under 30 January 1915 that the Admiralty warned British merchant ships to fly the flag of a neutral state, or none at all, in the waters around the British Isles. The advice was meant to make it harder for German submarines to tell whether they were facing a British ship. In their later statements the Germans dated this decision to 31 January.

U-boats off the British coast

The advice was issued at a time when German submarines were becoming increasingly dangerous. At the beginning of January U-24 had sunk the battleship Formidable in the English Channel, and at the end of the month U-boats began attacking merchant ships more boldly on the routes leading to British ports. On 29 January U-21 shelled Walney Island in the Irish Sea, and on 30 January sank three British steamers in that area. On the same day U-20 torpedoed two ships without warning off the French coast, near Le Havre. In Berlin there was increasingly loud talk of a commercial war waged with submarines against all shipping bound for Great Britain.

An old ruse of war

Flying a foreign flag to avoid capture by the enemy had for centuries been a recognised ruse of war at sea. The British Merchant Shipping Act in fact allowed foreign ships in wartime to use the British flag in order to escape capture. The British were later to recall that American ships had made use of this possibility during the Civil War. Now, however, it was not a matter of a single stratagem at the moment of pursuit, but of government advice addressed to the whole merchant fleet and covering vast areas of sea.

A dangerous precedent for neutrals

The Admiralty’s advice quickly became the subject of a diplomatic dispute. Neutral states feared that if British ships began flying their flags on a large scale, German commanders would cease to trust any flag, and genuine neutral ships would fall victim. These fears were soon to be borne out. The Germans invoked the British advice when warning that in the waters around the British Isles neutral ships, too, could not feel safe, and the governments in London and Washington were soon arguing over the use of the American flag by British ships.