Submarine Deutschland in America

During the night of 8/9 July 1916 an unusual merchant vessel approached the coast of Virginia. It was the German submarine Deutschland, unarmed and built solely to carry cargo. At about one in the morning its crew sighted the lights of Cape Henry at the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. The chartered tug Thomas F. Timmins was waiting there and led it up the bay. Late in the evening of 9 July Deutschland dropped anchor off Baltimore, and the next day it entered the harbour. The British chronology of the war gives the date as 10 July and the place of arrival as Norfolk. In fact the vessel only passed Cape Henry, not far from Norfolk. Baltimore had been the destination of the voyage from the start, and 10 July was the day on which Deutschland moored in the harbour and photographs from the quayside went round the world.

Through the blockade under water

The British naval blockade had cut Germany off from overseas raw materials, and the Americans from German goods. In the autumn of 1915 the Bremen merchant Alfred Lohmann, the shipping line Norddeutscher Lloyd and Deutsche Bank founded the Deutsche Ozean-Reederei company, which was to outwit the blockade by carrying cargoes in submarines, which British patrols could neither stop nor search. Deutschland was the first of them. She was about 65 metres long, of 791 gross register tons, with a crew of 29. She had neither torpedoes nor guns. She was commanded by Paul König, an experienced Norddeutscher Lloyd captain.

The vessel left Germany in mid-June. For several days she waited off Heligoland until the risk of meeting British patrols had passed, and on 23 June she set out on her voyage. She did not go through the English Channel, but rounded Scotland to the north. She covered most of the way on the surface. According to the crew’s account, she dived only when a suspicious ship appeared on the horizon, for a total of about 90 miles out of roughly 3,800.

Dyes for rubber and nickel

In her holds Deutschland carried above all synthetic dyes, including alizarin derivatives, as well as medicines, among them Salvarsan, and bank and diplomatic mail. Sources give the weight of the dyes variously, from about 125 to over 160 tons. It was a small cargo, but a very valuable one. Before the war the American textile industry had bought its dyes almost exclusively in Germany, and it still had no production of its own. On the return voyage the vessel was to take the goods that German war industry lacked most: rubber, nickel and tin.

In Baltimore the crew were received as heroes. German Americans gave receptions in their honour, and the newspapers wrote at length about a voyage that looked like a mockery of the Royal Navy. In Germany the arrival of Deutschland was celebrated as proof that the blockade could be broken. The British and French, on the other hand, argued that a submarine was by its very nature a warship that could be neither stopped nor inspected, and so should not enjoy the rights of a merchant ship in a neutral port.

Washington’s decision

The status of Deutschland had to be settled by the United States authorities. American inspectors examined the vessel and found no armament on board, nor any sign of preparations for fitting it. On 15 July the State Department recognised her as an unarmed merchant vessel that could trade freely in American ports like any other. The Entente powers accused Washington of partiality, but the Americans held to the principle that a vessel’s character was determined by its armament, not by the shape of its hull.

At the beginning of August Deutschland sailed from Baltimore with a cargo of about 350 tons of rubber, 340 tons of nickel and over 90 tons of tin. At the end of August she safely reached Germany. In the autumn she made a second voyage, this time to New London in Connecticut, while her sister ship Bremen was lost on her first voyage. Underwater trade could not, however, replace ordinary shipping: a few hundred tons of goods per voyage meant little against the needs of the German economy. In 1917, when relations with America were broken off, the navy took over Deutschland and converted her into the armed submarine cruiser U-155.