The mission must have been urgent indeed to cause the navy to override the maritime superstition about Friday departures.
THE SUBMARINE as a weapon had come a long way by this time, certainly to the point where it killed its own crews only rarely. The first submarine ever credited with sinking an enemy ship was the Confederate navy’s H. L. Hunley, which, during the American Civil War, sank the Union navy’s frigate, the Housatonic. The Hunley, propelled by a crew of eight using hand cranks to turn its propeller, approached the Housatonic after dark, carrying a large cache of explosives at the end of a thirty-foot spar jutting from its bow. The explosion destroyed the frigate; it also sank the Hunley, which disappeared with all hands. This fate was more or less foretold, however. During trials before its launch, the Hunley had foundered three times, killing three crews, twenty-three men in all. Although inventors in many different countries contributed to the development of the submarine, the man most often lauded for turning it into something other than a suicidal novelty—an “iron coffin,” as members of the German navy were fond of saying—was an Irishman named John Philip Holland, who emigrated to America and began designing undersea vessels with the goal of helping Ireland defeat the British navy. A famous 1898 cartoon, based on a photograph taken in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, shows Holland emerging in top hat from the hatch of one of his submarines, with the caption, “What? Me worry?” Holland was first to incorporate electric engines for undersea cruising and gasoline for surface running, though gasoline, with its fumes and volatility and propensity for suffocating crews, was eventually replaced by diesel fuel. A Spaniard named Raimondo Lorenzo D’Equevilley-Montjustin, employed by the German arms maker Krupp, was responsible for designing Germany’s first submarines, though he did so by incorporating the ideas of Holland and others. His boats prompted the German navy to establish, in 1904, a division devoted to their construction, the Unterseebootkonstruktionsbüro, though the navy remained skeptical about their value. By the start of the war, submarine disasters still occurred, but not at so high a frequency as to deter young men like Schwieger from joining Germany’s U-boat service.
Schwieger’s boat was 210 feet long, 20 feet wide, and 27 feet tall. Viewed head-on, it might have seemed to offer its crew a comfortable amount of living space, but in fact the portion occupied by the men was only a cylinder down the center. Much of the boat’s apparent bulk consisted of giant tanks on both sides of the hull, to be filled with seawater when diving and to be emptied when surfacing. The space in between was crammed with berths for three dozen men, a kitchen, a mess room, a cubicle for the wireless operator, a central control room, two 850-horsepower diesel engines, tanks for 76 tons of diesel fuel, two 600-horsepower electric engines and the massive array of batteries that powered them, plus storage for 250 shells for the U-boat’s sole deck gun and space for storing and handling seven torpedoes, known formally as “automobile torpedoes.” The boat had two torpedo tubes in the bow, two in the stern. Linking all this apparatus was an array of pipes and cables as densely packed as the tendons in a human leg. “More dials and gauges than one might ordinarily see in a lifetime,” one crew member said. Schwieger had his own tiny cabin, with an electric light over his bed.
Unlike large surface craft, a U-boat came to reflect the character and personality of its commander, as though the boat were a suit of steel tailored just for him. This arose from the fact that while on distant patrol the captain received no orders from superiors and had more direct control over his own men than would, say, an admiral aboard a flagship, with a fleet of ships and thousands of men under his command. There were cruel boats and chivalrous boats, lazy boats and energetic boats. Some captains made no attempt to save the lives of merchant seamen; others went so far as to tow lifeboats toward land. One U-boat commander sent the captain of a torpedoed ship three bottles of wine to ease the long row ashore.
Under U-20’s previous commander, Otto Droescher, the boat attained a reputation for daring. On one cruise, in September 1914, Droescher and another commander took their submarines into the Firth of Forth, the estuary off Edinburgh, Scotland, and sailed as far inland as the Forth Bridge, hoping to attack British warships anchored at the navy base at Rosyth, just beyond the bridge. The boats were spotted, however, and fled back to the North Sea.