7 - 1918: Minesweeping and Anti-Submarine Operations during the Final Year

Summary

Minesweeping

By January 1918, the German minelaying assault on the waters around the British Isles and elsewhere had seemingly passed its peak. In part, this was probably due to the growing effectiveness of British countermeasures; and perhaps partly because it was increasingly difficult for the Germans to maintain such high levels of mine production, given the pressing demands of other military priorities. But while there were clear indications that fewer mines were being deployed than had been the case some six months earlier, an evident focus on more specific objectives can be discerned from a study of minelaying activities during the last year of the war.

Whilst the seaways in the Harwich area, as well as the waters adjacent to a few other British ports, continued to be strewn with mines deposited principally by Flanders Flotilla U-boats still operating from the Belgian ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend, the minelaying submarines of the High Seas Flotilla increasingly concentrated their efforts on three other specific dimensions of maritime activity considered to be of crucial strategic importance to Britain. First, the High Seas Flotilla pursued a programme of intensive minelaying off the coasts of the Netherlands, to disrupt and damage convoy traffic to and from the United Kingdom through these waters; these voyages were known to those involved as the ‘beef trip’. The second area on which they invested a great deal of their effort encompassed the inner waters of the Firth of Forth and the tracks taken by the Scandinavian convoys. Finally, between the months of March and September 1918, the Germans expended considerable amounts of their precious time and scarce resources on a complex plan intended to finally ensnare the Grand Fleet. This involved the laying of a great barrier of mines out in the North Sea on a 45-mile radius from Bell Rock.

Although there was a diminution in German minelaying off other coasts of the British Isles, such activities did not completely cease. On 21 February 1918, for example, a cluster of mines was deposited in the seas about one and a half to two and a half miles north-east of the River Tyne by the UC-49, presumably to try and sink a battleship returning northwards to its Scottish base after refit in north-east England.