The submarine as an instrument of war was created in the late 1800's and its inception was immediately a cause for concern. It was a sneak-thief, an agent that did not follow the normal rules of naval combat. No lines of sumbarines would ever square up against each other in an orderly, Trafalgar-esque battle. No submarine captain would ever have his T crossed or any other such nonsense.
Submarines were a new thing, and they required new rules. The widespread use of submarines by the German Empire in World War One was the deciding factor in the creation of these new rules.
A submarine that came across a non-threatening combatant ship should:
1. Surface.
2. Announce that everyone should very quickly get to the lifeboats.
3. After everyone has gotten off, shell the ship with its deck gun until it sank.
These rules were assiduously followed until so many submarines were lost due to British use of illegal faux-merchant "Q" ships--merchant ships that were actually thinly disguised vessels of war--and other such British tricks became too much for the German Admiralty.
They declared an area west of the British Isles to be a war zone and any ship that traveled through this zone to be sunk without due dilligence.
This state of affairs continued for months and months until the Lusitania, a completely harmless passenger vessel full of innocent civillians that just happened to be carrying a secret load of ammo bound for the Western Front in the dark recessses of her hold, was sunk off the coast of Ireland.
An immediate outcry among neutral governments, most especially the USA, caused Germany to go back to playing by the rules. This unrestricted submarine warfare would be a big cause in the American declaration of war 1.5 years later.
"Oh yes, the vile Hun, look at the terrible things he does with his submarines. He sinks ships full of innocent women and children."
Unrestricted submarine warfare by the German Navy in the Atlantic started up again only after the American declaration of war in 1917.
So that was the basis of international ideas of submarine warfare, World War I. The Turtle and the Hunley aside, that was the first war in which submarines had been used on any kind of scale. And those rules that were laid down, the observance of which constituted restricted submarine warfare and the lack of observance of which constituted unrestricted submarine warfare, held over until the next war. World War II.
In World War II the Germans started out again with all their rules in place and their conduct very above the board. The country may have been run by insane Nazis, but the Navy was very much comprised of old-school German bosuns who'd been taught right.
They largely did exactly what they were supposed to. Non-military boats flying the flags of combatants were given orders to abandon ship then given enough time to bring down the lifeboats, after which they were shot at till they sunk. Torpedos were for destroyers and other purely military targets. This carried over even after the entry of the USA in December of 1941.
In 1942, however, everything changed. In September of that year a British ship, the Laconia, was sunk off the coast of West Africa by a German U-boat. The Germans had announced their presence, allowed the crew and passengers to get to lifeboats, and after sinking the ship commenced rescue efforts.
The Germans in their U-boat towed the lifeboats of the Laconia behind them, steering a course towards neutral areas of West Africa where they could be offloaded. Survivors even clung to the deck of the ship. They draped large Red Cross flags over top of their hull and steamed across open water with no concealment.
Along came an American bomber. He saw the U-boat and radioed back to headquarters for instructions. He was given a very decisive order: "Sink ship."
He bombed the fuck out of that U-boat, which submerged as fast as it could and got the hell away from there. A whole lot of survivors from the Laconia died, either from the bombing or from being abandoned in the middle of the ocean.
The man in charge of the German Navy, Admiral Doenitz, immediately issued an order called the "Laconia Order" telling all of his submarines to not observe the old rules and just sink everyone they saw in their patrol area. Unrestricted submarine warfare, the barbaric action which had propelled the United States into war in 1917, the war crime which had so counted against the German people when the hateful Versailles Treaty of 1919 was hashed out, was back on.
Later on, during the Nuremberg Trials, Doenitz would be taken to task for this Laconia Order. His actions were declared a war crime and he was sentenced to prison. Among his defenders? Turns out, one of the most respected US Admirals, Chester Nimitz.
See, the funny thing is that, immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the American Navy commenced unrestricted submarine warfare against all Japanese shipping. Oil tankers, troop ships, passenger ferries, fishing boats, whatever. We didn't give a fuck. We just destroyed the hell out of whatever we saw. From day one.
No American sub ever surfaced, announced its presence, told a Japanese crew/passengers to abandon ship, then after waiting sank the ship with our deck gun. Hell no. All American submarines ever did is what a submarine is best at, creep up and then torpedo the fuck out of the ship until it sank. There was no consideration for the people on the ship whatsoever.
Like I said, this could have been a heavily laden troop ship in the south Solomon Islands headed to Guadalcanal in 1942 or a passenger ferry in the Sea of Japan in 1945. We didn't give a fuck. Because they were Japs. And this was standard procedure, ordered from on high, from the very beginning of the war in December of 1941.
This was why Chester Nimitz, one of the heroes of the Battle of Midway, one of the greatest American naval officers of all time, came out publicly in support of Admiral Doenitz who was on trial for issuing the Laconia Order.
And this is what really gets me about American history. We always try to take action from a higher moral plane than the rest of the world, almost to instruct everyone, but we take the most morally wrong actions. Or we take actions based on some sort of Bismarckian realpolitik, to sieze a resource or a stategic area, but somehow we manage to fuck that up, too.
It's the hypocrisy that really gets to me. Doenitz was put on trial because of an order that he gave due to an Allied war crime. And we put him on trial for things that we had done and had been doing for years against his co-belligerents. And the things we were doing were things that we'd sort of gone to war against Doenitz's country twenty-odd years before.
It's the hypocrisy. It's like how Roosevelt condemmned the bombing of Guernica and Chinese cities in the late 30's and then gleefully signed off on the firebombing of German cities like Hamburg in the early 40's.
If we're making a cynical grab for power, can't we go for it? Why do we have to clothe that in choking, hypocritical rhetoric? If we're trying to improve the world, can't we go for that? Why do we have to embroider those actions with heinous war crimes? Why does my country, which I love, which I consider myself proud to be a citizen of, have to be so goddamn bumbling?
