Submarine and Anti-submarine — Reading Companion

From Technical Manual to Polemic

The book's structure reveals a deliberate change in pace and purpose. Early chapters—'The Evolution of the Submarine,' 'The Submarine of To-day'—read like a technical primer, describing hull designs, torpedo mechanisms, and operational ranges. The language is detached, almost instructional. But by Chapter X, 'The U-Boat Blockade,' the tone hardens. Newbolt begins listing sinkings without warning, and the sentences grow shorter, more staccato. The Falaba is 'stopped and torpedoed in cold blood'; the crew of the Aguila 'were fired upon while launching their boats.' The narrator no longer explains—he indicts.

This shift is not gradual but abrupt, mirroring the historical rupture Newbolt perceives: the transition from 'civilized' naval warfare to what he calls 'barbarian' tactics. The technical chapters provide a baseline of dispassionate expertise; the later chapters abandon that stance entirely. Readers should note how the same author who calmly describes a submarine's conning tower later describes German laughter at drowning victims. The contrast is the book's central rhetorical device.

The Voice of Outrage: Quotation as Evidence

Newbolt frequently embeds external voices to build his case. He quotes the New York Times calling the Falaba sinking 'perhaps the most shocking crime of the War.' He reproduces the German Embassy's warning to travelers, then notes that 'intending travellers smiled at this outrageous threat.' Most damningly, he cites the Kölnische Zeitung and Kölnische Volkszeitung—the latter a 'prominent Roman Catholic and patriotic paper'—expressing 'joyful pride' in the Lusitania attack. These quotations are not neutral; they are exhibits in a prosecution.

The narrator's own language escalates in response: 'half-witted wickedness,' 'true savagery,' 'unparalleled disgrace.' Yet Newbolt never abandons specificity. He notes that medals were struck, school holidays given, and subscriptions raised for the U-boat crew. The accumulation of concrete detail—the 37 killed out of 38 on the Tangistan, the stewardess and five men of the Fingal—anchors the outrage in verifiable fact. This technique gives the polemic a documentary weight it would otherwise lack.

Pace and the Accumulation of Atrocity

The narrative pace in the opening chapter is carefully controlled. Newbolt begins with a general statement—'a good deal of the information contained in this book will be new to the public'—then moves to a series of dated entries: March 9, March 15, March 27, March 28. Each entry adds a fresh horror, and the rhythm accelerates. By the time he reaches the Lusitania, the prose has become a drumbeat of dates and numbers: May 1, May 7, 2 P.M., 2.15, 2.36. The effect is cumulative, almost overwhelming.

This acceleration mirrors the historical escalation Newbolt describes: from warning to threat to mass murder. But the pace is not uniform across the book. Later chapters, such as 'Submarine v. War-ship' and 'War-ship v. Submarine,' return to a more measured, tactical analysis. Readers should attend to these shifts in tempo. They are not accidental; they signal changes in the author's rhetorical purpose—from explanation to accusation, from instruction to memorial. The book's emotional power derives from this alternation, not from any single passage.

Newbolt's book is best read as a hybrid: part technical history, part wartime polemic. The reader who expects a dry operational account will be startled by the moral fury of the first chapter; the reader who expects pure propaganda will find unexpected patience in the descriptions of submarine evolution. The key is to watch the narrator's voice—when it slows to explain, when it quickens to condemn. The illustrations by Norman Wilkinson, listed in the contents, offer a visual counterpart to this dual register: technical drawings of vessels alongside dramatic scenes of attack. Together, text and image create a document that is both a record and a reckoning.