ABSTRACT
Germany built its first submarine in 1851. It sank on its initial voyage, but the Germans kept working with submarines, experimenting and improving them. By the start of WWI, Germany had 29 Unterseeboots, nicknamed U-boats by the British. The German U-boat was far more sophisticated than any submarine of any other country. A typical German U-boat was 214 feet long, carried 35 men, had 12 torpedoes, and could travel underwater for 2 hours at a time. It was a fighting machine. By contrast, British admirals had not spent time or resources developing submarines. They considered fighting with submarines to be “under-handed, unfair, and dashed un-English.” They had only developed “K”-class submarines that earned the nickname Kalamity Class. The K-class submarines had so many accidents that a third of them sank without being hit by enemy fire.
