It's not strictly true that "the best tactic that the Royal Navy and other allied navies had come up with to counter the threat of German U-boat attacks was to simply ram the enemy submarine to disable the periscope." The Royal Navy had devoted considerable attention to the submarine menace before the war in the form of a high-level Submarine Committee which sat continually from 1910 until 1914. In its penultimate report, while it admitted that "no system capable of general application has so far been evolved," it recommended patrol by aircraft in order to direct friendly submarines to attack enemy submarines; patrols by fast vessels by night and day to force submarines to submerge; fitting ships with the much-tested Modified Sweep, an explosive towed charge; organising fleets at sea so that as many guns could be brought to bear on sighted enemy periscopes; offensive and defensive mining; and eventually using aircraft accompanying the fleet to patrol ahead "so to harry Submarines that the latter will never attack, but this is a degree of perfection still very far from attainment." This report was dated 5 May, 1914. —Simon Harley (Talk | Library). 17:21, 27 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The map included in this article is from the 1917 declaration of unrestricted warfare. A slightly more relevant map to 1915 might be this one. Otherwise a nice little piece, although I agree with Simon's comment above. Some books with some relevance to anti-sub technology are Robert Grant's U-boats Destroyed and U-boat Intelligence and, to a greater extent Dwight Messimer's Find and Destroy, which has a chapter on the British responses in 1914 and 1915. In summary they included ramming, mines, nets, barrages, explosive sweeps and the incredibly ineffective Lance Bomb, as well as the more strategic measures (attacking ports, using neutral flags and radio intelligence). That said, in comparison to the later years of the war and the Second World War, there weren't many effective ways to deal with U-boats... Ranger SteveTalk16:27, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
