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Q-ship HMS Dunraven fighting a U-boat. The Dunraven sank after this encounter. (Artwork by Charles Pears)
German U-boats were the scourge of British shipping during World War I, and until the convoy system was instituted towards the end of the war, the submarines sank ship after ship. Before the use of convoys, the Admiralty tried all kinds of methods to stop the U-boats. One of these was the advent of Q-ships, also called mystery ships.
Since merchant ships were a popular target for U-boats, the British decided to try to draw out the submarines by using bait. So they took small merchant vessels and secretly outfitted them with hidden guns, hoping that when a U-boat surfaced to try to destroy what looked like an unarmed merchant ship, the ship could use the element of surprise to open fire and sink the Germans. The Q-boats’ secret guns were hidden wherever was feasible, including behind hinged panels and under fake lifeboats.
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Description of a Q-ship, London Times, 5 Aug. 1918
But the ships’ disguises went beyond simply hiding their guns. The ships were frequently repainted with different markings and their lights rearranged so that if they were trolling for U-boats in the same area over an extended period of time, anyone watching wouldn’t get suspicious seeing the same ship over and over again. The shapes of the ships were also sometimes disguised, using wire and canvas, and occasionally wooden planks were used to make it seem like the ships were made out of a completely different material. The decks of the ships were allowed to become grimy, instead of the spic and span of a normal Navy vessel, to more realistically imitate a merchant ship.
The ruse that it was an innocent merchant vessel extended to the crew members as well. They dressed in civilian clothing, and once in a while one of the men would dress up as the ship master’s “wife.” Since more men were onboard than there would be if it really were a merchant vessel, only a certain number of men were allowed up on deck at a time. The rest navigated the ship on the interior using passageways and trapdoors.
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Q-ship HMS Polyanthus
When a U-boat was detected, the men would act like they didn’t know it was there until it opened fire. Then the pre-selected “panic party” would act scared and abandon ship, even taking their performance so far as to pretend to forget one of the crew members onboard then have to go back to get him. Once the “panic party” left and the U-boat drew closer to destroy the ship, the remaining crew members onboard the Q-ship would reveal the hidden guns and open fire on the U-boat.
The Q-ships were mildly successful at first, but as the Germans caught onto their ruse, the effectiveness declined. Instead of rising to the surface to fire on the ships, the U-boats simply began firing torpedoes while submerged instead. By the end of the war, the Q-ships had sunk 14 U-boats but had lost 27 of their own ships. However, the idea was liked well enough that the British and the Americans used Q-ships again to some extent during the Second World War.
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Vice-admiral’s opinion on the value of using Q-ships, London Times, 22 May 1919
Learn more about Q-ships here or here. Or read a fascinating firsthand account of life aboard a Q-ship here. Find more stories from the war in Fold3′s World War I collection.