Listening in the dark: audio surveillance, communication technologies, and the submarine threat during the First World War

Within the context of the first truly global industrial conflict, all belligerents in the Great War had access to new and adapted technologies including aircraft, sophisticated artillery, wireless telegraphy, and submarines - or Unterseeboots (U-boats) as the German version came to be known. This was the first major combat in which the use of submarines became commonplace and hence became a key and defining feature of the changing repertoire of naval warfare. From the Allied Forces point of view, the U-boat threat could not be challenged through use of a single technology or system. Rather it required revolutionary organisational change - a dedicated campaign of combined civilian-military research and development to track a target that was typically beyond visual range. The British version was an innovative combination of counter-initiatives centred upon wireless communication and surveillance technologies, specifically electro-acoustic or enhanced listening technologies used to intercept and track U-boat communications and movements. By the end of the war, the epistemology of naval warfare had permanently reoriented to be more about enhanced listening than enhanced vision.