Robin McCaig

Clare College

The Legality of Unrestricted Submarine Warfare in the First World War

  In 1946 the IMT at Nuremberg ruled that Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was not guilty of a war crime for having waged unrestricted submarine warfare against enemy merchant vessels because such ships had lost their non-combatant status by being armed, convoyed and incorporated into military intelligence gathering. The “actual circumstances” of the Dönitz case have now been taken up by modern attempts at restatements of the laws of naval warfare (e.g. the San Remo Manual) so as to permit all belligerent warships to attack without warning any merchant vessel, enemy or neutral, that meets the wide-ranging criteria of a “military objective”.   However, most of the circumstances on which these criteria are based pre-date the Second World War and originated in attempts by the Allies in 1914-18 to counter what they alleged were illegal methods in Germany’s use of submarines against merchant vessels during the First World War. Those U-boat campaigns were justified on three broad grounds: military necessity, belligerent reprisals, and claims that modern conditions (which pre-war lawyers had failed to anticipate) rendered the existing laws of naval warfare untenable. Given that these justifications, whether all or in part, have been accepted by most legal commentators today, my thesis is an analysis of the submarine warfare of 1914-18 as a phenomenon distinct from that of 1939-45, investigating its legal and historical contexts to examine whether the facts bear out modern claims, and to ask whether the relevant law post-1945 was adopted because it was necessary or because it was convenient.                                                

Start Date: 2007/10.

End Date: 2012/04.

M.A. (Hons) Modern History, University of St Andrews
2000-03: LL.B (Hons) (First Class), University of Strathclyde
2003-04: Diploma in Legal Practice, Glasgow Graduate School of Law
2004: Participant, Philip C Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition, International Rounds

2004-06: Trainee Solicitor, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar
2006-07: Solicitor, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar
Qualified Solicitor and Notary Public in Scotland

2007-11: PhD Candidate, William Senior Student in Legal History (Clare College)

2008-10: Secretary, Clare College MCR

Public International Law, Prize Law, Law of Armed Conflict, Legal History.

 

Case Note: The Further Evolution of the Evolutionary Approach to Treaty Interpretation (Cambridge Law Journal, July 2010) 

Papers Presented:

July 2008: Cambridge Legal History Colloquium- Prize and Compromise: The UK and the Destruction of Neutral Ships in the Declaration of London (1909)

October 2008: Clare College Graduate Research Forum- Cruising for King and Profit: An Introduction to Prize Law

March 2009: Clare College Research Symposium (also co-organiser)- Deceived by False Colours: First World War Historians and the Law of Flags in Naval Warfare

July 2009: Cambridge Legal History Colloquium- When Nemesis met Clio: International Justice and the Verdicts of History

November 2009: LCIL PhD Round Table- Cruising in Uncharted Waters? The Legal Status of Submarine Warfare in the Era of the First World War

February 2010: Clare College Graduate Research Forum- Prize and Prejudice: The Course of Admiralty and the Law of Nations

March 2010: Clare College Research Symposium- Debunkin’ Dönitz: What the Nuremberg Trial Really Said about Submarine Warfare

February 2011: Clare College Graduate Research Forum- Ancestral Voices Prophesying U-boat War: The British Establishment Anticipates the Submarine as Commerce Raider Before 1914

Dr Roger O'Keefe

TBA