Q-ships Was: Re: Naming this child (little Audi content)

[Geoff Jenkins <jenkinsg@pilot.msu.edu>]

I may be wrong (happens frequently), but as far as I recall, it was
during World War I, not "the high rolling days of piracy" that the term
Q-ship (if not the concept) came into fashion.

German submarines of that vintage preferred to deal with merchant ships
on the surface, with gunfire (saved scarce torpedoes), but dealt with
armed ships from beneath the waves. The Q-ships were thus aimed to be
externally innocuous, but able to deal with a sub. The first effective
one was, as I recall, a converted trawler named the Lyon, circa 1915.
They were later used quite extensively, but only until Germany engaged
in unrestricted submarine warfare, at which point they retained very
little value.

The term Q-ship, unfortunately for those of us who use it to refer to
our cars, was almost never used for the infinitely more glamorous
merchant raiders modified from fast commercial vessels. The actual
Q-ships were more of a defensive decoy than an aggressive hunter.

Briefly, the US Army Air Force experimented with a similar idea (and the
same name) in WWII, using extremely heavily armed B17s. The idea never
took off. No pun intended. :-)

Geoff