Pirates and Q-ships

 
The following article is from Reuters:

PARIS, April 21 - French forces have captured six suspected pirates in the Indian Ocean after a command and supply ship was attacked by gunmen in speedboats, the French military said on Wednesday.

Pirates in two skiffs attacked the "Somme" ship overnight on Monday, some 300-km (190 miles) off the coast of Somalia. The French fired back and the speedboats fled.

No one was injured and after a brief search of the area, the Somme discovered the assailants' mother ship.

"We found the suspected pirates, petrol and equipment that could be used for anything but fishing," said Colonel Patrick Steiger, a spokesman for the military.

It was the second time in six months that the "Somme" had come under attack while taking part in a European anti-piracy operation in the area.

"In a funny way, the boat looks like a civilian vessel and we think that it was attacked by mistake," said Steiger.

So, as I understand it, the pirates are apparently confused by the innocent-looking ship and on two different occasions have attacked it. Exactly how clever are these guys? Or are they using their spare time for drinking rum and drawing up treasure maps instead of correctly identifying their targets?


Of course, if the pirates are weak in the target identification area why not exploit that? This seems the perfect place to deploy a couple of Q-ships.

Q ships were used during WWI and WWII with varying success to fight submarines. Basically, the Q-ship was a well-armed merchantman that was disguised to look like a "soft" target. Since submarines carried a limited number of torpedoes the plan was to entice a submarine - in this case an unsuspecting German u-boat - to surface and destroy the ship using his deck guns. Once the submarine had surfaced and approached the ship, hunter became hunted and the merchant ship opened fire with its concealed weapons - often successfully destroying the u-boat.

This excerpt is from First World War.com:

Introduced towards the close of 1914 by the British and French - and later deployed by the Italian and Russians navies - Q-Ships were deployed as an initially although decreasingly successful anti-submarine weapon.  Alternatively referred to as Special Service Ships or Mystery Ships, the purpose of Q-Ships was straightforward: to trap enemy (usually German) submarines.

Invariably comprised of small freighters or old trawlers they were loaded with hidden guns in a collapsible deck structure.  In practice U-boats would hail Q-Ships flying (in the case of the Royal Navy) the merchant red ensign and, in the period before the implementation of Germany's policy of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917, a so-called "panic party" would apparently abandon the Q-Ship prior to the usual German policy of approaching the enemy vessel so as to sink it with the minimum depletion of ammunition.

At this stage the use of torpedoes to sink relatively small vessels was officially frowned upon.Thus with the U-boat effectively lured towards the apparently abandoned vessel the Q-Ship would run up the white ensign and the deck structure would be collapsed by the remaining ship's crew revealing a series of up to four manned guns, which would immediately open fire. Initially successful the Q-Ship ploy resulted in the sinking of some 11 enemy U-boats by the British and French.  As the war progressed production of Q-Ships notably increased so that by the war's close the British alone deployed 366.  However the Germans quickly developed a certain caution in approaching small enemy vessels, wary of decoys.

Torpedoes were increasingly used to sink Q-Ships at longer range; and with the introduction of unrestricted submarine warfare the crews of Q-Ships were not given time to abandon ship before being fired upon.  The British lost 61 Q-Ships in total.  By 1917 the effectiveness of Q-Ship deployment was minimal and the overall endeavour could not be termed a success.

Wikipedia also has some information here.