Photo by Brown Bros.
U. S. Submarine E-2.
Note wireless, navigating-bridge, and openings for flooding superstructure when submerging.
Moored alongside the parent-ship, the submarine X-4 was filling her fuel-tanks with oil through a pipe-line, in preparation for the day’s cruise and target-practice I was to be lucky enough to witness. Two hundred and fifty feet long, flat-decked and straight-stemmed, she looked, except for the lack of funnels, much more like a surface-going torpedo-boat than the landsman’s conventional idea of a submarine.
“I thought she would be cigar-shaped,” I said as we went on board.
“She is—underneath,” answered Lieutenant Scope. “What you see is only a light-weight superstructure or false hull built over the real one. See those holes in it, just above the water line? They are to flood the superstructure with whenever we submerge, otherwise the water pressure would crush in these thin steel plates like veneering. But it makes us much more seaworthy for surface work, gives us a certain amount of deckroom, and stowage-space for various useful articles, such as this.”
Part of the deck rose straight up into the air, like the top of a freight-elevator coming up through the sidewalk. Beneath the canopy thus formed was a short-barreled, three-inch gun.
“Fires a twelve-pound shell, like the field-pieces the landing-parties take ashore from the battleships,” explained the naval officer, as he trained the vicious-looking little cannon all around the compass. “Small enough to be handy, big enough to sink any merchant ship afloat, or smash anything that flies.”
Here he pointed the muzzle straight up as if gunning for hostile aeroplanes.