Submarine Warfare, Past, Present, and Future

by Herbert C. Fyfe

“To sum up, submarine navigation, like aerial navigation, is as yet only in the experimental stage—let us follow its progress carefully and encourage experiments; but to make a radical transformation in our navy on the strength of certain manœuvres would be an act of imprudence both perilous and criminal.”

The attitude of the saner class of Frenchmen may be gathered from the following extract from a speech delivered in the Senate on the 4th of December, 1900.

“At the present time we are certainly all of us believers in the submarines; I am as keen a believer as you, but it must be recognised that it is still the vessel of the future rather than of to-day.

“The day may come when it will cause all the cruisers to disappear, but to-day the submarine is a weapon about whose efficiency one cannot be very certain, or at least whose use in warfare is limited to special circumstances. For the present, then, we needs must accept the proposals of the Admiralty and wait to substitute these new engines of warfare for our present bigger vessels until the future has given to submarines the power and the value which some already claim for them.”

“It has been the crowning misfortune of France,” said Sir G. Clarke, “that every fresh invention has resulted to the advantage of the principal naval Power, from whom it has ever been her ambition to wrest the command of the sea. A closer study of the problem of the submarine boat will probably reveal the fact that the boat will be of little use against moving targets, but, having been convoyed to its destination, may be of service against fixed targets. The Power able to blockade its enemy can so convoy the submarine boat without risk, and then it can be sent on its adventurous enterprise in the crowded harbours of the enemy.”

It will be only an instance of the irony of fate if submarines come to be employed by Great Britain against France in the next great war, but the French writers who declare that England reaps where France has sown must remember that no nation can hope in these days to possess the monopoly of any one particular weapon of warfare.

“We have seriously believed,” says a writer in the Journal de la Marine, “that in all the great modifications that have been brought about in the construction of submarines is the result of the important changes which the last fifty years of the century have produced in the art of naval warfare. All these changes have been sought out, experimented upon, studied, and finally realised by France, who has also been the first to apply them. These results have established in a brilliant and incontestable manner the skill of our engineers; but our rivals have not only appropriated the results of our labours, but they have not been slow to place themselves on equal terms with us, and finally to excel us in the application of these discoveries.... We have been only the humble artisans working for them to establish their superiority.”

All this, it is added, is due to the industrial supremacy of England. France built a commerce-destroyer, D’Entrecasteaux, of 8,000 tons, and with a speed of 19 knots. She was to prey on English ships of commerce like a second Alabama. And Great Britain replied to the threat by building the Powerful and the Terrible, each of 14,000 tons and 22 knots, and the efforts of France were thus brought to naught, and the Journal wearily complains that, “It is easy for England to place three armed cruisers for service where we can only place one.”

In the question of submarines Great Britain has pursued the same perfidious conduct. Very quietly the British sat still until France had done all the preliminary work of experiment and trial, and now, after something of the nature of a real engine for naval war has been produced by their engineers, Britain quietly steps in and begins at the point France had reached.

“The English Government have not chosen to contribute by their own researches and work to upset a state of things to which the supremacy of the British Navy is due; the appearance of a boat which will plunge under the water and act on the offensive within a considerable radius of action has enlarged the question. At present all they wish is the protection of coasts and harbours.”