Submarine Warfare, Past, Present, and Future

by Herbert C. Fyfe

During the war between Great Britain and the United States in 1812 H.M.S. Ramilies of seventy-four tons, was so unfortunate as to be the object of attack both by a diving vessel carrying torpedoes and by a powder-ship. The Ramilies was lying off New London at anchor and maintaining the blockade. As she was known to be short of provisions the Americans fitted out a schooner and filled the hold with powder, covering it over in the hatchways with barrels of flour. By means of an ingenious piece of clockwork attached to a gunlock and a train leading to the powder its explosion was ensured at the intended time. The Ramilies suspecting nothing, but thanking Heaven for the gift, captured the vessel and the crew escaped to land. By some extraordinary chance (or was it destiny?) the schooner was ordered to anchor near another prize some distance from the Ramilies, so that when the clockwork reached the fatal hour, 2.30, the charge exploded and blew up, not the Ramilies with her captain, Sir Thomas Hardy, and crew of six hundred men, but only the prize crew who were in the schooner.

The naval historian James could not trust himself to comment upon “this most atrocious proceeding,” whilst a naval officer wrote: “A quantity of arsenic in the flour would have been so perfectly compatible with the rest of the contrivance that we wonder it was not resorted to. Should actions like this receive the sanction of Governments, the science of war and the laws of nations will degenerate into the barbarity of the Algerians, and pillage will take the place of kindness and humanity to our enemies.”

During the American Civil War a species of weapon known as a “coal torpedo” was employed. This consisted of a hollow lump of iron, fitted with a charge of dynamite. It was rubbed over with coal tar and dust, and exactly resembled a large lump of coal. Lord Dunsany thought that this certainly seemed to be on the verge of lawful, if not beyond it.

At the close of the eighteenth century David Bushnell inaugurated the era of submarine warfare by devising cases fitted with explosives, arranged to go off at a set time by clockwork. To enable these cases to be affixed to the sides of vessels, Bushnell invented the first boat capable of diving beneath the waves of which we have any definite details. His attempts to blow up the Eagle in 1776 by a case fastened on her bottom, and the Cerberus in 1777 by means of a towing torpedo, failed, owing more to the lack of skill on the part of the operator, Sergt. Ezra Lee, than to any defect in the apparatus employed. Nor was Bushnell successful in his effort to destroy vessels in the Delaware by the aid of a number of kegs filled with powder and set adrift.

The introduction of gunpowder, of Greek fire, of fire-ships, of artillery, of shells, of bombs, of machines, of infernals, of catamarans, of powder vessels having, as has been shown, been at one time or another denounced as immoral by certain “humanitarians,” it was but natural that a secret contrivance for bringing about a terrific explosion beneath an unsuspecting ship’s crew should have been believed to be an invention of the Evil One, and history affords proof that the novel modes of fighting introduced by Bushnell and Fulton were regarded with great disfavour by naval men, who considered the innovators as men “who would discredit the glorious traditions of our navy, and substitute a set of catamarans for the noble frigates that had carried our flag to victory and were the pride of the nation”; by humanitarians, who regarded the torpedoes as a “dishonest and cowardly system of warfare”; and by the public generally, who denounced the nations who attempted to compass the destruction of British ships of the line by dastardly tricks which England would never stoop to employ.

In a work written by James Kelly, and published in 1818, the author comments with great severity on “some infamous and insidious attempts to destroy British men-of-war upon the coasts of America by torpedoes and other explosive machinery.” This refers to the attacks on H.M.S. Ramilies by one of Fulton’s boats, attacks which failed, but which caused Sir Thomas Hardy to notify the American Government that he had ordered on board from fifty to one hundred American prisoners of war, “who, in the event of the effort to destroy the ship by torpedoes or other infernal inventions being successful, would share the fate of himself and his crew.” So frightened were the relations and friends of prisoners of war by these threats that public meetings were held, and petitions were presented to the American executive against the further employment of torpedoes in the ordinary course of warfare.

Those who endeavoured to perfect a system of submarine mining for the defence of harbours and coasts were abused in the same way that Bushnell and Fulton had been. Samuel Colt, the inventor of the pistol which bore his name, and one of the first to experiment with mines fired from shore by means of an electric current, was roundly denounced by John Quincy Adams, who dubbed him “that Guy Fawkes afloat.”

At the time of the Crimean War the popular term “infernal machine” was applied to the submarine mines laid down by the Russians to defend the approaches to Cronstadt. In the seventies Lieut.-Col. Martin endeavoured to establish, on the grounds of humanity, an international anti-torpedo association, while even to-day there are people found to protest against the employment of certain forms of torpedoes, as witness the following letter recently published in the Engineer. The author, Mr. Reginald Bolton, declared that while no one could object to the defensive lay torpedo or the spar torpedo, the same could not be said of the “Whitehead,” “Brennan,” or “Edison.”

“Surely,” he urges, “our forefathers’ code of morality in warfare should not be in advance of our own. All civilised nations have debarred the brutal explosive bullet, and why not the equally mean submarine torpedo? If such a remedy as Commodore Hardy’s were to be applied by any nation, could its opponent complain, and is there anything in the practice of morality to prevent, say, a thousand prisoners’ lives being presented as a bar to the use of an implement which was acknowledged to be a disgrace to its employers not less than eighty years ago?”

The methods of warfare which have most aroused the ire of humanitarians and “blatant platform orators, with their vulgar party cries of eternal peace,” are those which depend for their success on secrecy or deceit. Powder vessels, coal torpedoes, et hoc genus omne, are condemned because they pretend to be what in reality they are not, and torpedoes and submarine boats because they advance in secrecy without giving the enemy any chance of firing at them or of protecting themselves against their insidious attacks beneath the water-line.