During the Spanish-American war, the Americans suffered severely from “torpedoites,” and were continually fancying they saw Spanish torpedo-boats, and firing on them, when in reality there were none present.
As an American officer remarked, “whatever the actual shortcomings of a torpedo-boat flotilla, it must always act at least as an admirable anti-soporific.” As to the Spaniards they appeared to dread the mines they had themselves laid more than did the Americans.
One of the most amusing cases of the moral influences of torpedo warfare was related by Vice-Admiral Sir Nowell Salmon at the Royal United Service Institution in 1892.
Sir Nowell was discussing the question of the value of the electric searchlight on battleships in warding off torpedo attack. He was inclined to think that he would rather not have it at all, for on any occasion that he had seen, whether it had been at a fixed station on shore or whether it had been a fixed station on board, making a quadrangle within which ships might lie, the torpedo station had always been the point of attack, and had always suffered. In one case in which he put a squadron inside four ships to make a path of light round them, the ships showing the light were of course at once the point of attack, and were all attacked and sunk; one commander indeed said that he was sunk no less than seven times.
“I can remember a little incident in which I took part. It shows how very curiously the electric light may act in some cases. The squadron inside the rectangle of light was in total darkness, and my boat in which I was inspecting the preparations happened to get within the beam of one of the ships showing the light. Just as this happened, I saw a boat inshore of me. I thought she was one of the attacking boats steaming up inshore. Of course I set to work to cut her off, as I was commanding the defending squadron. I steamed as hard as ever I could. I got my muskets ready and so on. Still she went past me, going inshore as I thought, and it was not until I recognised my own shadow shaking its fist at the engineer for not clapping on more steam, that I found I was chasing the shadow of my own boat thrown on the cliff. In a very few seconds I should have been hard and fast ashore.”
“The real strength of the destroyer,” wrote a special correspondent with the British fleet during the 1901 manœuvres, “consists not so much in what she can do against large ships, certainly not in what she ever has done so far, but in the fear entertained by her adversaries of the harm she is held to be capable of doing. Her menace is tremendous, and really paralysing to some minds.” This probably applies quite as much to submarines as to destroyers.
CHAPTER VII
THE SUBMARINE IN ACTION
Once, and only once, has a submarine boat succeeded in inflicting any damage on an enemy in actual warfare. This was during the American Civil War when one of the Confederate Davids succeeded in blowing up the Federal frigate Housatonic, and in annihilating itself at the same time.
Before this event under-water vessels had attempted to destroy hostile craft, but with no success.
In 1776 Bushnell’s diving torpedo-boat made an attack on the English frigate Eagle, and in 1777 on the English man-of-war Cerberus and other vessels. Although it failed to inflict any injury on a single vessel, three of the crew of a prize schooner astern of the Cerberus, hauling one of Bushnell’s drifting torpedoes on board, were killed by the explosion.