Submarine Warfare, Past, Present, and Future

by Herbert C. Fyfe

Thucydides (iv. 26) gives an instance of a case of divers being employed as subaqueous auxiliaries during the siege of Syracuse.

“The besieged had driven piles into the water before their old docks, that their vessels might be in safety behind them and the Athenians be unable to stand in amongst them and do any damage to the shipping.” The latter endeavoured to remove this species of nautical entrenchment, and for this purpose they constructed a raft on which were turrets and parapets to cover the men who embarked on it. It was towed up to a line of piles and used as a kind of covering battery for the crews of boats who removed the piles which had been “sawed off close to the bottom by divers.” A serious obstruction was offered by some piles driven in till their heads were below the surface of the water in the hope that the besieging ships might run upon it. But the divers, by persevering efforts, succeeded in sawing them through, thus enabling the besiegers to remove them.

The Chronicles of the early Middle Ages supply instances of the employment of divers in naval warfare. The Baltic, we read, was so infested with pirates that a Swedish force was sent against them. The Swedish admiral, observing that the pirate vessels lay at anchor in a certain bay, sent in at night men from his own fleet to dive beneath them and make holes in their bottoms. The following day he engaged them. In the action the leaks made by the subaqueous assailants during the night proved so serious that the piratical crews had to turn their attention chiefly to stopping them and to baling out their vessels. The number available to fight their enemy was in consequence so reduced that the Swedes gained a complete victory and the power of the pirates was annihilated.

Again at the siege of Malta by the Turks in the sixteenth century some furious under-water fighting occurred. The Maltese were excellent divers and the Knights took advantage of their skill to assist in the erection of a barricade across the mouth of one of the creeks which indent the shores of the Grand Harbour. This obstruction the Turkish besiegers endeavoured to remove, and accordingly they made upon it a series of determined attacks. The divers left their work to drive them off and a terrible and weird struggle ensued, frequently below the surface of the water, which finally ended in the repulse of the infidel assailants.

One must accept cum grano salis the stories told by writers regarding the time that divers were able to continue under water. Beckmann said that the divers of Astrakhan employed in the fishery there could remain for seven minutes under water. The divers in Holland seem to have been very expert, for an observer, during the time they were under water, was obliged to breathe at least ten times. “Those who collect pearl-shells in the East Indies can remain under water a quarter of an hour, though some are of opinion that it is possible to continue longer; and Mersenne mentions a diver, named John Barrinus, who could dive under water for six hours.” Beckmann evidently found it a little difficult to swallow this, so he adds, “How far this may be true I shall leave others to judge.”

An account of a Sicilian diver, Nicolo Pesce, given by Kircher, is yet more marvellous than any of those just cited. So great was his skill that he carried letters for the king from Sicily to Calabria. The story goes that the king offered him a gold cup if he would explore the terrible Gulf of Charybdis. He remained for three-quarters of an hour amidst the foaming abyss and on his return described all the horrors of the place to the astonished monarch, who requested him to dive once more to further examine the gulf. For some time he hesitated, but upon the promise of a still larger cup and a purse of gold he was tempted to plunge again, with the melancholy result that he never came to the surface again.

A history of the art and practice of diving, although it would present many points of interest, is foreign to our subject, and attention must be confined to the question of submarine warfare.

Some writers on this subject, whilst making such statements as “The confinement of gunpowder in watertight cases and its submarine explosion for the destruction of floating and other bodies is almost as old as villainous saltpetre itself,” or “The ancients understood the manufacture of subaqueous explosives or at least combustibles,” do not trouble to give any particular instances. A French writer is reported to have collected accounts of the use of such devices against ships below the water-line, but a diligent search has failed to reveal the name of the author.

“The fact that some under-water explosive compound,” said Admiral Cyprian Bridge, in an article he contributed to Fraser’s Magazine many years ago, “had been known in ancient times was not lost sight of in the stirring intellectual revolution of the Renaissance, which, amongst other legacies, bequeathed to mankind the outlines of the modern art of war. It is not surprising, therefore, that we should meet with the use of such an agent in the wars of the sixteenth century. The most celebrated instance of its employment was by the Italian Giannibelli (sic) at Antioch during the siege of the city by the Prince of Parma.”

Perhaps the Admiral is referring to what Lieutenant Sleeman says is the earliest record of the employment of a torpedo (i.e., a case of explosion possessing the power of aggression). In 1585 an Italian engineer named Zambelli invented a floating mine and succeeded in destroying a bridge built over the Scheldt by the Prince of Parma. Zambelli’s mine consisted of a flat boat filled with gunpowder arranged in it so as to secure the maximum effectiveness, and provided with a long sulphur metal rope and clockwork for its ignition.