Submarine Warfare, Past, Present, and Future

by Herbert C. Fyfe

The David, that finally succeeded in sinking the Housatonic, proved so costly an experiment in human lives, because she was not worked as a submarine, but as a low freeboard surface torpedo boat, a purpose for which she was never designed, and for which, as we have seen, she proved dangerous and inefficient. As some one has observed, she was intended for submerging at pleasure—her own pleasure, however, not that of her crew. During the attack on the Housatonic, on February 17th, the vessel did not run under water. The crew submerged it to the hatch coaming and left the cover open against the protest of Mr. Howgate, who despatched it on its mission. The attack was made by a spar torpedo, and the wave thrown up by its explosion, when it struck the Housatonic, entered the open hatchway and swamped the vessel. Most accounts of the feat of the David state that all the crew were drowned. From the following extract it would seem that the gallant captain survived the attack.

“I remember on one occasion during the war,” wrote Hobart Pacha in an article, “The Torpedo Scare,” appearing in Blackwood’s Magazine for June, 1885, “when I was at Charleston, meeting in a coffee-room at that place a young naval officer (a Southerner) with whom I got into conversation. He told me that that night he was going to sink a Northern man-of-war which was blockading the port, and invited me to see him off. I accompanied him down to his cigar-boat, as he called it, and found that she was a vessel about forty feet long, shaped like a cigar, on the bow of which was placed a torpedo. On his stepping on board with his crew of four men, his boat was immersed till nothing but a small piece of funnel was visible. He moved off into the darkness at no great speed—say at about five miles an hour. The next evening, on visiting the coffee-house, I found my friend sitting quietly smoking his pipe. He told me that he had succeeded in making a hole in the frigate which he had attacked, which vessel could, in fact, be seen lying in shallow water, some seven miles off, careened over to repair damages. But he said that, on the concussion made by firing the torpedo, the water had rushed in through the hatches of his boat, and she had sunk to the bottom. All his men were drowned. He said he didn’t know how he escaped himself, but he fancied that he came up through the hatches, as he found himself floating about, and swam on shore. This affair was officially reported by the American blockading squadron, corroborating the fact of the injury done to the frigate, and stating that the torpedo-boat was got up, with four dead bodies in her hold. Here is one system which might be utilised in naval warfare if perfected, and I am given to understand that a submarine torpedo-boat is already invented by Mr. Nordenfelt.”

After the sinking of the Housatonic the Federals again turned their attention to submarine warfare, and in October, 1864, some trials were made on the Hudson with a boat named the Stromboli, constructed at Fairhaven from the designs of an engineer, one Wood. It was not, properly speaking, either a submarine or a diving boat, but by letting in a certain quantity of water into the reservoirs it could be brought flush with the surface, leaving only the conning tower, the chimney and the ventilator above the waves. A steam engine propelled the Stromboli at a speed of ten miles an hour, while a spar torpedo formed the armament. On the 16th of November, 1864, the Stromboli was under the command of John Lay, and was ordered to proceed to Hampton Roads to attack the Confederate cruisers. It appears to have arrived on the 6th of December, but its subsequent doings are not to be discovered.

Another semi-submarine which figured in the American Civil War was the Sputyen Duyvil, built by Messrs. Mallory & Co., from the plans of Messrs. William Wood and John Lay. She was made of wood, and her dimensions were, length 74 feet, beam 20 feet, draught 7½ feet. On going into action she could be immersed to a depth of 9 feet in order to put her armoured side below water, she was to fight with her deck, which was placed with 3–in. armour, flush with the water. Amidships, and standing about 3 feet above the deck, was a pilot house from which the boat could be steered. The Sputyen Duyvil was attached to James River’s squadron during the year 1865, but there is no evidence that she was ever brought into use; her torpedoes were fired on contact, and were worked through a hollow iron boom projecting from the bow, and having inside it a rod to which the torpedo was to be attached.

THE “SPUTYEN DUYVIL.”

CHAPTER XIV
THE WHITEHEAD TORPEDO—“THE MOST WONDERFUL MACHINE IN THE WORLD”

“When you have been shown lovingly over a torpedo by an artificer skilled in the working of its tricky bowels, torpedoes have a meaning and a reality for you to the end of your days.”—Rudyard Kipling.

“The next great naval war will bestow upon the torpedo and its users a halo of romance which will eclipse entirely that surrounding the gun and the ram.”

“The arts of shipbuilders and steel-workers stand for nothing when a Whitehead torpedo succeeds in striking a ship’s bottom and tears and rends it with the explosion of 200 lbs. of gun-cotton. In the hands of ignorant or careless people the Whitehead is nearly as dangerous to its friends as to its foes, but in the hands of skilful and resolute men it is the most terrible engine of warfare which the world has ever seen.”—Lieut. G. E. Armstrong, in Torpedoes and Torpedo Vessels.