Submarine and Anti-submarine

by Sir Henry John Newbolt

The American Civil War then gave a great opportunity for practical experiments in torpedo attack; but the difficulty of wholly submerged navigation not having been yet solved, the boats used were not true submarines, but submersibles. Their propulsion was by steam, and their dimensions small. A more ambitious invention was put forward in 1869 by a German, Otto Vogel, whose design was accepted by the Prussian Government. His submersible steamship was to be heavily armed, and was ‘considered the equal of a first-class iron-clad in defensive and offensive powers.’ These powers, however, never came into operation.

Inventors now returned to the designing of true submarines; and after the Frenchman, Constantin, the American, Halstead, and the Russian, Drzewiecki, had all made the best use they could of the hand-winch or the pedal for propulsion, three very interesting attempts were made in 1877–8 to secure a more satisfactory engine. Olivier’s boat, patented in May 1877–8, was to be propelled by the gases generated from the ignition of high explosives, the massed vapours escaping through a tube at the stern. This ingenious method was, however, too dangerous for practical use. Surman’s design of 1878 included a propeller, rotated by compressed air. But the English boat of the same date, Garrett’s Resurgam, was much the most noteworthy of the three, and introduced a method which may in the future be brought to perfection with great results. In this boat, the motive force was steam, and propulsion under water, as well as on the surface, was aimed at and actually attained. In her trials, the vessel showed herself capable of navigating under water for a distance of 12 miles, by getting up a full head of steam in a very powerful boiler, with the aid of a blower, before diving; then by shutting the fire-door and chimney, and utilising the latent heat as long as it would last. When the heat was exhausted, it was, of course, necessary to return to the surface, slow up the fire again and recharge the boiler with water. The vessel was remarkably successful, and had the great merit of showing no track whatever when moving under water. She was lost by an accident, but not until she had impressed Nordenfelt, the Swedish inventor, so strongly that he secured the services of her designer, Garrett, for the building of his own submarine boats. The first of these appeared in 1881.

In the same year were patented Woodhouse’s submarine, driven by compressed air, and Génoud’s, with a gas-engine worked by hydrogen, which is said to have attained a speed of between four and five knots. Blakesley, in 1884, proposed to use steam raised in a fireless boiler heated by a chemical composition. In 1884, too, Drzewiecki produced the fourth of his ingenious little boats, driven this time not by pedals but by an electric motor. His example was followed by Tuck of San Francisco shortly afterwards, and by Campbell and Ash in their Nautilus, which in 1886 underwent very successful trials in the West Indian Docks at Tilbury, near London. In 1886 D’Allest, the celebrated French engineer, designed a submarine fitted with a petrol combustion engine. But the question of propulsion may be said to have been finally settled, within a few months after this, in favour of the electro-motor. For Gustave Zédé’s famous Gymnote, which was actually put on the stocks in April 1887, attained in practice a surface speed of 10 knots, and a maximum of 7 to 8 under water. This success saved future designers the trouble of further experiments with ingenious futilities.

5. Offensive Action.—We have so far been considering the development of the submarine as a vessel navigable under water, without reference to the purpose of offence in war. But this purpose was from the first in view; and with almost all the inventors recorded, it formed the main incentive of their efforts. The evolution of the submarine weapon has been much simpler, and more regular, than that of the vessel which was to use it; but it has been equally wonderful, and the history of it is equally instructive. Briefly, the French, in this department as in the other, have shown the most imaginative enthusiasm, the Americans the greatest determination to achieve results—even with crude or dangerous means—while the English have to their credit both the earliest attempts in actual war, and the final achievement of the automobile torpedo. Of the Germans, as before, we must record that they have contributed nothing of any scientific value.

Sir William Monson’s device of a bark, with an under-water cannon and an accompanying boat was soon developed by the English navy into the more practicable mine, self-contained and floating, to be towed by boat or submarine. In January, 1626, the King gave a warrant to the Master of the Ordnance, ‘for the making of divers water-mines, water-petards, and boates to goe under water.’ In June of the same year, the Duke of Buckingham, then commanding the naval expedition for the relief of La Rochelle, issued a warrant ‘for the delivery of 50 water-mynes, 290 water-petards, and 2 boates to conduct them under water.’ Pepys in his ‘Diary’ for March 14, 1662, mentions a proposal by Kuffler of an ‘engine to blow up ships.’ He adds, ‘We doubted not the matter of fact, it being tried in Cromwell’s time, but the safety of carrying them in ships;’ and probably this distrust of Drebbel’s German subordinate proved to be justified, for nothing more is heard of the design. The attempt referred to as made ‘in Cromwell’s time’ may have been Prince Rupert’s attack on Blake’s flagship, the Leopard, in 1650. The engine then used was not a submarine one but an infernal machine, concealed in an oil-barrel, brought alongside in a shore boat by men disguised as Portuguese, and intended to be hoisted on board the ship and then fired by a trigger and string. A more ingenious ‘ship-destroying engine’ was devised by the Marquess of Worcester in 1655. This was evidently a clock-machine, for it might be affixed to a ship either inside, by stealth, or outside by a diver, ‘and at an appointed minute, though a week after, either day or night, it shall infallibly sink that ship.’

The clock machine was actually first tried in action in 1776 by Bushnell, or rather by Sergeant Lee, whom he employed to work his Turtle for him. The attack by this submarine upon the Eagle, a British 64-gun ship lying in the Hudson River, was very nearly successful. The Turtle reached the enemy’s stern unobserved, carrying a mine or magazine of 150 lbs. of powder, and provided with a detachable wood-screw which was to be turned until it bit firmly on the ship’s side. The mine was then to be attached to it, and the clockwork set going. The wood-screw, however, bit upon some iron fittings instead of wood, and failed to hold; the tide also was too strong for Lee, who had to work the wood-screw and the propeller at the same time. He came to the surface, was chased by a guard-boat, and dived again, abandoning his torpedo, which drifted and blew up harmlessly when the clockwork ran down. Lee escaped, but the Turtle was soon afterwards caught and sunk by the British. Bushnell himself, in the following year, attacked the Cerberus with a ‘machine’ consisting of a trigger-mine towed by a whale-boat. He was detected, and his mine captured by a British schooner, the crew of which, after hauling the machine on deck, accidentally exploded it themselves, three out of the four of them being killed.

In 1802 Fulton’s Nautilus, in her trials at Brest, succeeded in blowing up a large boat in the harbour. In 1814 his submersible, the Mute, was armed with ‘columbiads,’ or immensely strong under-water guns, which had previously been tried with success on an old hulk. Similar guns were tried nearly fifty years later by the Spanish submarine designer Monturiol. But the offensive weapon of the period was the mine, and the ingenuity of inventors was chiefly directed to methods of affixing it to the side or bottom of the ship to be destroyed. One of these was the use of long gloves of leather or rubber, protruding from the interior of the submarine, invented by Castera in 1827, and adopted by Bauer, Drzewiecki, and Garrett in succession. But the device was both unhandy and dangerous; there would often be great difficulty in manœuvring the boat into a position in which the gloves would be available, and they could not be made thick enough to withstand the pressure of any depth of water. Practical military instinct demanded a method of launching the mine or torpedo against the target, and the first attempts were made by placing a trigger-mine at the end of a spar carried by the nose of the attacking boat. In October, 1863, during the American Civil War, the forts of Charleston were in danger from the accurate fire of the Federal battleship Ironsides, and Lieut. Glassell was ordered to attack her in the submarine David. He had no difficulty in getting near his enemy and exploding his torpedo, but he had misjudged his distance, and only succeeded in deluging the Ironsides with a column of water. The submarine was herself severely injured by the explosion and had to be abandoned. A second David, commanded by Lieut. Dixon, in February, 1864, attacked the Housatonic, off the same harbour, and in spite of the greatest vigilance on the part of Admiral Dahlgren’s officers, succeeded in reaching the side of the battleship, where she lay for the space of a minute making sure of her contact. The mine was then fired: the Housatonic rose on a great wave, listed heavily, and sank at once. The David, too, disappeared, and it was found three years afterwards that she had been irresistibly sucked into the hole made in her enemy’s side. After this, experiments were made with drifting and towing mines, and with buoyant mines to be released at a depth below the enemy’s keel; but by 1868 the invention of the automobile torpedo by the English engineer, Whitehead, of Fiume, solved the problem of the submarine offensive in the most sudden and conclusive manner.

The Torpedo.—Whitehead’s success arose out of the failure of an enterprising Austrian officer, Captain Lupuis, who had been trying to steer a small fireship along the surface of the water by means of ropes from a fixed base either on shore or in a parent ship. The plan was a crude one and was rejected by the Austrian naval authorities; it was then entrusted to Whitehead, who found it incapable of any practical realisation. He was, however, impressed with Lupuis’ belief in the value of a weapon which could be operated from a distance, and though he failed in designing a controllable vessel, he conceived the idea of an automobile torpedo, and, after two years’ work, constructed it in a practical form. It has been spoken of as ‘the only invention that was perfect when devised,’ and it certainly came very near perfection at the first attempt, but it was erratic and could not be made to keep its depth. In 1868, however, Whitehead invented the ‘balance-chamber,’ which remedied these defects, and brought two finished torpedoes to England for trial. They were fired by compressed air from a submerged tube, and at once proved capable of averaging 7½ to 8½ knots up to 600 yards and of striking a ship under way up to 200 yards. The target, an old corvette in the Medway, was sunk on to the mud by the first shot, at 136 yards, and immediately after the trials the British Government bought the secret, and other rights. Imitations were, of course, soon attempted in other countries, and a type, called the Schwartzkopf, was for some years manufactured in Berlin and used in the German and Spanish navies; it was also tried by the Italians and Japanese, but it failed in the end to hold its own against the Whitehead.

The automobile torpedo was at first used only for the armament of ordinary war-ships; it was not until 1879 that an American engineer named Mortensen designed a submarine with a torpedo-tube in the bows. His example was followed by Berkeley and Hotchkiss in 1880, by Garrett in his first Nordenfelt boat of 1881, and by Woodhouse and by Lagane in the same year. Even after this Drzewiecki, Tuck, and D’Allest designed their submarines without torpedo-tubes, but they were, in fact, indispensable, and the use of the Whitehead torpedo has been for the last twenty years assumed as the main function of all submarines designed for war.

The Submarine in War.—The difficulties of construction, propulsion, and armament having now been solved, the submarine at last took its place among the types of war-ships in the annual lists. From the first England and France held a marked lead, and in Brassey’s Naval Annual for 1914 the submarine forces of the chief naval Powers were given as follows:—Great Britain, 76 vessels built and 20 ordered; France, 70 and 23; the U.S.A., 29 and 31; Germany, 27 and 12. The technical progress of the four services was probably more equal than their merely numerical strength; but it was not altogether equal, as may be seen by a brief comparison of the development of the British and German submarine types between 1904 and 1914. The eight British A-boats of 1904 had a displacement of 180 tons on surface/207 tons submerged; the German U1 of 1904–6 was slightly larger (197/236) but in every other respect inferior—its horse-power was only 250 on surface/100 submerged, as against 550/150, its surface speed only 10 knots against 11·5, and it was fitted with only a single torpedo-tube instead of the A-boat’s two. This last deficiency was remedied in 1906–8, but the German displacement did not rise above 210/250 nor the horse-power above 400/150, while the British advanced to 550/660 and 1200/550. By 1913 the Germans were building boats of 650/750 displacement and 1400/500 horse-power, but the British were still ahead with 725/810 and 1750/600, and had also a superiority in speed of 16/10 knots to 14/8. The last German boats of which any details have been published are those of 1913–14, with a displacement of about 800 tons on the surface and a maximum speed of 18/7 knots. The British F-boats of the same date are in every way superior to these, with a displacement of 940/1200, a speed of 20/12 knots, and an armament of six torpedo-tubes against the German four. The comparison cannot be carried, in figures, beyond the date of the outbreak of war, but it is well known among the allies of Great Britain that the superiority has been amply maintained, and, in certain important respects, materially increased.