Aircraft and Submarines / The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day Uses of War's Newest Weapons

by Willis J. Abbot

While we were getting our boat over the side, the submarine moved closer in, keeping her gun bearing on us all the time, most uncomfortably. The gun stood uncovered on the deck, just abaft the turret. It was thickly coated with grease to protect it when the vessel submerged. It is only the very latest type of submarines that have disappearing guns which go under cover when the vessel submerges and are fired from within the ship, which makes all the more surprising the speed with which a submarine can come to the surface, the men get out on deck, fire the gun, get in again and the vessel once more submerges.

I was in the first boatload that went over to the submarine. From a distance it looked like nothing so much as a rather long piece of 4×8 floating on the water, with another block set on top of it and a length of lath nailed on the block. It lost none of these characteristics as we neared it. It only gained a couple of ropes along the sides of the 4×8, while men kept coming mysteriously out of the block until a round dozen was waiting to receive us. The really surprising thing was that the men turned out to be perfectly good French sailors, with a most exceedingly polite French lieutenant to help us aboard the little craft....

The Capture of a U-Boat.
Painting by John E. Whiting.

The vessel we were in was a 500-ton cruising submarine. It had just come from eight months' guarding the Channel, and showed all the battering of eight months of a very rough and stormy career with no time for a lie-up for repairs. It was interesting to see the commander hand the depth gauge a wallop to start it working and find out if the centre of the boat was really nine feet higher than either end. We were fifty-four feet under water and diving when the commander performed that little experiment and we continued to dive while the gauge spun around and finally stopped at a place which indicated approximately that our back was not broken. I suppose that was one of the things my friend the lieutenant referred to when he said life on a submarine was such a sporting proposition.

We boarded the submarine over the tail end and balanced our way up the long narrow block, like walking a tight rope, to the turret, where we descended through a hole like the opening into a gas main into a small round compartment about six feet in diameter exactly in the midship section, which was the largest compartment in the ship. Running each way from it the length of the vessel were long corridors, some two feet wide. On each side of the corridors were rows of tiny compartments, which were the living and working rooms of the ship. Naturally, most of the space was given up to the working rooms.

The officers' quarters consisted of four tiny compartments, two on each side of the after corridor. The first two were the mess room and chart room, and the second pair were the cabins of the commander—a lieutenant—and his second in command, an ensign. Behind them was an electric kitchen, and next came the engines, first two sets of Diesel engines, one on each side of the corridor, each of four hundred horse-power. These were for running on the surface. Then came four bunks for the quartermasters and last the electric motors for running under the surface. The motors were run from storage batteries and were half the power of the Diesel engines. The quarters of the crew were along the sides of the forward corridor. The floors of the corridor were an unbroken series of trap doors, covering the storage tanks for drinking water, food, and the ship's supplies. The torpedo tubes were forward of the men's quarters. Ten torpedoes were carried. The ammunition for the deck gun was stored immediately beneath the gun, which was mounted between the turret and the first hatch, abaft the turret. Besides the turret there were three hatches in the deck, one forward and two aft.

There were thirty-four men in the crew. The men are counted every two hours, as there is great danger of men being lost overboard when running on the surface, and in bad weather they are sometimes counted as often as every half hour.

The turret was divided in two sections. In the after part was the main hatch and behind it a stationary periscope, standing about thirty inches above the surface of the water when the deck was submerged and only the periscope showing. There was no opening in the forward section of the turret, but the fighting periscope, which could be drawn down into the interior or pushed up to ten feet above the surface when the vessel was completely submerged, extended through the top.

For two hours, turn and turn about, the commander and his second stand watch on the iron grips in the turret, one eye on the periscope, the other on the compass. And this goes on for weeks on end. It is only when they lie for a few hours fifty to seventy-five feet below the surface that they can get some rest. And even then there is no real rest, for one or the other of them must be constantly on duty, testing pipes and gauges, air pressure, water pressure, and a thousand other things.