Cyril Field

The Evolution of the Submarine and Submarine Mine

Thomas. They write here one Corneilius'[44] son
Hath made the Hollanders an invisible eel
To swim the Haven at Dunkirk and sink all
The shipping there.
Pennyboy. But how is't done?
Cymbal. I'll show you, Sir.
It's an automa, runs under water
With a snug nose, and has a nimble tail
Made like an auger, with which tail she wriggles
Betwixt the costs[45] of a ship and sinks it straight.
Pennyboy. A most brave device
To murder their flat bottoms!
The Staple of News. Ben Jonson.

"Pitt", said the famous Admiral Lord St. Vincent, in the course of an interview with the American inventor Fulton, "is the greatest fool that ever existed, to encourage a mode of war which they who commanded the seas did not want, and which, if successful, would deprive them of it." Truer words were never spoken. Fulton had invented floating mines or torpedoes—"infernals" as they were then called—and even an ingenious form of submarine boat. The French, to whom he first offered them, to their honour be it spoken, would have nothing to do with them even though hard put to it to hold their own against the British fleet. Admiral DecrÈs reported that Fulton's inventions were "fit only for Algerines and pirates". The Maritime Prefect at Brest refused to allow him to attack an English frigate off the coast with his submarine, "because this type of warfare carries with it the objection that those who undertake it and those against whom it is made will all be lost. This cannot be called a gallant death", he said. Finally, Admiral PlÉville le Pelly, the Minister of War, stated that it appeared to him to be "impossible to serve a Commission for Belligerency to men who employ such a method of destroying the fleet of an enemy".

It is a sad reflection that after a century of much-boasted "advance in civilization", we none of us appear to have any chivalric scruples of this kind. But, in spite of our tremendous ascendancy at sea, Pitt—being a politician and not a naval officer—was, as St. Vincent said, "fool" enough to listen to Fulton when, repulsed from France, he took the name of Francis and brought his schemes over to this country. Experiments were made in the Downs, and Lieutenant Robinson of the Royal Marines carried out a demonstration before Pitt with some of Fulton's torpedoes, or "carcasses" as they were called, by blowing up a brig anchored off Walmer Castle.

The famous Sir Sydney Smith was an aider and abettor of Fulton, though a naval officer, but his attitude may have been due to a desire to stand well with Mr. Pitt rather than to a conviction that the adoption of his proposed methods of warfare would be of real service to the navy. What doubtless attracted both men was the hope of destroying the French invasion flotillas at Boulogne and in the Basque Roads, which our fleet could not get at. Attempts were made, but ended in dismal failures. The public generally was dead against the employment of what were regarded as dastardly and underhand apparatus, and so were most naval officers. An officer, in a diary made at the time, describes[46] "six copper submarine carcasses, some to hold 540 pounds of powder and others 405 pounds" that were sent on board his ship for the purpose of being employed against the enemy's vessels. He says further that "Johnstone the smuggler laid one down near the gates of the new harbour before Flushing surrendered, but we never heard of any damage being done by it. As for our part we never tried them—indeed, our Admiral said it was not a fair proceeding."

The idea of attacking an enemy under water was, however, by no means a novel one. Attempts in this direction have been made almost from time immemorial. Swimming under water and diving seem to have been often resorted to in order to cut ships' cables, and even for the purpose of boring holes in their bottoms; but the latter would appear to be rather an impossible performance.[47] The Romans are said to have had a corps or society of divers known as Urinatores. Then there are legends of diving-apparatus employed by Alexander the Great, who himself is frequently depicted in mediÆval manuscripts being lowered to the bottom of the sea in a glass barrel.

In manuscripts and woodcuts of the Middle Ages there are to be found several pictures representing men in a species of diver's costume, supposed to have been made of leather, with air-tubes leading to the surface of the water, where they are buoyed by bladders. Some, instead of tubes, are provided with flasks of air. Personally I should doubt whether such dresses ever had any actual existence. I fancy they are originally derived from a species of swimming-jacket or life-belt which is depicted in a fourteenth-century manuscript in the Imperial Historical Museum at Vienna.[48]

diagram of diver going after old gun old gun, diver has leather mask or bag reaching to the surface for air Diver Salving a Gun
(From a print of 1613)

A comparison between the two sketches over page will, I think, go far to prove me right, since the so-called "Diver's Helmet" is taken from Vegetius' De Re Militari, not published before 1511. The earliest picture of a diving-helmet of this kind I have been able to find is in a German work published in 1500: both are therefore of a later date than the "Swimming Jacket". This "jacket" was intended to be worn as follows: The lower rectangular part was to be placed at the back, the oval portion to the front of the body. When the swimmer wished to remain at the surface he inflated his jacket by means of the tube; when he required to dive out of sight he would let the air out. Look at the position of the buckles and straps in the two drawings and you will see that there is a strong presumption that the later artist deliberately made the alteration in order to support his bogus picture of a diving-helmet.

drawing of jacket Swimming Jacket (from a fourteenth-century MS.)

drawing of helmet Diver's Helmet from Vegetius (sixteenth century)

Observe the close similarity between these two nominally very different articles. The shape of the earlier drawing has suggested a helmet to the illustrator of De Re Militari by Vegetius, and he has therefore done away with two straps and buckles and altered the positions of the other two. It is not clear how they are to be fastened together; but the use of the straps and buckles on the jacket is apparent.

The earliest mention of a submarine boat occurs in "Salman[49] and Morolf", a German poem of 1190. This was, of course, an imaginary one, like the famous Nautilus in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues under the Sea; but in the days of "good Queen Bess" one William Bourne, a naval gunner, published a detailed description of how to make "a shippe or boate that may goe under the water unto the bottome, and so to come up againe at your pleasure". The "device", as he calls it, had some quite practical points.[50]

In the following reign a Dutchman, Corneilius Van Drebbel by name, seems actually to have built a submarine vessel, which is stated to have gone under water from Westminster to Greenwich, and with which James I was so pleased that he not only had a duplicate one built, sending it as a present to the Tsar of Russia, but so far overcame his constitutional timidity as to adventure his precious and royal person in a submarine trip in the Dutchman's invention. Then followed many suggestions for submarines, but between Van Drebbel's boat in 1620 and Fulton's in 1800 probably not more than half a dozen were actually constructed.

Van Drebbel was probably responsible for the "water mines, water petards, forged cases to be shot with fireworks, and boates to goe under water" which Buckingham took with his fleet on the ill-managed and inglorious expedition to La Rochelle in 1626. The water-petards or floating mines were of a very feeble description. The following is a French contemporary account of what they were like.

"The composition of these petards was of Lattin (i.e. Brass) filled with powder, laid upon certain pieces of timber, crosse which there was a spring, which touching any vessel would flie off and give fire to the petards, but only one took effect, which did no great hurt, only cast water into the ship, and that was all, the rest being taken by the King's boats."

About 1771 David Bushnell, a native of Maine, built a curious little submarine not unlike a walnut in shape, if you imagine a walnut floating with the point downwards. It was propelled by a hand-turned screw and carried a case of powder provided with a clockwork apparatus for exploding it at the required moment. There was an ingenious arrangement for screwing this mine to the bottom of a ship, and by its means the navigator of Bushnell's submarine very nearly succeeded in blowing up H.M.S. Eagle when lying in the Hudson River in charge of a convoy of transports bringing troops for the campaign against the revolted American colonists. Other attempts were made by the Americans to blow up our men-of-war in the course of the war, but without success. In the war with the United States (1812-14) the Americans again attacked our ships in a similar manner. The Ramillies in particular seems to have been singled out for these attempts. She was attacked both by a submarine boat and by various explosive contrivances. The British retaliated by embarking in her 100 American prisoners and notifying their presence on board to the United States Government. They also bombarded the town of Stonington for being "conspicuous in preparing and harbouring torpedoes".

Between this time and the latter portion of the century innumerable submarine boats were designed and a considerable number of experimental ones actually built. A few of them promised very well, though most were failures, the principal reason of their non-success being the want of a suitable means of propulsion. Every conceivable method was attempted, but it was not till the advent of the internal-combustion engine that the submarine became a really practical proposition. Space forbids mention of even a tithe of these inventions, but among the most notable was that invented by the German Bauer, between 1850 and 1860, when he made a futile attempt to blow up a Danish man-of-war. Then there were the Davids, used by the Confederates in the Civil War in America. Most of these drowned their crews. One, however, succeeded in torpedoing the Federal sloop Housatonic, but accompanied her to "Davy Jones's locker". A Swede, Mr. Nordenfeldt, built about half a dozen submarines between 1880 and 1890, one for this country, one—his first experimental one—which was eventually purchased by Greece, two for the Turkish Government, and, lastly, two or three for the German Admiralty. All of these may be regarded as experimental craft, but they are noteworthy as being the first submarines to be equipped with Whitehead torpedoes, and certainly marked a step forward in the science of underwater navigation.

The French navy was the first to tackle the problem of submarine navigation with any real enthusiasm. French inventors had been responsible for a very large proportion of the designs for submarines, which had continually increased in numbers as the nineteenth century progressed. After extensive experiments with the Gymnote (launched 1888), Gustave ZÈdÉ (1893), and Morse (1899), France set about the construction of a regular submarine flotilla of considerable size, launching nearly thirty boats between 1900 and 1903. Other Powers, except perhaps Russia, held back from the new departure, and it is not impossible that it would have been politic for the British Government to have maintained that attitude, in accordance with the views of Lord St. Vincent, and to have announced that it would refuse to recognize the crews of submarines as legitimate belligerents. To have done this would not have been to enunciate any new theory, for from time immemorial this was the attitude adopted by all navies towards the crews of fire-ships, and that it was later on accepted to apply to those who made use of torpedoes and floating mines is evident by the following quotation from the naval officer's diary which has already been referred to.

He states that on the occasion of the attack on the French ships in the Basque Roads by Lord Cochrane, when explosion-ships as well as fire-ships were used, volunteers were called for to take them in, and "no one was compelled to go, as the enemy by the laws of war can put anyone to death who is taken belonging to a fire-ship". Had we refrained from following the example of the French most probably the Germans would have done so also, first because the French submarines sustained many accidents and did not appear very likely, to experts such as the German naval officers, to become a very valuable arm; and, secondly, because in naval matters they have always tried to follow our lead. But the newspaper "experts" and other laymen in this country to whom the idea of submarine navigation was most captivating as something mysterious, new, and strange, with great potentialities, not only for warfare but for "copy", clamoured in the Press for submarines. The Admiralty eventually ordered four "Holland" boats for "experimental purposes".

John P. Holland was an American inventor, and his first boat, built in 1875, "was a tiny affair with just enough room in her for one man to sit down amidships and work the pedals that turned the propeller. It was only 16 feet long, 2 feet deep, and 20 inches wide, and it is probably the smallest submarine ever constructed. The 'crew' had to wear a diving-dress, and drew air from reservoirs at either end of the vessel. Five little torpedoes were carried, which could be put out through the dome and fired from a distance by electricity."[51] Between this time and 1902 Holland was responsible for six more submarines and the design for another which was never built. The earlier ones were small, but the last two or three of considerable size.

The Holland VIII deserves some description, as she may be regarded as the prototype of the British earlier submarine vessels from which nearly all of our larger and later types have been evolved. "She was a porpoise-like vessel 65 feet long, nearly 11 feet in diameter, and of 75 tons displacement. Her single propeller was driven by a gas-engine when at the surface and by an electric motor when below, both being placed on the same shaft and connected or disconnected as required. She carried a torpedo-tube, a tube for throwing aerial torpedoes, and a submarine gun, the latter being placed aft and inclined upwards, as was the aerial torpedo-tube forward".[52] This vessel, after very considerable alterations had been made in her, was re-named the Holland IX and purchased for the United States navy.

Observe the Victory in the background. If Nelson were standing on the poop with his glass, what would he think and say of these "microbes of the sea"?

The First Lord of the Admiralty, in reply to a question asked in the House of Parliament in 1900, had replied "that the Admiralty had not designed a submarine boat, and did not propose to design one, because such a boat would be the weapon of an inferior power". Whether he was right or wrong, the statement was a straightforward and an understandable one. Possibly it struck the First Lord as being too straightforward for a politician, so he at once began to "hedge", and qualified what he had said by adding: "But if it could be produced as a working article, the Power which possessed such an article would no longer be an inferior but a superior Power". It is hard to reconcile the two statements; for if a submarine was an unworkable proposition it would be no good to any Power, strong or weak.

However, a couple of years later, as I have already mentioned, the Admiralty determined to acquire a few submarine boats, nominally with the view of finding out how their use by an enemy could be rendered abortive. First one and then four other practically similar ones, to be built on Holland's designs, were ordered from Vickers of Barrow-in-Furness. Their displacement—submerged—was 120 tons. It must be remembered that a submarine's surface displacement is always less than when she has filled her tanks to sink her deeper in the water. They were 63 feet 4 inches long and 11 feet 9 inches wide at their greatest beam; steamed from 8 to 10 knots above and 5 to 7 knots below water, carried a crew of seven men, and had a single torpedo-tube. Many experiments were carried out with these little vessels, the net result being that series after series of larger and larger submarines were constructed, each batch an improvement on the preceding one. Thus we had, after the first five "Hollands", the A, B, C, D, and E classes, and are now turning out the "F" class. The description of our latest submarines must be postponed till the chapter dealing with the fighting-ships of to-day; but it may be noted that up to 1914 all had been improved "Hollands". That is to say, that while some other naval powers, notably Germany, were building their submarines more and more on the lines of surface vessels with flat tops or decks, we remained faithful to the "porpoise" or "fat cigar" type, only modifying them by increasing their size and length, and by adding to the length of the narrow superstructure, which formed a deck and eventually a cut-water for use at the surface, but which was independent of the actual watertight hull or body of the vessel, since the water was allowed free access below the platform.

It is time now to give some description of the evolution of that terrible instrument of destruction, the Submarine Mine, under which head may be included both those that are placed below water and those that float or drift at the surface. The utilization of explosives for the attack of shipping has been attempted by belligerents for centuries, but I am not aware that they have ever been employed against peaceful traders and fishermen before the Great War. The Germans may attempt to excuse themselves by alleging that some merchantmen carry guns for defence; but that has been the universal practice for centuries, and no merchantmen were more heavily armed than the old trading-ships of the Hansa League. Such ships were entirely different from the privateers, provided with Letters of Marque which entitled them to attack and capture enemy vessels if they could. On principles[177]
[178] of self-defence, merchantmen were always entitled to beat off an attack if they could, and such action exposed other merchantmen to no reprisals. It is only of late years, when civilization was supposed to be so far advanced as to render the sinking of merchantmen "on their lawful occasions" an impossibility, that they ceased to carry guns.

Probably the first inventor of a floating mine—in the shape of an explosion-ship, as distinguished from a fire-ship—was an Italian engineer, who in contemporary accounts is variously referred to as "Gianibelli", "Gedevilo", "Genebelli", "Gienily", "Jenabel", and "Innibel", who, by means of a couple of small vessels filled with powder, which was built over with tons of bricks, gravestones, millstones, and "everything heavy, hooked, and sharp which 'this wicked witty man thought most damageable'", blew to absolute "smithereens" the great bridge which the Duke of Parma had built across the Scheldt in order to complete the blockade of Antwerp in 1585. It is rather interesting to note in passing that Gianibelli seems to have spent some time in this country. He had a good deal to do with the building of Tilbury Fort, and brought forward extended proposals for the reopening of Rye Harbour, which had become silted up. This he does not seem to have effected satisfactorily, and payment of £821, 9s., which he demanded of the Mayor and jurats of that famous town, was refused. He may have had something to do with the preparation of the fire-ships sent against the Spanish Armada in Calais Roads. At any rate the Spaniards on board thought so, for they, considering them "to be of those kind of dreadful Powder-Ships, which that famous Enginier Frederick Innibel had devised not long before in the River of Skeld", cried "the Fire Antwerp", cut their cables, and put to sea in the confusion that proved their ruin.

We have already mentioned the attempts made by the British at La Rochelle with floating mines and devices of that kind, and, coming to the time of William III, we find "Honest Benbow" employing an explosion-ship, evidently modelled on those of Gianibelli, against the town of St. Malo. It did a lot of damage and unroofed a great number of houses, but effected nothing of any military value. One Meesters, a Dutchman, was the leading spirit in this kind of warfare. Whether he was any connection of Van Drebbel and Dr. Kuffler I cannot say, but he induced the Government to use his explosion-ships, or "machines" as they were termed, probably with the view of emulating these two nautical Guy Fawkeses who had succeeded in getting good incomes and considerable sums of money out of the British Government for their ideas and inventions, although, as far as can be ascertained, none of them had proved of the slightest value or efficiency. Explosion-ships or machines became for a time recognized units in the British navy, and were employed against Dunkirk, Dieppe, and various French ports without much effect. "At the former, the machine-ships, as they are called, did nothing but blow up themselves, and the credit of their inventor, as some say; but he being come hither, complains he was not seconded with ships as he ought to have been."[53] Very possibly he was not, for this class of warfare did not meet with much appreciation in the Royal Navy. On the other hand, the naval commanders complained that Mr. Meesters "had not his machine-ships in readiness when they had a fair opportunity of wind and weather to attack the forts at Dunkirk, and that he had trifled all the time and put the Government to great expense only to enrich himself, when the whole matter was impracticable". It is not surprising, therefore, that we hear no more of explosion-ships for a very long time.[54] The attempts made against the British ships by the Americans, and those we ourselves carried out with indifferent success against the French Invasion flotillas, have been already referred to. Though this form of attack was not again employed by the navy for many years, the following description in MÜller's Elements of the Science of War (1811) shows that something like a floating mine was used in armies for the destruction of bridges. It consisted of a chest fitted with a rudder and filled with powder, and fired by means of two gun-locks, which were set in action by a stick protruding from the water and attached to their triggers.

In 1844 some attention was attracted to an alleged invention of a Captain Warner for blowing up ships. The John of Gaunt, a sailing-ship, was taken in tow by a steamer and blown up off Brighton in the presence of an immense crowd of spectators; but as the inventor wanted the Admiralty to pay him £400,000 for it before he showed them what it was like, his secret naturally remained a secret. It would seem to have been merely a mine floating just beneath the surface of the water, with some arrangement to explode it on contact. The Crimean War gave us some little experience of underwater mines, for several were employed by the Russians in the Baltic and the Black Sea. They were feeble affairs, and did no damage worth mentioning. One was fished up and exploded on board one of our ships, but no one was seriously hurt. Some were made of copper, others of wood fastened together like the staves of a barrel. But the rumour of these mines, which were stated to contain 700 pounds of powder and to explode either on contact or by what was then called a "galvanic current"—that is to say, electricity—caused the allied French and British fleets in the Baltic to exercise great care in their movements. As at the present day, a system of trawling for them was instituted, and no less than fifty were picked up off Cronstadt in ten days.

"The angling for this dangerous kind of prey was thus managed: two boats took between them a long rope, which was sunk by heavy weights to a depth of ten or twelve feet, and held suspended at that depth by empty casks as floats; the boats then separated as far as the rope would allow, and rowed onwards at right angles to the length of the rope; it was a species of trawl fishing in which the agitation of the floats showed that a prey had been caught, which prey was then hauled up carefully."[55] Mines were also fished up off Kertch and other Black Sea ports, showing that the Russians had gone in extensively for submarine defence, and only failed in causing us serious loss on account of the primitive character of the mines and the precautions which we took against them. On our part we had some idea of using a so-called submarine invented by Mr. Scott Russell, a noted engineer; but it seems to have been merely an elongated diving-bell which could not carry out a satisfactory trial. Two attempts were made by Boatswain John Shepherd, R.N., to blow up Russian ships in the harbour of Sebastopol, but apparently without success. He went in alone in a punt, taking with him some kind of an explosive apparatus, and for his "bold and gallantly executed" exploits he received the Victoria Cross.

At the end of the 'fifties we were engaged in war with China for a considerable period, and the wily Celestials tried all sorts of dodges to blow up our ships by means of floating mines, or "infernal machines" as they were still called. They were ingenious apparatus, some of them. The following extracts from a letter written by an officer on board the Encounter, off Canton, give a good idea of the means employed. Three attempts were made to blow her up.

"The first was a sampan", he writes, "towed by a canoe on 24th December, 1856, and captured close under the bow by our second gig rowing guard. The fuse was lighted in the bamboo tubes at the side. The second attempt was on the morning of 5th January, 1857, about 2.30. Two rafts, moored together, with about 20 fathom of line buoyed up, with hooks to catch cables or anything else, and, on the wires touching the ship's side, to break by the little lead weight the lighted fuse on the top of the bamboo, which communicated with the powder. These were lighted and all ready, but fortunately observed by our guard-boat and towed clear of ship. Being only a raft it was just awash, and in each caisson at least 17 cwt. of gunpowder in open tubs and jars. The raft itself was made of 6-inch plank well bound together, and caulked. The third attempt was on the morning of the 7th January, 1857, at 4.30. A pair of vessels in the shape of a can-buoy with a flag on the top, about 8 inches long; the fuse, with a tin box[183]
[184] containing punk[56] over the fuse, then a cover with lighted match on top; this had a string to it, which, when pulled, drew out the centre partition and communicated the fire to the punk, to allow the fellows who swam off with them towards the ship to make their escape; but they got frightened at some stir with the boats, and by accident one went off with a fearful explosion on the starboard bow, about 60 yards, and the other, being deserted, floated down on our booms. One of the men was caught and brought on board here, and had his brains blown out at the port gangway. The buoy-shaped vessel was capable of holding about 10 cwt. of gunpowder." The Encounter was afterwards attacked by two floating mines coupled together by a length of rope, each containing half a ton of powder. They were towed by a Chinaman in a small boat, who was shot by the look-outs and the mines destroyed. The Niger, however, had a small junk exploded alongside her which had, on the top of the powder in her hold, a cargo of the most evil-smelling filth that could be found even in a Chinese city. No damage was done to her hull, but she was absolutely smothered with this poisonous muck, and for years afterwards the crew of the Niger was subject to the annoyance of being reminded of this malodorous incident, for whenever a man belonging to another ship met a Niger, he made a point of holding his nose!

It remained for the mechanical ingenuity of the Americans to establish the submarine mine as a recognized naval weapon. In the long war between North and South a considerable use was made of improvised submarine mines, principally by the Southerners in trying to prevent the ships of the big Federal Fleet from penetrating their estuaries and harbours. Space forbids description in detail of these contrivances, but the sketches on p. 185 will enable you to form some idea of their construction. The results obtained induced the British Admiralty to carry out a series of experiments in 1865. The old Terpsichore was blown up by a "torpedo-shell" charged with 75 pounds of powder, and very much higher powered mines were tried in various ways. Other European nations could not afford to overlook this form of warfare, and it was largely owing to the use of defensive submarine mines that the Germans kept the powerful French fleet from attacking their coast in the war of 1870. Ten years later mines and their appliances were part of the equipment of most large war-vessels, which carried two kinds, one holding 250, the other 500 pounds of gun-cotton. They were perfectly safe to handle, although fully charged, since the gun-cotton was kept wet and could only be exploded by inserting a small canister of dry gun-cotton as a primer. They were intended to be used for countermining and blowing up an enemy's mine defences, or for defending the ship at anchor. For harbour defence at home and in our overseas dominions a special branch of the Royal Engineers was formed, known as the Submarine Miners, who had charge of everything connected with this part of our national defences; but with the advent of the submarine this duty was assumed by the Royal Navy.