Blackett's War (4 page)

The first of these hand-cranked, barely submersibles to carry out a successful attack on an enemy warship was the Confederate
H. L. Hunley
in the American Civil War, but at a terrible cost to her own crewmen. Thirteen men were killed in initial training mishaps, the men drowning or suffocating when the boat twice sank to the bottom of Charleston harbor. Shortly after her third set of volunteers managed to attach and detonate an explosive mine that sent the Union steamship
Housatonic
to the bottom on February 17, 1864, the
Hunley
sank for the third and last time, perhaps when the oxygen inside the crew compartment was exhausted. All eight men on board died.

But in the thirty-six years that Bauer’s
Plongeur
lay in the mud beneath Kiel harbor, everything changed: the modern submarine was born. Much of the credit went to another man whom it would have been easy to mistake for just another crank. John P. Holland was an Irish schoolteacher and music instructor with a high school education, poor eyesight, frail health, and improbable dreams of building both a flying machine and a submarine. In 1873, aged thirty-two, he took passage by steerage to America. His two brothers, who had joined the Irish independence movement, had preceded him, fleeing the British authorities. In February 1875, now teaching at a parochial school in Paterson, New Jersey, Holland sent the U.S. Navy Department a plan for a one-man, pedal-powered submarine. The navy dismissed his design as impractical.

If the navy wasn’t interested, it was exactly the kind of idea to appeal to the militant fringe of Irish Americans who since the 1860s had been hatching increasingly wild and daring schemes to strike British interests around the world in the cause of Irish independence. A few hundred members of the Fenian Brotherhood, a secret society founded in New York City in 1857, had launched a comic-opera “invasion” of British Canada at the end of the American Civil War with the idea of holding the territory hostage in exchange for Irish freedom; the U.S. government in the end paid their train fare home in return for their promise to invade no more foreign countries from American soil. More serious was the raid carried out by the Fenians on the British penal colony at Freemantle, Australia, in the summer of 1876; the arrival in New York on August 19, 1876, of six Irish political prisoners freed in that coup—the men had all been sentenced to penal servitude for life—made headlines around the world.
⁸

Over the next four years the Clan na Gael, the organization that had since largely succeeded the Fenian Brotherhood, collected more than $90,000 in
contributions to its “Skirmishing Fund,” intended to support a campaign of terror against the British. It was at this time that Holland, probably through his militant brother Michael, made contact with the fund’s trustees. In early 1877 at Coney Island he demonstrated a small working model of a powered submarine. The Fenians agreed to support his experiments, and just over a year later, on June 6, 1878, the 14-foot-long
Holland No. 1
, its balky engine temporarily powered by a jury-rigged steam line run from an accompanying launch, set out from its dock on the Passaic River, ran along the surface at 3½ knots, dove to 12 feet, then dove again and stayed down an hour before resurfacing. The impressed Irish patriots promptly offered Holland a further $20,000 to construct a full-size version that might be capable of striking an actual blow against British tyranny.

Despite efforts to keep the construction of the new boat a secret, word of Holland’s experiments spread quickly as soon as he began test runs in the Morris Canal Basin, on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, in June 1881. A reporter from the
New York Sun
showed up soon thereafter, tried and failed to persuade Holland to give him a story about the submarine, then went ahead and wrote his story the next day anyway. Among other things he inventively asserted that the vessel was called the
Fenian Ram
. The name, woefully inaccurate but unimpeachable as publicity, stuck.

The whole enterprise was ludicrous: a self-taught inventor, shadowy revolutionaries, a secret war chest, incoherent conspiracies. Except that Holland had, quite simply, invented the modern submarine there on the shores of the Hudson. His new boat was powered by a 17-horsepower petroleum engine that drove the screw as well as two compressors that supplied compressed air to keep the balance tanks trimmed; by partially blowing out the water in the tanks, small changes in the boat’s weight as fuel was expended and projectiles fired could be compensated for. The problem of longitudinal stability—the tendency of a submarine underwater to rock back and forth along its length like a seesaw—had bedeviled all earlier inventors and would continue to plague Holland’s rival designers even for years to come. Holland ingeniously solved it by maintaining a fixed center of gravity and positive buoyancy: centrally located seawater ballast tanks together with compressed air reservoirs in the bow and stern stabilized the boat. Instead of relying on ballast to make the boat sink on an even keel like a lead weight (or, worse, employing awkward and not very effective contrivances like vertically projecting screws to propel the boat up and down), Holland’s design used the dynamic force of the boat’s forward motion, acting on diving
planes at the stern, to drive it underwater even while preserving a small positive buoyancy. Being able to dive and surface “like a porpoise” in this fashion, Holland explained, allowed for quick dives to evade an enemy and also kept the boat maneuverable underwater, instead of wallowing like a waterlogged drum. It was the principle of all successful submarines since.

The boat was equipped with an air-powered gun that could fire a 100-pound charge of dynamite 50 yards underwater or 300 yards through the air. The
Fenian Ram
made 9 miles an hour on the surface, and probably almost as much submerged with its engine breathing a supply of stored compressed air. “There is scarcely anything required of a good submarine boat that this one did not do well enough, or fairly well,” Holland later wrote.
⁹
It was not an idle boast: in its essentials—propulsion, balance, weaponry—the
Fenian Ram
had all the working ingredients of a true submarine.

Meanwhile, the Fenians were falling out among themselves. There were accusations of misuse of the Skirmishing Fund and demands for accounting from some discontented members, with others objecting that so much had been spent on this speculative “salt water enterprise” at all. Fenian leader John Devoy was accused in a front-page article in a rival New York Irish newspaper of disrespecting “the intent of the donors” to the fund who were expecting more immediate and visible results. (Devoy shot back, “England always gets her dirty work done among Irishmen by ardent ‘patriots’ who want value for their money and ten cents worth of revolution every week, or an Englishman killed every once in a while, and the breed is with us yet.”)
¹⁰
In November 1883, with a court case pending in New York that threatened to tie up the fund’s assets, a few of the Fenian leaders decided to save their investment. Armed with a pass bearing Holland’s forged signature, they entered the docks at the Canal Basin and towed the
Ram
off into the night to New Haven, Connecticut. There Holland’s invention fell quickly into dereliction. The Fenians tried a few times to take her out under her own power but were so inept that the harbormaster declared the boat a menace to navigation and forbid any more trials. The boat was then moved up the Mill River and stored in a lumber shed at a brass foundry owned by one of the Fenians; her engine was later stripped to power a forge at the foundry. In 1916 the
Fenian Ram
was carted back to New York City and exhibited at Madison Square Garden to raise money for victims of the Irish Easter Week rebellion earlier that year, her only actual service in the cause of Irish independence.
¹¹

Holland was furious over the theft of the boat (“I’ll let her rot on their
hands,” he declared) but the experience he had gained from $60,000 worth of the Fenians’ support, as well as the ensuing publicity he had garnered, at last attracted the U.S. Navy’s attention. Lieutenant William W. Kimball, who had followed press reports of Holland’s work, came to New York, took him to dinner, and listened raptly as Holland explained the principles of stability, dynamic diving, and maneuverability behind his design. Kimball was promptly sold, and spent the next two decades wrangling with the navy bureaucracy and Washington politics as he tried to get the navy to acquire its first submarine. “Give me six Holland submarine boats, the officers and crews to be selected by me, and I will pledge my life to stand off the entire British flying squadron ten miles from Sandy Hook without any aid from our fleet,” Kimball declared at one hearing before the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs in 1896. Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, the grand old man of sea power strategy, added his support in a letter to the committee chairman, stating that in his view the submarine boat would be “a decisive factor in defending our coasts” in any future conflict.
¹²

Holland added two final refinements to the design that the U.S. Navy would eventually acquire. First, an auxiliary electric motor, powered by a battery of sixty wet cells, now provided the power to propel the submarine while submerged. The batteries could be recharged by clutching the electric motor to run backward, thus acting as a generator, when the boat was surfaced and its drive shaft was being turned by the boat’s 45-horsepower gasoline engine.

The other new feature was a single torpedo tube that could fire a self-running, or “locomotive,” torpedo. The modern torpedo had its genesis in 1864 when a British engineer named Robert Whitehead, who was manager of a small factory in the port town of Fiume in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Rijeka, Croatia), was approached by an Austrian naval officer with the basic idea. By 1868 Whitehead had perfected a mechanism to keep the torpedo running at a preset depth: a pendulum automatically kept the torpedo on an even keel by adjusting a tail fin to swing up or down if the nose pitched down or up; a hydrostatic valve, actuated on one side by the external water pressure and on the other by a spring adjusted to a preset tension, was similarly linked to the fin to make the torpedo rise or fall if it deviated from a predetermined depth. A chamber of compressed air drove a motor that spun a propeller, and a pistol on the nose set off a charge of 100 pounds of guncotton on impact with a target. Early models had a range of 300 yards and traveled at 6 knots; by 1900, after the British government
had bought an interest in Whitehead’s invention and a series of improved designs were developed, torpedoes were routinely achieving speeds of 30 knots and ranges of 800 yards or more.
¹³

Deployed at first on small fast warships—torpedo boats—the weapons caused serious concern from the late 1870s on for their potential threat to the battle fleets of the world’s great navies; other fast warships known at first as torpedo boat destroyers, and later simply
destroyers
, were developed to counter them.
¹⁴
The idea of marrying the torpedo to the submarine took no great leap of imagination.

On April 11, 1900, the U.S. government issued payment of $150,000 and took official delivery of the
Holland VI
, which would become the U.S. Navy’s
SS-1;
within a few months orders for seven more improved “Hollandtype” boats were issued. The improved models followed Holland’s basic plan but were bigger and more powerful, 64 feet long and equipped with a 180-horsepower engine. Over the next six years Holland’s Electric Boat Company licensed foreign rights to Britain, Russia, the Netherlands, and Japan. The first submarines of all the world’s major navies—save only Germany’s—would be built to Holland’s design.

HOLLAND ONCE DISDAINFULLY REMARKED
that naval officers didn’t like submarines “because there is no deck to strut on.” Yet even the submarine’s most enthusiastic supporters acknowledged that they could not imagine it ever having more than a distinctly limited role in naval operations. Above all, the submarine would be a
defensive
weapon, they believed. In his testimony to the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, Kimball had melodramatically offered to stake his life defending New York harbor: it was no coincidence he had invoked that scenario. The submarine’s primary function, in his view, would be to hold the first line of coast defenses, just beyond the range of shore guns. Submarines might also be useful, he told the committee, in harassing and driving off a blockading squadron, carrying communications through hostile lines, clearing minefields, and guarding channels and other narrow waterways against a fleet attempting to enter them.
¹⁵

The last thing that any naval strategists contemplated for the submarine was that it would be a commerce raider. There were unshakable technical, legal, and strategic reasons for that conclusion. To cruise effectively against an enemy’s trade required substantial range and endurance, qualities the
submarine seemed unlikely ever to possess. Capturing enemy merchant ships in wartime was a perfectly legitimate practice under the established rules of international law, but again submarines were remarkably ill-suited to the particulars.

The rules for taking prizes at sea were grounded in precedents of admiralty courts going back centuries, more recently affirmed by a series of international conventions. The nuances of admiralty law were sufficiently complex to keep lawyers busy, but the basic principles for what constituted a legal capture, and the procedures a captor had to follow to ensure the legality of his actions, were universally recognized and uncontroversial. Warships of a belligerent power could stop, board, and search any merchant ship they encountered on the high seas; ships or goods found to be owned by enemy nationals could be claimed as prizes, as could neutral vessels transporting arms or other “contraband of war” to an enemy port. But every capture was subject to a proceeding in the capturing country’s admiralty courts upon their return. Showing an often surprisingly fierce independence, admiralty courts rarely hesitated to disallow improper captures, even awarding damages to a ship’s owner, when the letter of the law had not been followed.