Protector interior. Lake’s boats were always designed to provide comfortable accommodations for the crew.
The conning tower, situated above the living quarters, was large enough to accommodate four men, and contained “all sorts of gauges, registers, indicators, means of communication, and facilities for control. The commanding officer, the steersman, and the man at the hydroplane wheel are in constant touch with one another, while automatic indicators advise the steersman and the gunner at the bow torpedo tubes of the proper bearing of the boat.”
With the Protector, Lake had devised an innovative amalgam of his designs and Holland’s. Whether the Protector maneuvered as well or as quickly as Holland boats was questionable—and would become more so—but that Lake had created a more modern boat was not. While again, it might have been coincidence, just after Simon Lake had begun to run test voyages on a submarine he was convinced had overcome any possible objections from the navy and Congress, Montague Lessler claims to have been approached with a bribe offer by Philip Doblin.
Through spring and summer 1903, with the future of the American submarine force very much in question, Lake’s commitment was undiminished. Through allies in Washington, he continued to press for competitive trials of Protector and a Holland boat, convinced that once official Washington saw what his boat could do, appropriations would follow.
Faith in ultimate victory was buttressed by word that the Holland boats were performing unevenly with navy crews. There were breakdowns, engine failures, electrical mishaps, problems with the torpedoes, and a rash of other mishaps that, while not fatal, might certainly undermine Electric Boat’s sway with naval officers and congressmen. The Fulton had experienced its share of malfunctions as well, including an onboard explosion from battery gas as the vessel was entering a harbor in Delaware. Five of the crew, including Arthur MacArthur, were sufficiently bruised to be sent to a local hospital, although all were discharged the next day, when the Fulton resumed its journey to Annapolis.
What Lake failed to appreciate, however, although he of all people should have, is that new technology will always come with imperfections. Prototypes like the Protector—or the Fulton—might minimize performance problems by keeping the design relatively simple, building only to the specifications required for acceptance by the buyer, and then operating the machine under carefully managed conditions. Once circumstances cease to be under the control of the builder, however, problems inevitably arise. The ease with which those problems can be solved, not whether or not they exist, is the determinant of the success of the device.
After months of only positive results, in June 1903, Lake wrote to Navy Secretary William H. Moody to say that the Protector was ready for official testing. While he waited for a reply, he did everything he could to promote his new design. When he heard that President Roosevelt was nearby, aboard the presidential yacht with his family, he offered them a tour of the Protector, an invitation the president accepted. Roosevelt was duly impressed. But Lake’s more significant achievement had been to persuade the navy to send a young lieutenant, John Halligan, to observe the submarine’s test runs. On July 1, Halligan was assigned as a full-time liaison in Bridgeport.
In August, Lake’s perseverance had seemed to bear fruit. The March 1903 appropriation had given the Secretary of the Navy full discretion in the purchase of new submarines. With Halligan’s enthusiastic endorsement, the navy expressed a willingness to hold competitive trials. The assistant secretary even forwarded a draft set of specifications, although the exact details would come later from the Bureau of Construction. There could be no guarantees of sales of course, but the mandatory first step seemed to be in reach.
Ebenezer Hill did everything he could to further Lake’s cause. He requested that the Lake boat be allowed to conduct a mock attack on a surface ship during naval maneuvers in September at Newport, which the navy denied because the government refused to become responsible for those not in its employ or material it did not own. Hill, after noting that he had authority to speak on Lake’s behalf, then offered to have Lake post a bond that would fully indemnify the government in case of accident or damage. This too was declined on the grounds that having “private parties participate in military maneuvers” would be “bad precedent.” Hill then asked if Lake could simply sail Protector to the maneuvers and observe, a request that was granted. As it turned out, however, the maneuvers were rescheduled for Maine and Lake never got to show off his boat.
Electric Boat had also been informed of the decision to hold a competition and announced they would use the Fulton rather than one of submarines the navy had already purchased. Although the stated reason was that none of the other seven boats remained their property, far more likely is that Frost and Spear were unwilling to expose the vulnerabilities of vessels that had been in navy hands in a head-to-head duel.
The tests were scheduled for November 16 in Narragansett Bay, off Newport, Rhode Island, before a naval board of inspection. There would be speed trials, both submerged and awash, maneuverability, diving and surfacing, and torpedo firing. Weeks before, Lake got word that Electric Boat had informed the navy secretary that the Fulton was undergoing a major overhaul and would not be ready in time. Lake at first thought he would have an open field, but when he learned that the board of inspection intended to wait until the Fulton was ready, he dashed off an angry letter to Secretary Moody, demanding that Electric Boat participate in the November tests with one of the boats already in the navy’s possession. He cited Isaac Rice’s testimony in May, in which Rice insisted he would be happy for a competition.3
The head of the board of inspection, Captain Charles J. Train did not demand that a Holland boat be present for the November 16 trials, but rather that the test be conducted for “one competitor even in the absence of another.” Left unanswered was whether or not a brilliant performance by the Protector would result in the cancelation of the pending test for the Fulton and a contract for Simon Lake.
Seizing the opportunity, Lake left Bridgeport three days in advance, sailing the Protector under its own power with a crew of six. On the night of November 16, however, the Protector, running on the surface in high winds, snapped the reverse clutch on one of the engines and the boat was crippled. Ordinarily, Lake would have ridden out a storm by remaining submerged and still until it passed, but that was not an option with the naval board waiting in Newport. With only one engine, Lake had no alternative but to postpone the trial. The new agreed date was January 12, 1904.
While repairing the clutch, Lake realized that, despite the engines’ horsepower, his propellers would not generate the minimum speed required by the navy. He sent a letter to the Navy Department, in which he admitted, “The speed and endurance of the Protector will fall considerably below our original estimate.”4 He requested a variance for the low speed, which he promised to rectify in an additional test. He had also sent a number of letters asking that testing criteria be changed to allow the Protector to demonstrate certain attributes he thought important, such as surface running using both motor and batteries. In each case, Captain Train replied that the navy was confident the criteria already established would provide ample input to allow for a fair judgment.
On January 10, the board members journeyed from Washington to a frigid Narragansett Bay beset by ice floes. They took one look at the icy water and decided no accurate surface speed test would be possible in such conditions. Lake assured them the ice would soon clear and asked that they remain in Newport. Train agreed but only if Lake would sign a letter affirming that the results of any test in which he participated would be final. Although he was informed that Electric Boat had signed a similar declaration, Lake refused. Over Lake’s protests, the board then cancelled the trial and returned to Washington. Lake later claimed that a member of the board, a naval constructor named J. J. Woodward, was an Electric Boat agent, coming just short of accusing him of accepting payoffs. Ebenezer Hill was free with intimations as well. It is difficult, however, to fault
the board for being unwilling to wait around Newport in the freezing cold for an indefinite period until the ice cleared to conduct tests that might well eventually have no meaning.
Lake, once again feeling he had been cheated out of a fair hearing, made another pivot. If he could not sell to the navy, there was always the army. Lake’s associates petitioned Secretary of War William Howard Taft, and Taft dispatched a team of officers from Fort Totten to observe the Protector on a series of test runs. The army, responsible only for the coastline, had different needs than the navy. When the Protector navigated perfectly around and through the ice, on one occasion breaking the crust from underneath, and also demonstrated the ability to lay and cut cables for mines or telephone, the army board recommended the purchase of a series of Lake submarines at $250,000 each. For Lake, this would be a boon, since he was again nearly out of money.
An appropriation was quickly approved by the Senate, but perhaps because a bad taste remained from the Lessler scandal, the bill stalled in the House pending a review by senior officers of both services. In April 1904, the generals and admirals decided unanimously that the navy alone should administer the submarine program. That same month, on April 27, Congress again put the navy in the submarine business, at least in theory, when it authorized the secretary of the navy “to contract for or purchase subsurface or submarine torpedo boats, after they have been fully tested to his satisfaction and found to fulfill all reasonable requirements for submarine warfare.”5 To the $500,000 previously appropriated but unspent, an additional $350,000 was added. Once again, no specific criteria were attached to the appropriation, so the navy could choose whichever design it felt best suited its needs, and from whichever company. But after a barrage of demands, accusations of unfairness, delays, and then failures, Simon Lake had made few friends among the navy brass.
In mid-May, Electric Boat announced that the Fulton was ready for testing. On June 2, the board once more convened at Narragansett Bay, this time free of ice and howling winter winds. Lake and the Protector were expected as well as Fulton, but Lake never showed up, nor did he communicate with the Navy Department to explain his absence. There were rumors Lake had sold the boat, but no one would admit to buying it.
The Fulton was thus tested alone and the trials lasted a week. The conditions might have been less rigorous, but the standards were not. “The tests included running twice over the measured mile course at cruising condition and speed, and three times at full speed, both of these being surface runs. Then three submerged runs were made and three runs awash, with the boat ready to dive at a moment’s notice. On these runs the Fulton made ten dives and a feature of the tests was the rapidity with which she could get under water. One of the observers said that she “dived to a depth of 20 feet in 12 seconds.”6
The Fulton also performed various maneuvers during a week of trials and acquitted itself excellently. “The main feature,” Frank Cable recounted, “was a difficult torpedo attack. We had a target fixed by means of two small boats anchored three hundred feet apart to represent the length of a small warship, and toward it we were to start at a distance of ten miles, running submerged the entire distance, and using only our periscope (the periscope had arrived at last) for observation.* The efficiency of the run was determined by the infrequency with which we exposed our periscope. The two boats lay about a mile eastward of Block Island . . . we had to take our course from the chart and ran the risk of error in direction due to an inaccurate compass. There was a considerable sea, which impeded our making swift observations through the periscope in the briefest possible time required.”7 Cable made his first observation five miles out, but the swells obscured the target. He made his second three miles later, but still could not see the two small boats. Finally, only two miles from the target, Cable saw where to aim. Running submerged, he passed between the two boats.
Other tests involved maneuverability, both on the surface and submerged, running with the periscope theoretically shot away, and remaining submerged for twelve hours. The Fulton passed them all. On June 11, the boat made a “triumphant return to New Suffolk,” having covered the sixty miles from Newport in eight hours.8
The unmitigated success of the trials would be moot, however. In a meeting in Secretary Moody’s office on June 24, the secretary voiced the opinion, backed by counsel, that Congress, in appropriating $850,000 for fiscal year 1905, intended that none of $500,000 for 1904 be spent, but rather be carried over to help fund the larger amount. Moody was due to leave office on July 1, and so intended to leave any decision on submarines to his successor.
The secretary also demanded of Fred Whitney, the Lake Company’s attorney, that he produce evidence of corruption that Lake had all but insisted had impacted the selection process. Whitney, who earlier in his career had been clerk for the naval affairs committee, said he believed there had been “bias” shown for Holland submarines, but that “he knew of no officers who had received any money.” When Moody pressed as to whether this “bias” was based on anything but relative performance, Whitney was forced to admit that neither he nor Lake had any evidence of “anything that approaches or resembles corruption.”9 Ebenezer Hill then attempted to show how Captain Train had prevented the Protector from receiving a fair test, but Moody produced the correspondence from Lake admitting that his boat could not make more then 3.8 knots submerged, an immediate disqualification.
The meeting adjourned with Secretary Moody once more passing all questions of submarine acquisition to his successor, but he added, “I have one thing with which I must deal here today, and I want to repeat my question whether either of you gentlemen have any charges to make against this board,” to which Hill immediately replied, “Leave me out. I have never made any charges.” Whitney also replied, “I have not.”
But still, no funds would be available for submarine construction in the United States for an indefinite period. Foreign governments, on the other hand, might prove to be a good deal more amenable.
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*The Fulton did not use an omniscope, on which Lake held a patent that he would not have licensed, but rather a less efficient, Italian version, whose range of vision was limited, but effective enough when moving straight ahead.
CHAPTER 24
A WARSHIP IN SEARCH OF A WAR
Electric Boat had taken the lead in overseas marketing with its 1901 sale of five Adder-class boats to the British Admiralty, a transaction that had irritated members of the naval affairs committee. The British did not envision the submarine as an offensive weapon, but only as a part of their coastal defenses. Even so, purchasing submarines had proved unpopular among more conservative elements in the Royal Navy. In addition to the widespread view that submarines were a waste of money, as in Napoleon’s time, the very idea of an undersea boat struck many senior officers as dishonorable and a violation of the gentlemanly rules of war. Royal Navy Controller Admiral A. K. Wilson, denounced submarines as “underhanded, unfair, and damned unEnglish,” demanding that surface vessels should “treat all submarines as pirates in wartime . . . and hang all crews.”1
But the Hollands had their supporters as well. When the boats were first sent out on fleet maneuvers, they succeeded in mock torpedo attacks on four warships. Admiral Baron J. A. Fisher, First Sea Lord, wrote, “It is astounding to me, perfectly astounding, how the very best amongst us fail to realize the vast impending revolution in Naval warfare and Naval strategy that the submarine will accomplish.”2
But successes were mixed with all too frequent failures. Part of the problem was that, because construction had been licensed to Vickers, Holland’s design was altered, often not for the better. A British expert who inspected both variations wrote, “One fault in the British ‘Hollands’ [is that] the interiors are filled with pieces of mechanism that might easily be dispensed with. What struck me especially on board the American boats (the author had an opportunity of inspecting several at Long Island in October, 1902) was the wonderful amount of space—or elbow
room—they possessed, which must make a great difference to the comfort of those managing the boat during trials.”3
While the boats generally performed well in sea trials—“A noteworthy feature of the test was her excellent diving propensities, which for three days were put to the severest trials”—there were any number of minor mishaps, most brought on by the testing of an alternative piece of equipment or new operating protocol, especially in the fourth and fifth boats.
How the Hollands fared, however, would soon be of little interest to Electric Boat. Because of the manner in which the licensing contract had been structured, the British could revise the design and build future boats without any obligation to the American company, which they almost immediately proceeded to do.
Rather than continue the licensing agreement, Great Britain commissioned from Vickers what became known as its “A-class” submarines. Thirteen of the one hundred foot-long bastardized Hollands were built between 1902 and 1905, but were beset by design and operating problems far more serious than had been experienced with the original boats.
Going Deep Page 29
