Blackett's War

by Stephen Budiansky

  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 worl
d’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.

  In general, the law permitted a captor to burn or sink a prize and its cargo only if its enemy ownership was beyond doubt; even in that case, the captor had an unambiguous duty first to remove the crew and passengers and to preserve the ship’s papers and other documents for examination by a prize court to validate his action. The London Declaration of 1909, an agreement on the laws of naval war signed by all the major European powers and the United States, reiterated all of these points, in particular the rules respecting the rights of neutrals. Although never formally ratified, the London Declaration for the most part was simply a restatement of the existing admiralty court precedents that constituted the international law of naval war. Notably, while offering one exception to the rule that ships of neutral countries always had to be taken into port for “the determination of all questions concerning the validity of the capture”—Articles 49 and 50 permitted the destruction of neutral vessels that were otherwise subject to capture and condemnation in the case “of exceptional necessity,” if “the safety of the warship” or “the success of the operations in which she is engaged at the time” would be endangered—the declaration underscored the one inviolable principle: “Before the vessel is destroyed all persons on board must be placed in safety.”

  Submarines could hardly take on board “all persons” from a freighter or passenger liner before sinking her with gunfire or torpedoes; nor did they have men enough of their own to spare to place aboard a captured vessel as a prize crew; nor the armament to escort a prize to port and protect it from recapture along the way by an enemy warship.

  But it was the grand strategic ideas of navy men of the early twentieth century that spoke loudest in relegating the submarine to a small, and largely defensive, supporting role. Mahan’s writings on sea power theory had been enormously influential in all major naval powers of the world, and if there was one sacred truth in the gospel according to Mahan, it was that navies existed to defeat an enemy’s navy. Concentrating one’s naval power in a single mighty fleet would force an enemy into a climactic fleet-on-fleet battle that would decisively secure control of the oceans for subsequent operations; meanwhile, the very threat posed by such a concentrated force would compel the enemy to concentrate his forces as well to avoid defeat in detail, thereby leaving his own coasts vulnerable and checking his ability to conduct smaller forays. Commerce raiding was, in this view, a fatal dispersion of effort, or at best an inglorious sideshow to the real action.

  Certainly that was Germany’s conception in the years leading up to 1914. A British diplomat who visited Berlin before the war seeking a diplomatic end to the spiraling naval arms race between the two powers found the Kaiser a devotee of Mahan. Wilhelm II had read the American captain’s book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History and was convinced that German greatness depended on control of the seas. “Germany,” the Kaiser declared in 1900, “must possess a battle fleet of such strength that even for the most powerful naval adversary a war would involve such risks as to make that Power’s own supremacy doubtful.” Since launching its crash naval construction program in 1898, Germany had set more and more ambitious targets as it sought to challenge Britain’s supremacy, eventually reaching a mighty seagoing force of sixty battleships and battle cruisers. The German High Seas Fleet was conceived on pure Mahanian lines: a series of battle squadrons each built around a core of seven or eight of the huge ships attended by flotillas of light cruisers and destroyers. Winston Churchill, shortly after taking office in 1911 as first lord of the Admiralty—the top civilian minister of the navy—warned that the Germans were building a sea force designed for “attack and for fleet action,” not merely for the defense of Germany’s overseas colonies and trade. The Germans, he concluded, were preparing “for a great trial of strength.”16

  In 1901 Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the master architect of the rising imperial fleet, had bluffly declared, “Germany has no need for submarines.”17 It was only in 1906 that the German navy acquired a single submarine for evaluation purposes, the last of the major naval powers to do so. U-1—the “U” stood for Unterseeboot, U-boot for short—was workable if unremarkable in its design. The first German submarines were powered by noisy two-stroke kerosene engines that belched huge plumes of thick white smoke and showers of embers, making them visible from afar day or night. Tall vent stacks mounted on the deck had to be detached and stowed before the boat could dive.

  By 1910 German designers and shipyards had started to catch up with their rivals. From U-19 on, German submarines were equipped with quieter, safer, and more reliable diesel engines. These new boats were also substantially larger, oceangoing vessels, 210 feet long, with four torpedo tubes (two fore and two aft), carrying 100 tons of fuel, giving them a theoretical range of as much as 10,000 miles. But only ten of the diesel-electric U-boats had been completed when war began on August 1, 1914. Overall, Germany’s submarine fleet rema
ined minuscule, numbering just twenty-four, a third as many as Great Britain’s.18

  Convinced that Britain’s Grand Fleet would immediately descend upon the Heligoland Bight for the climactic confrontation foreseen by Mahan’s theories, the German naval staff ordered all of its U-boats into a static defensive line with the start of the war. The U-boats were kept on the surface, moored to buoys, as part of a multilayered defense around the German naval base at Heligoland Island. The plan was for an outer ring of destroyers to launch torpedoes and then fall back, leading the enemy through the line of U-boats, which would submerge and launch their weapons; an inner ring of torpedo boats would then try to further harry and whittle down the enemy before the High Seas Fleet sallied forth to join the battle in earnest.19

  But the British confounded expectations by holding back: in place of the grand climactic battle came anticlimactic stalemate. As early as October 1914 the commander of the German submarine force, Fregattenkapitän Hermann Bauer, chafing at the absurdity of keeping the bulk of his boats tied up to buoys in a circle around Heligoland for a battle that might never come, was urging the potential of the U-boats to strike a devastating blow at British oceangoing commerce. The commander of the High Seas Fleet relayed Bauer’s arguments in a report to the chief of the naval staff, Admiral Hugo von Pohl: “I beg to point out that a campaign of U-boats against commercial traffic on the British coasts will strike the enemy at his weakest spot, and will make it evident to him and his allies that his power at sea is insufficient to protect his imports.”20