SUBMARINES

Greymouth Evening Star, 1 September 1943, Page 7

SUBMARINES

BIRTH OF A MENACE. “Pitt is the greatest fool that has ever existed to encourage a mode of war which we who possess command of the sea do not want, and which, if successful, would deprive us of it.” The speaker was the First Lord of the Admiralty. It was the year 1805. Pitt was Prime Minister, and the subject of the conversation was a thing called a submarine in Which Robert Fulton, the steam-boat pioneer, vzas trying to interest the British Government.

Fulton had offered his invention to Napoleon, who advanced him 10,000 francs to build an experimental model, the Nautilus. It failed to sink any English ships, so Napoleon, who liked results, grew cold towards the idea. Hence Fulton’s trip to England, where, two days after a successful trial of his submarine, news of Trafalgar came through, and what was the need of a “secret weapon” then? The submarine was, and still it, regarded primarily as “The weapon of the weaker Power,” as that First Sea Lord was aware, says a writer in the “Sydney Morning Herald.” Von Bernardi was aware of it, too, when in “Germany and the Next War,” in 1912, he wrote that submarines, mines, and air-power would contribute largely to equalise the difference between the two navies. Jellicoe knew it when he said that the submarines’ “unrestricted war on commerce was the greatest peril which ever threatened the population of this country.” To-day, both these statements still have meaning. But up to the early days of 1915, the attitude of the British Admiralty to the submarine was one of tolerance ... in the beginnings, amused tolerance, and later an annoyed tolerance with a suggestion of “This pest won’t bother us for long.” There was plenty about the first submarines to be amused at, if you liked macabre humour. There was Cornelius van Drebbel’s earliest recorded submarine, in which James 1 is said to have taken a ride down the Thames with the inventor. It was a wooden frame covered with leather, and propelled by 12 sets of oars. There was a “secret formula,” too, for keeping the air pure. After this, embryo submarines followed thick and fast down the years, including one called the Turtle, which tried to “torpedo” a British man-of-war in New York Harbour in 1776, an attempt which failed because they couldn’t fasten the charge of gunpowder to the solid copper bottom of the Eagle. THE FIRST VICTIM. The first warship to be sunk by a submarine was a sloop in the American Civil War. The submarine’s name was David, a testy craft which had already drowned three crews, and which now, in achieving immortality by exploding a “torpedo” against the bows of the Housatonic, fouled in the resultant wreckage, and carried down with her the fourth crew as well.

Notice that “torpedo” here, just meant a charge of explosive attached to a pole carried in front of the submarine, then held against the side of the ship, and exploded. Some means of “lengthening” the pole had to be provided before submarines would be useful for more than one sinking. In the same year that the Housatonic went down, Whitehead in England was patenting the very means necessary, the “fish torpedo,” which, in general principles, was the torpedo we know to-day. This led to fast hit-and-run torpedo boats, but since the effective range of the first torpedoes was only about 600 yards, this' was dangerous for the hit-and-run-ners. „ , So Thorsten Nordenfeldt, Swedish machine-gun pioneer,' argued that if you had a submarine torpedo boat you could sneak up on ''’■our prev, closely, invisibly, and loose your torpedo at your leisure. Developing the plans of an English minister, the Rev. G. W. Garrett, Nordenfeldt. in 1885, demonstrated in Sweden, before officials of every European Power, a “successful” submarine. This first model he sold to Greece. And then, naturally enough, Greece’s enemy, Turkey, was persuaded to buy Nordenfeldt 11 and Nordenfelt 11LSteam was the motive power, and they could stay down for nine hours, and travel under water for 50 miles

at a time. They then had to ascend to get up steam again. The Turks took them over full of confidence, but soon found that trials are deceptive guarantees. The crews claimed that to move about in them under water set up a see-saw motion, and that a Blondin was needed to preserve an even keel. The first and only occasion on which they fired off a torpedo, Nordenfeld 111 almost stood on her beam-ends, and then plunged to the bottom sternfirst. They got her up again safely, but the crews promptly resigned. Those submarines rusted away in the docks at Constantinople. Meanwhile, the British Admiralty remained sceptical, while John P. Holland in America and others in France went ahead experimenting. Accumulators, the sine qua non of a modern submarine, were perfected towards the end of the century, and thereafter the way was clear. By 1900, the submarine had reached the stage more or less as we know it today. , T . . Britain now ordered six from Vickers, who had secured the rights to manufacture the American “Hollands” in England, but up to and after, the beginning of the Great War, submarines remained the Cinderellas of the Navy. When 1914 came, the submarine had never yet been tested in active service. To us to-day, knowing what was to follow, there is an ominous calm about the academic discussions as to 'the submarine’s possibilities that cropped up during the first six months of the war. Even after the first warship, the Pathfinder, was torpedoed by U2l on September 5, 1914, and three old cruisers (with over 1000 drowned) went down a few weeks later, it was still being written that “the submarine is losing prestige fast ... it is a negligible quantity in naval warfare.” WORLD WAR LOSSES The first merchant vessel to fall a victim was the Glitra, of Leith, captured by Ul7 in October—the crew politely ordered to the boats—the seacocks opened. No sign of “frightfulness” yet, but a hint of it in the torpedoing of the Admiral Ganteaume laden with Belgian refugees, a few weeks later . . . and in the torpedoing of the first battleship, the Formidable, a 15,000-tonner, struck out of the night on January 1, 1915, and only 71 saved out of a crew of 680. This lying-in-wait by night was something new, and introduced a new noteof warning, But opinion still prevailed that the submarine was not yet a menace. The famous German declaration m uniarv, 1915, that the waters round British Isles were henceforth to

be regarded as a war region in which all ships, Allied and neutral, rtiight be sunk on sight, was at first received with derision. The day after the preliminary announcement, when four merchantmen were reported as submarine victims in one communique, bringing the total to 12 since the war began, “The Times” said: .‘Two swallows do not make a Summeb, and one submarine, however ably handled, cannot enforce a blockade of British ports nor interfere effectively with the flow of British trade.” Even though there turned out to be more than one submarine, “The Times” was proved right eventually . . . if it took three and a-hal£.years of unremitting sub-hounding and the loss of 5,408 Allied ships to do it. And now “The Times” will be proved, right again.