The submarine, 1776-1918

Naval War College Review, Spring, 2004 by Frank Jr. Uhlig

When, on 11 April 1900, the U.S. Navy bought the Holland, named for its designer, that little submarine joined a fleet consisting of two armored cruisers, six monitors, seven first and second-class battleships, and seventeen each of protected cruisers, gunboats, and torpedo boats. At sixty-four tons the Holland was not the smallest vessel then possessed by the Navy, but at fifty-four feet it was the shortest.

Though many of the ships in the not-very-old and not-very-large U.S. fleet of 1900 would last for years afterward (the Holland would not be among them), all would be obsolete when the "Great War" broke out only fourteen years later. So would all those ships still being built in 1900, and all those yet only concepts--and not only in the U.S. Navy but in all navies. Technology was moving swiftly.

Among those types of warship that made up the American fleet at the beginning of the twentieth century, the submarine alone would survive until the beginning of the twenty-first century. In what size, shape, or any other particular the submarine will make it into the second half of this century, we cannot know, but we can be confident that survive it will.

The submarine would prove itself to be a revolutionary instrument of naval war. But the submarine was not the only such instrument of war to appear at that time. Within less than five years two other instruments of similar import to those concerned with the struggle for mastery of the sea would make their appearance. In 1899 the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated, first to the British and then to the U.S. Navy, the practicality of wireless radio communications both between ships at sea and between ships and shore. No one needed to tell the navies the value of this. In the U.S. Navy alone, by the end of 1904 there were fifty-nine radio sets in use afloat and ashore. During the Russo-Japanese War, which began that year, both sides used radio; in addition, the Russians engaged in communications intelligence. (1)

Meanwhile, in December 1903 two Ohio bicycle manufacturers, Wilbur and Orville Wright, were to show the world that manned, powered, controlled flight in a craft heavier than air was another practical thing. The first use of such a practical thing in war took place in Libya in 1911 during an Italian war against the Ottoman Empire. The first naval use was by the Americans at Vera Cruz, Mexico, in April 1914. (2)

Both electrical communications over a distance and manned flight had had long histories before Marconi and the Wright Brothers demonstrated their achievements. It was in 1844 that Samuel F. B. Morse began to communicate via telegraph between Washington and Baltimore. By then men had been flying--in balloons--for years. The first manned flight, by the Montgolfier brothers, over Paris, took place in 1783. Manned flight it was, but it was barely controlled by those on board, for they were lifted by hot air and driven by the wind. Submarines also underwent a long history of development before John Holland could demonstrate to the U.S. Navy that he had a reliable warship, able at its captain's command to more, steer, shoot, submerge, and surface.

For more than a century before the Holland's time, inventors, not often with naval help, had been trying to develop a practical submarine. One of the earliest such was David Bushnell of Connecticut, who in 1776, before there was a United States, built a balloon-shaped undersea craft, the Turtle, which was driven by a hand-cranked propeller. The craft's one-man volunteer crew, Sergeant Ezra Lee, attacked HMS Eagle, a sixty-four-gun ship of the line then at anchor in New York Harbor. The weapon was a time bomb that Lee was to screw into the ship's bottom. Unfortunately for both Bushnell and Lee, the latter found it impossible to fasten his weapon to the Eagle's bottom. Both the Eagle and the Turtle survived their brief encounter unharmed.

Eighty-eight years later, in 1864, eight Southern volunteers, commanded by a Confederate army officer, all of whom were trying hard to put an end to the United States, used another hand-cranked undersea craft, the cigar-shaped Hunley, to attack the wooden screw sloop USS Housatonic, anchored on blockade duty off Charleston, South Carolina. Their weapon was a spar torpedo, a ninety-pound charge at the end of a long pole jutting forward from the Hunley's bow. Unlike Lee, not only did they sink their intended victim but they sank with it, perishing to a man.

By the end of the nineteenth century several countries, including Spain and France, had built some marginally successful submarines. The designers' chief advances had been to abandon reliance on propulsion by quickly exhausted men in favor of machine-driven propellers, and to replace time bombs and spar torpedoes with the newly developed "fish" torpedo. This weapon was developed by Robert Whitehead, an English inventor working in Trieste, the main seaport of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After being expelled from a tube the torpedo would swim under its own power toward its intended victim, which, upon being struck, presumably would sink.