Home : Heath Elliot Johnmeyer, United States Navy :

By The End Of The 1930's

No less a figure than Robert Fulton picked up where Bushnell left off. In the late 1790's he was in Paris drafting plans for his Nautilus, a “diving boat” which, when launched in 1800, was able to submerge to twenty-five feet and could keep het three-man crew alive under water for more than four hours. He offered his invention to Napoleon, and the emperor was interested, but only on the stiff condition that Fulton find and sink a British warship. After a luckless season spent cruising the French coast, the inventor crossed the Channel and tried to sell his submarine to the English. The decisive victory at Trafalgar put an end to any interest the admiralty might have had in experimental naval devices, and in 1806 Fulton gave up and went home to work on the steamboat that would make him famous.

How The Turtle Worked In Bushnell’s Own Words Hull: The external shape [resembled] two tortoise sheik of equal size joined together… . The entrance was elliptical … so small as barely to admit a person … Hatch: A brass cover, resembling a hat with its brim and crown, shut water-tight … and was hinged to turn over sidewise when opened.… There were … several small glass windows in the crown, with covers to secure them. Ballast: The vessel is chiefly ballasted with lead [making it] so stiff that there was no danger of oversetting. About two hundred pounds … would be let down forty or fifty feet below the vessel; this enabled the operator to rise instantly to the surface … in case of accident. Propulsion: [The boat moved horizontally] by an oar … formed upon the principle of the screw, fixed in the forepart of the vessel … turned by hand or foot … [and moved vertically by] an oar placed near the top of the vessel. Steering: [A] rudder, hung to the hinder part of the vessel might be used for rowing forward. Its tiller was … at the operator’s right hand, fixed at a right angle to an iron rod which passed through the side of the vessel…. Raising and depressing the … tiller turned the rudder … Submerging: [Depressing a brass foot-valve admitted water into the bottom of the vessel and] two brass forcing pumps … at each hand [ejected it] … the water rose [in the depth gauge] … bearing the cork, with its phosphorous, on its surface … [so] the depth of the vessel under water … [could be] ascertained by graduated lines. Air: The inside [contained] air sufficient to support [the operator] thirty minutes without receiving fresh air. There were two air pipes in the crown. A ventilator within drew fresh air through one … and discharged it into the lower part of the vessel; [this] expelled impure air through the other… . Both … shut themselves off whenever the water rose near their tops … and opened themselves immediately after they rose above the water. Weapon: [In] the forepart of the brim of the crown was a … wood-screw … by pushing the wood-screw up against the bottom of a ship and turning it at the same time, it would enter the planks; when the wood-screw was firmly fixed, it would be cast off by unscrewing the rod, which fastened it upon the top of [its] tube.… [A] powder magazine made of two pieces of oak timber, large enough when hollowed out to contain 150 pounds of powder … was secured in its place by a screw turned by the operator. A strong piece of rope [bound] the magazine to the wood-screw… . Within the magazine was an apparatus, constructed to run any proposed length of time under 12 hours; when it had run out its time, it unpinioned a strong lock resembling a gun-lock, which gave fire to the powder. This apparatus was so pinioned that it could not possibly move till, by casting off the magazine … it was set in motion.

The idea of the submarine lay fallow until the Civil War when both North and South looked to the old experiments and tried to improve on them. The Union navy produced The Intelligent Whale, a craft whose sole virtue lay in her name, while the South fashioned a twenty-five-foot-long cylinder out of boiler iron and christened it the H. L. Hunley after its chief backer. Powered by eight sailors turning a crank, the Hunley made four miles an hour in the smooth waters of Mobile Bay and could remain submerged for more than two hours.

She was shipped over to Charleston in hopes of driving away the Union fleet from beleaguered Fort Sumter, but she sank during trials in the harbor, killing her crew. She was raised and a new crew recruited; again she foundered. Hunley himself came down from Mobile, took command, and died with yet another crew. Incredibly, the Confederate Navy got more volunteers for what was now known as the “Peripatetic Coffin,” and on the night of February 17, 1864, the jinxed boat set out against the Union sloop-of-war Housatonic. Seconds after Federal lookouts spotted her coming at them, decks awash, the sloop exploded and went down almost immediately. Nearly a century after Bushnell went out to fight, a submarine had at last sunk a ship. Even so, the Hunley’s luck hadn’t changed; she followed her victim to the bottom.

It was not the Hunley’s first and last combat cruise that led to the next stage in submarine development, but the clash of the ironclads Monitor and Merrimac. Seeing in that battle an augury of the death of the wooden warship, and convinced that England would soon have an iron navy of devastating power, a young Irish patriot named John Holland began to plan a vessel that could stand against the future fleet of his enemy. When he emigrated to America in 1872, Holland tried to interest the Navy in an undersea warship. Making no headway, he turned to the Fenian Society, and these Anglophobes financed his “Boat No. 1,” a fourteen-foot ram impressive enough to draw more funds from its sponsors. In 1881 Holland launched in the Hudson River the thirty-one-foot Fenian Ram. Powered by an internal combustion engine, she performed superbly. The Fenians were delighted, but shortly afterward the society began to fall apart, leaving Holland to face years of frustration and setbacks seeking Navy contracts. Finally he undertook to build the fifty-three-foot Holland at his own expense. She could make seven knots submerged, had a cruising range of fifteen hundred miles, and like most of the submarines that followed her, she was powered by batteries when underwater and by internal combustion on the surface. Despite highly successful trials, it took three years for the Navy to buy her. “The Navy,” Holland said, “does not like submarines because there’s no deck to strut on.”

Nevertheless, some regular Navy men paid attention. After watching the Holland go through her paces, Admiral Dewey decided that if the Spanish “had had two of these things at Manila, I could never have held it with the squadron I had.” As the small fleet started to grow, it attracted a cadre of men who were anxious to prove the worth of these complex, dank, malodorous, and dangerous craft.

By the outbreak of World War I, America had forty-nine submarines, but they took small part in the naval campaign. The high point came when the L-2 encountered a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland. Before the Americans could open fire, however, the enemy obligingly exploded and sank.

The United States submarine service rusted between the wars. The inaugural genius that had produced the device seemed vitiated, and although by the end of the 1930's the powerful “fleet” boats were replacing their smaller predecessors, too much of the service, in the stark appraisal of the naval historian Fletcher Pratt, consisted of “small, poorly armed vessels—and these used with little imagination.” How they would perform in a war was anybody’s guess.

Diving Into the Past

A brief history of undersea warfare begins in 1578 when .William Borne sketches the first sub design, which features ballast tanks that can be filled or emptied to rise or sink. Though never realized, his central idea is the same used by modern submarines.

In 1775, David Bushnell builds the Turtle, a human-powered sub with a crew of one. It’s meant to screw bombs onto British warships, but has the distinct disadvantage of not actually working. In 1863, the H.L. Hunley, a Confederate hand-cranked sub, is built in Mobile, Alabama. It sinks twice, killing 13, before its final crew of eight also dies in the first successful sub attack, against the USS Housatonic.

From 1914–1918, during WWI, 274 German U-boats sink 6,000-plus allied ships, establishing the sub as an instrumental weapon. By war’s end 182 of the subs will be lost. From 1939–45, the Battle of the Atlantic pits Germany’s U-boats against allied surface vessels and convoys. Glub glub.

In 1954, the United States launches the world’s first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus, which can operate underwater indefinitely. In 1958 the sub becomes the first ship to cross the North Pole. And in 1960, America kicks off a new, dangerous era—and some bitchin’ Bond movies—when it equips subs with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.

A Soviet November-class nuclear sub, in 1968, scares the hell out of the U.S. Navy after successfully tailing a high-speed task force. This inspires the U.S. to develop the fast-attack Los Angeles–class subs. In 1974, the CIA launches a “deep-ocean mineral recovery” mission…to salvage Soviet sub K-129, which sank in 1968. The project fails when the sub falls apart and sinks back to the bottom.

The U.S., Britain, Canada, and Norway, in 1981, launch an 83-ship exercise, attempting to elude Soviet surveillance systems. Secret purpose: to test if a high-level mole is selling the Soviets our secrets. In 1985, the FBI nails John Walker for selling codes that allow Russia to pinpoint every U.S. sub. Is every guy with that name a traitor or what?

In 1989, a fire on the Soviet nuke sub Komsomolets leads to its sinking off Norway, killing 42. Fish-gobbling Nords become paranoid about radioactive herring. The Russian attack sub Kursk sinks in the Barents Sea—all hands lost, in 2000. It was uncovered that an experimental torpedo probably exploded. In 2004, the Seawolf-class Jimmy Carter is christened. Though its namesake is a certified mama’s boy, he is also the only U.S. president badass enough to be a submarine-qualified commander.

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