War Under the Waves: A History of Submarines

By Fred Warshofsky

War Under the Waves, first published in 1962, is a non-technical overview of the history of the military submarine. Beginning with the Turtle of the American Revolutionary War, the Hunley of the Civil War, and continuing on to famous World War One and Two submarines (such as the USS Growler and USS Harder), War Under the Waves provides a look at the crews and their subs as they engaged the enemy and helped make the submarine one of the essential tools of naval warfare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The War Vault
• Release date: Oct 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9791222017501

Book preview

Introduction

The submarine – that silent, deadly undersea raider – has proved itself to be one of the most efficient tactical weapons ever invented. Both World Wars attest to this.

The history of the submarine, however, goes back far beyond modern times. In the fourth century B.C., Alexander the Great, ruler of Macedonia and conqueror of what was then the known world, had ordered the construction of a glass barrel. When it was ready he entered and had himself lowered into the sea. The great conqueror swiftly realized the potential of his submarine, and according to Aristotle, used similar vessels to repel a fleet that was attempting to lift the siege of Tyre.

Alexander’s brilliant use of the submarine, although recorded by the Greeks and inscribed in Persian folklore, failed to attract the attention of the Romans; and the submarine, as a weapon, was not used again in warfare. Civilizations rose and fell, the Dark Ages swept across Europe, and it was not until the Renaissance that the submarine again made an appearance.

Leonardo da Vinci, the Florentine artist, architect and scientist, conceived the plans for an underwater warship. So terrible were his visions of the destruction the submarine could cause, that he suppressed his plans. War, he reasoned, was horrible enough.

Again, the submarine disappeared from human consciousness. About one hundred years after the death of Leonardo, a strange Dutchman named Cornelius van Drebbel arrived in England. He cut a comical figure at the court of King James the First with his weird talk of an Eel Boat that could prowl beneath the surface of the sea. But King James heeded the words of Mother Shipton, a prophetess, who cryptically predicted: Underwater men shall walk, shall ride, shall sleep, shall talk.

Van Drebbel was allowed to pursue his experiments on the Thames River. In 1620, his Eel Boat – constructed of wood, covered with oil-soaked strips of leather, and propelled by oars – was completed. King James was so delighted with the strange craft that he reportedly took a short voyage under the surface of the Thames.

But if the Eel Boat was little more than a royal oddity, the submarine had not long to wait before it was to become a fearful weapon of war. It was in 1775 that an American inventor named David Bushnell offered the struggling colonies a means of destroying the British Fleet.

Sergeant Ezra Lee, of General Samuel H. Parsons’ Colonial Army, goggled in amazement at the barrel-like contraption before him. You expect to sink the British fleet with this, he asked incredulously of the slight, shy-looking inventor who stood beside him.

The Turtle, replied David Bushnell, is a submersible. In it you can go underwater right up to a British ship, plant a charge of gunpowder against the hull, and blow it to eternity!

Lee, a heavily muscled man with the springing movements of an athlete, circled Bushnell's weird-looking invention. He nodded his head several times, leaned over and rapped the curving oak sides, and finally stepped once again in front of the inventor. She might work at that, he said. If you will teach me to operate the water machine, I will be a willing pupil.

It was late spring, 1776, and the War of Independence was not going well. The ragged Colonial Army was being driven back from New York; General Sir William Howe was over running Long Island, and his brother, Admiral Lord Richard Howe, sat with his fleet astride New York harbor. This mighty British fleet had already closed most of the colonial ports and had driven the American ships from the sea. Nothing, it seemed, could challenge the British. Then General Samuel Parsons heard of an eccentric thirty-five-year-old Connecticut inventor, just graduated from Yale, who had been experimenting with underwater explosions and had developed some form of water machine that would travel beneath the surface. Parsons had enough of a nautical background to realize that such a machine, if it really worked, could play havoc with the British fleet.

The General's initial sight of the world's first combat submarine could hardly have been called inspiring. The Turtle was the most ungainly looking vessel ever to touch water. Only seven feet high, four feet long and three feet thick it resembled nothing so much as an egg or a clam standing on end. The hull was of oaken planks, curved like barrel staves and calked and tarred at the joints. The interior was just large enough to hold one man and enough air to keep him alive for thirty minutes.

At her stern was a small rudder controlled from the inside by a lever which ran through a crude and leaky stuffing box. On the bow was a flat, single-blade propeller which would pull the submarine ahead at a speed of two knots when the operator vigorously turned a crank handle inside. But the Turtle, as it was called for its lack of speed, was far ahead of its time, and its ballast system was a work of sheer genius. The principles which Bushnell developed almost two centuries ago are similar to those used even in today's nuclear submarines. He described the system for Thomas Jefferson:

"The vessel was chiefly ballasted with lead, fixed to its bottom.... The Vessel with all its appendages, and the operator, was of sufficient weight to settle very low in the water. About two hundred pounds of lead at the bottom for ballast, could be let down forty or fifty feet below the Vessel. This enabled the operator to rise instantly to the surface of the water in case of accident.

When the operator would descend he placed his foot upon the top of a brass valve, depressing it, by which he opened a large aperture in the bottom of the Vessel, through which the water entered at his pleasure. When he had admitted a sufficient quantity, he descended very gradually; if he admitted too much, he ejected as much as was necessary to obtain an equilibrium, by the two brass forcing pumps, which were placed at each hand. Whenever the Vessel leaked or he would ascend to the surface, he also made use of the forcing pumps. When the skillful operator had obtained an equilibrium, he could row upward or downward, or continue at any particular depth with an oar, placed near the top of the vessel, formed upon the principle of the Screw, the axis of the oar entering the Vessel; by turning the oar one way he raised the Vessel, by turning it the other way he depressed it.

Bushnell and his brother had laboriously tested the Turtle on the Connecticut River, and convinced that it would work, the inventor set out to develop weapons for it. In his last year at Yale, 1775, Bushnell came up with something he called a torpedo— actually a maneuverable mine. He fashioned a large metal box, with one side concave so it would fit the outside of the Turtle's stern, just above the rudder. This was held in place by a locking device that could be tripped from inside the submarine. The torpedo held 130 pounds of gunpowder, a fuse and timer. It was attached by a short length of strong line to an auger about a foot long that projected above the Turtle’s top.

All of Bushnell's ingenious planning culminated in this auger. The idea was for the operator of the submarine to dive beneath an enemy ship, rise snug against its hull, and drive the auger bit into the enemy planking. Once the auger had taken hold, he would release the gunpowder torpedo, which automatically started the timer, and crank furiously away from the scene. The torpedo, of course, would remain attached by the line to the auger, which in turn would be embedded in the victim’s hull. The subsequent explosion would blow a huge hole in the enemy ship and sink it.

The tiny submarine had other refinements too. In its small conning tower were glass ports the size of silver dollars, through which the operator could see as he cranked his way along the surface. There were also two ingenious snorkel tubes, almost exactly like the ones skin divers use today. On the surface the operator could breathe through them, and when the Turtle submerged, the tubes were closed automatically by float valves. Finally, there were crude navigational instruments including a compass and a depth gauge.

Bushnell's fantastic mind had equipped the tiny submarine with every conceivable device. The only thing lacking was the most important essential of all – an operator. The inventor himself could not operate his craft on a raid. He was a frail man with none of the burly power needed to crank the vessel through its maneuvers and without the endurance needed to operate on very little air. His brother, who had worked with him on the tests, had fallen ill, and there was no one to whom David Bushnell could turn. General Parsons solved the problem with a call for volunteers for an extremely hazardous undertaking.

The call turned up Ezra Lee of Lyme, Connecticut, a man brawny enough to row, crank, pull and twist the many levers, valves and oars of the Turtle. Lee was in his early twenties, a man brave enough to enter a seagoing coffin – for, once he was inside, the hatch was bolted and sealed from the outside. Lee could not get out by himself, nor was there any guarantee that a bit of floating debris might not break in one of the tiny ports, or set off the torpedo. Further, Sergeant Lee understood machinery and was able to grasp the operating principles of the Turtle quite swiftly.

The summer sped by as Bushnell taught Lee to operate the water machine. Each day the sergeant-turned-sailor would take the ungainly craft out on the Connecticut River and practice submerging and surfacing, going forward, and releasing the torpedo. Lee made endless runs of varying distances and depths, and as he grew more familiar with his submarine, he began to point out deficiencies. The crank for the forward propeller works fine, he noted on one occasion, except when I try to increase speed. Then she starts to leak badly.

Bushnell painstakingly designed a new stuffing box to run the shaft through. Another time Lee returned from a practice run and reported: She tips too easily, my weight is perhaps not distributed properly. Can we try moving the seat back a few inches?

Then, toward the end of summer, orders finally came from General Washington's headquarters. The water machine from Connecticut was to be brought to New York for an attack on the British fleet. The Turtle was hoisted dripping from the water and placed on top of a heavy-timbered wagon, looking for all the world like an oversized wine cask being drawn to market. With two teams of farm horses drawing the heavily laden wagon, and a tarpaulin draped over the top to keep her hidden from Tory spies, the Turtle reached Manhattan safely.

A final test run was made in the Hudson River, and then Lee and Bushnell sat and waited for the right moment. At last, late in August, there came a night with no moon. At the foot of Whitehall Stairs – near the Battery, at the tip of Manhattan Island — a small group of officers and men from Washington's Army huddled near the water. Bobbing beneath them was an oversized oaken barrel surrounded by a cluster of whaleboats.

Where, inquired one of the officers, is the water machine? I see only a large barrel.

That is it, at your feet, snapped General Parsons who, along with General Israel Putnam, was representing George Washington at what was to be the first submarine attack in all history. Parsons then turned to the man who was America's first submarine captain. Ready, Sergeant Lee?

Aye, sir, and God grant I may give the British lion an earache with a bit of Yankee thunder.

Unconsciously every head turned to look out over the harbor. There lay the sixty-four-gun frigate H.M.S. Eagle, her tall masts and furled sails jutting over the humping blackness of Staten Island. The Eagle, surrounded by other ships of the line, was Lord Howe's flagship and the insolent symbol of the powerful British fleet that still ruled the seas.

Lee turned back to Parsons. I'll be off now, sir, he said. God go with you, replied the General.

The husky sergeant stepped lightly across the tethered longboats and up to the Turtle. He grasped the brass collar on top of the hatch and swung himself up and into the tiny submarine. For a moment he sat in the gloom of the interior, mentally recalling where each lever and crank was fitted. Then he popped up again and turned to the young officer in charge of the two whaleboats that were to tow his tiny craft about a mile out into the bay. How runs the tide, he asked.

Almost at the ebb, came a reply from one of the boats. She lacks but one glass to the turning. By then you should be in the middle of the Redcoat fleet.

Then we'd best haul away now, said Lee, thinking of the meticulous timetable Bushnell had laid down for the attack. The plan was to have the Turtle approach her objective while the tide in the Upper Bay was slack. After the attack, the swift current would be utilized to carry the submarine back to Whitehall Stairs, and thus conserve as much of Lee's strength as possible.

With a slight squeak of