V.

SUBMARINES.

The submarine as anything of the nature of a practical arm made its first appearance as a “submarine torpedo boat,” useful merely for harbour defence. As such it was eagerly embraced by the French Navy, and had a considerable vogue therein, besides being a commonplace in the United States long before the British Admiralty accepted it as serious in a way.

As a matter of fact, till the invention of the periscope enabled it to see where it was going when submerged, the submarine was little if anything but a paper menace. The periscope altered all this.

The first submarines for the British Navy figured in the 1901–2 Estimates. Five copies of the American _Holland_ were laid down at Barrow, the first being launched in October, 1901. These boats were of 120 tons submerged displacement, and used merely as instructional or experimental craft almost as soon as completed.

[Illustration: SUBMARINES LEAVING PORTSMOUTH HARBOUR.]

They were followed immediately by the “A” class, totalling thirteen boats in all. Displacement submerged, 207 tons. Those numbered from five to thirteen were given sixteen cylinder surface motors of 550 horse-power in place of the 450 horse-power twelve cylinder ones of the earlier boats. In 1904 A1 was lost with all hands under tragic circumstances off Spithead, being run down by a merchant steamer. This disaster led to the installation of double periscopes in later types. A3 was lost off Spithead in 1912, being run down by the _Hazard_, very near where A1 was lost.

The B class which followed numbered eleven boats, of which B1 was originally known as A14. The remaining B class belong to the 1904–05 Estimates. The submerged displacement in these rises to 313 tons, and the surface speed to thirteen knots, instead of eleven and a half, though, owing to improved lines, the horse-power was little increased.

New boats, completed in 1906 and later, though generally identical with the B class, were known as the C class, and totalled thirty-eight altogether. One, C11, was lost at sea from a collision.

In 1907 the earliest boat of a new type (D Class) was put in hand. Displacing 600 tons submerged, she practically doubled her predecessors. Her surface speed rose to sixteen knots with 1,200 horse-power. Three instead of two torpedo tubes were fitted, also wireless telegraphy was experimentally adopted in her. She herself was never any great success, but the rest of the type were far more successful.

By the end of 1911 eight boats of the D class had been launched. It was originally intended to build a total of nineteen of this class, but meanwhile an improved boat of the E type was evolved. The E class are 177ft. long, with a submerged displacement of 800 tons or thereabouts, and four 21-inch tubes. They are fitted with wireless. Their special feature, however, is the fitting of guns, as a regular and integral part of the design.

The first submarine to mount a gun was D4, in which a special 12-pounder was experimentally mounted, so that it could be housed when the boat was submerged; for later boats two guns were decided on.

The E class were followed by an F class--and a variety of other boats, most of which have been completed since the war began and concerning which it is obviously undesirable to say anything whatever.

Guns for submarines were expected to appear sooner than they actually did. At an early stage it was foreseen that, once radii developed, submarines were likely enough to find themselves in contact with hostile submarines and to need something to attack them with. The original idea of the submarine as “the weapon of the weaker Power” soon went the same way as did a similar idea about torpedo boats at their first inception.

In torpedo-boats it was at once self-evident that, whatever the value of the torpedo boat, the stronger Power was able to build far more than the weaker, and to annihilate accordingly.

For a time the submarine seemed to defy this law. It was fatuously hoped that “submarines cannot injure hostile submarines”; and that the “torpedo boat is the answer to the torpedo boat” would not have as sequel “the submarine is the answer to the submarine.”

[Illustration:

_Photo_] [_Stephen Crabb. Southsea._

SUBMARINE E 2.]

It may well be in the womb of the future that submarines to-morrow, or perhaps to-day, may be what the ironclad was yesterday or the day before. The submarine battleship may appear and render obsolete the “Dreadnought” of to-day! But nothing can alter the cardinal fact that, given equal efficiency, the Power with most such craft must win, and that, given an inferior efficiency, defeat may be looked for as the natural corollary on lines entirely unconnected with whether the “capital ship” is of a type that floats only or one that can be submerged at will.

Tactics may alter, the means may alter, and the most obvious instruments of naval strategy may do the same. But nothing whatever can affect the bedrock truth that, given equal efficiency, “numbers only can annihilate.” Given the “equal efficiency” nothing else really matters!

If the creators of weapons keep themselves to date, if those who supply them see to it that the supply is sufficient, if those who work the weapons are efficient, the part of those in chief control resolves itself into little save achieving victory with the minimum of loss. The day may yet arrive when someone discovers that a good deal of what has been written about the genius of various famous admirals of the past is verbiage rather than fact, that they were a part of one great whole, rather than the sole controlling organisation--at any rate, once battle was engaged.

In the future, if the submarine “Dreadnought” becomes an actuality, this is probably likely to be so to a greater extent than anything which obtained in the past. So far as we can to-day conceive of such future fights, much of the battle, at any rate, will entail more or less blind work under the surface, individual enemies engaging one another, the leader compelled to rely more and more upon the efficiency of his individual units and less and less upon his own tactical combinations.

Of course things may turn out otherwise. Inventions yet undreamed of may come to the fore, and the nether waters present no greater obstacle to regular operations than the surface does to-day. Plunging may offer no salvation to a beaten enemy. We can only make idle speculations now.

Yet, however things may shape, success or failure, victory or defeat must assuredly depend in a great measure on the makers of the weapons and the efficiency of those who work them--the tools, on the reliability of which every admiral must trust for victory.

When this war started there were roughly thirty German submarines to something like seventy British. At the moment of writing (June, 1915) at least twenty of those German submarines have gone below. How and why cannot be published: but they have gone under in one way or another. Means of defeating submarines are being developed.

Where big ships are concerned the principle means in use are high speed and a zig-zag course, the combination making it difficult for the relatively slow submarine to arrive at the correct striking point.

In this connection it has to be remembered that the vision of a submarine is limited; and so that though the range of modern torpedoes is something like five miles, the actual effective range of a submarine’s torpedoes is nearer a mile or less.

So much is this the case that German submarines are fitted with a torpedo which has a range of only a thousand yards or thereabouts, the reduced range being compensated for by a greatly increased charge. This charge, 420 lbs. of very high explosive instead of the usual charge of 300 lbs. or less, accounts for the devastating effects of German torpedoes fired from submarines.

It is merely a phase in submarine warfare. At present a submarine dare not fire too near its victim lest it be involved in the common destruction. That, however, is likely enough to be guarded against in future construction, and the prospects of the early future is one of more importance for submarines rather than less. They are bound to become larger and larger, their radius increasing with the size. Coincidently with this we may expect to see the birth of small submarines designed to attack big ones: some new variant of the swordfish and the whale.