unsuccessful at sending Eagle to the bottom, Bushnell’s Turtle performed the rudimentary functions required of a submarine vessel. His ideas were a product of the age of enlightenment, yet it would take an industrial revolution to solve the inherent difficulties associated with propulsion, with underwater navigation, with providing an adequate air supply, and with placing an explosive device near, on, or into the targeted ship. The nineteenth century saw several attempts, most notably the sinking of the steam sloop USS Housatonic by the Confederate submarine Hunley in 1864. The Hunley, however, was also lost as a consequence of the attack. Technology had simply not advanced sufficiently by the Civil War to solve those same problems Bushnell faced, but it would not take long before that would happen.
A hundred years after Bushnell launched his Turtle, Lieutenant Francis Barber, an instructor at the Navy Torpedo Station in Newport, Rhode Island, predicted the following: “The science of submarine navigation is likely to be one of great importance in connection with torpedo operations of future wars, both for attacking vessels and for entering harbors …”12 Within a generation, “the science of submarine navigation” became a reality, as did Barber’s “future wars.”
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Warfare soon took a devastating turn, with unprecedented destruction and loss of life on the battlefields of Europe. Aircraft added to the lethality associated with technologies introduced to the world at the onset of the twentieth century. Naval warfare, it would soon be discovered, would be dominated by the submarine. The devastation of World War I, known as The Great War, began with Germany’s advance through Belgium in August, 1914, to face the opposing army of France. At sea, the German submarine U-9 encountered a squadron of British cruisers operating in the North Sea on September 22. Within an hour, U-9 torpedoed and sank the Aboukir, Cressy, and Hogue—to the surprise of both the British and the Germans.
Germany, which had initially considered the submarine only useful for coastal defense, soon embraced this vessel as an effective naval combatant. During the early years of the war, the Allies could do little to disrupt the Unterseeboote, Germany’s infamous U-boat.
Although America remained neutral for two-and-a-half years, preparations were underway for what many considered an inevitable entry into the war. A submarine fleet was being organized, and the Atlantic flotilla soon found a home along the Thames River in Groton, Connecticut. Scientific and industrial leaders had been attempting to convince President Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels that a solution to the submarine problem—a contemporary understatement—which was having a devastating effect on the war, could be found if resources were allocated to put those civilian minds to work. Almost immediately after the United States declared war on April 6, 1917, antisubmarine efforts were underway at experimental stations at Nahant, Massachusetts, and at Fort Trumbull in New London, Connecticut. The monumental efforts of these civilian scientists and engineers supported by naval personnel at home and abroad would rein in U-boat predation on the high seas and hasten the end to a brutal war.
After Armistice, the Naval Experimental Station at New London continued its work until August, 1919, when it was closed. Two decades later, as Germany’s submarines descended into the Atlantic, and Japan’s patrolled the Pacific during World War II, scientists returned to Fort Trumbull. The New London Laboratory of the Columbia University Division of War Research was established to create the next generation of antisubmarine devices. Additional submarine detection technologies were being developed at the Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Soon after Japan surrendered in a formal ceremony aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, the Soviet Union emerged as the next great threat. The Cold War had begun. Experimental work that had been underway in New London and Cambridge throughout World War II was consolidated at Fort Trumbull and continued when the Navy-supported university research transitioned directly into the Navy Department—now officially titled the U.S. Navy Underwater Sound Laboratory, USN/USL. For two World Wars, the focus had been submarine detection; this would remain the mission of the “Sound Lab” in New London with a succession of name changes, for the next half-century.13
I joined the USN/USL staff in 1967, when the world was under threat of a nuclear confrontation. Soviet submarines patrolled the oceans, carrying weapons far beyond the imaginations of those who went before us. The “listening devices” of 1918 had also improved, but the goal was the same: detect, track, and, if the Cold War became a hot war, destroy the enemy. I can remember the nervous anticipation of everyone on board USS Pargo (SSN 650) in 1970 when we detected and then tracked a Charlie-class Soviet submarine. We were using an experimental, passive “listening” sonar system, which would eventually be installed on every U.S. attack submarine.14 All of us on board Pargo felt the same urgency to provide an effective deterrent to an enemy submarine, as did those who preceded us a half century earlier.
This book tells the story, often through the voices of those who were there, of the emergence of the submarine in 1914, when no one, including the Imperial German Navy, anticipated the impact these sleek, submersible vessels would have on the war. By Armistice on November 11, 1918, after a four-year effort to put an end to this efficient predator, the “listeners” had gained the upper hand. In the words of Admiral William Sowden Sims, then commander of all U.S. naval forces in Europe: “A listening device placed on board ship, which would reveal to practiced ears the noise of a submarine at a reasonable distance, and which would give its direction, would come near to solving the most serious problem presented by the German tactics.”15
After the war, Ernst Hashagen, captain of U-62, and someone very familiar with those “German tactics,” described the effect antisubmarine technologies had on German submarine crews:
The last year of the War is the worst. For three long years we have allowed our enemies time to study the nature of the submarine, to pry into its most intimate secrets. They pursue and fight us on the surface, through fog and storm, from the air and in the depths of the sea, on the coasts and in the open…. They listen-in for us, to hear the distant beat of our screws; and feel for us with electric fingers along the sea-bed.16
THE LISTENERS
INTRODUCTION THE WAR TO END ALL WARS
L-class submarines on station at Bantry Bay, Ireland. The “A” has been added to distinguish the American submarines from British L-class boats. Forward of each sail is the barrel of a stowed 3-in/23 caliber retractable deck gun. Visible on AL-10 are three vertical struts on which are mounted hydrophones in a K-tube arrangement. (Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) NH 60252)
They bear, in place of classic names,
Letters and numbers on their skin.
They play their grisly blindfold games
In little boxes made of tin.
—Rudyard Kipling, Sea Warfare, 1916.1
In 1915 and 1916, Rudyard Kipling published a series of articles in British and American newspapers describing the early progress of the naval war, writing of the U-boat as a hidden predator. “One class of German submarines meant for murder off the coasts may use a winding and rabbit-like track between shoals …” while others are sent “off for deep sea assassinations.”2 His writings evoked a sense of the violence and desperation of a war that had taken his eighteen-year-old son along the Western Front on September 27, 1915.
As far as the world was concerned, this had become a global conflict as countries aligned with either
