set the stage for additional forays into the waters between Britain and Germany. On the morning of September 22, Otto Weddigen, in command of U-9 with a crew of four officers and twenty-five enlisted, sent torpedoes into the sides of three British armored cruisers, Aboukir, Cressy, and Hogue, all three sinking within an hour with a loss of over 1400 officers and crew.
The success of a single submarine, and a nearly obsolete one at that, had surprised not only the British, but Germany as well. Maybe the Grand Fleet was not so grand after all. Construction of bigger, faster, better armed submarines would become a priority at Krupp-Germania and other German shipyards. No longer just a vessel designed for coastal defense, the U-boat fleet soon had the capability to spend weeks—even months—at sea, covering thousands of miles. They could now lay mine fields across harbors, undetected. They carried large caliber guns mounted on deck which could engage Allied shipping on the surface, saving their torpedoes for higher value, higher tonnage targets.
A massive engagement between the Grand Fleet and the High Seas Fleet was inevitable, where dreadnaughts, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers on both sides pummeled each other with their massive firepower. This confrontation occurred over two days, May 31 to June 1, 1916, at the Battle of Jutland—known in Germany as the Battle of the Skagerrak. Both sides claimed victory, but ended any further major engagements between the surface fleets of Britain and Germany; future naval operations during the Great War would be defined beneath the sea.4
Britain had depended on the Grand Fleet to deal with warfare on the open ocean, and the Admiralty’s first priority was to mobilize all of its resources—old ships reconditioned; new ships designed and built; manpower recruited. Submarines and the deadly torpedoes they carried, however, soon defined the realities of the twentieth-century, and antisubmarine warfare would also have to become a priority. Yet in 1914, no one really understood the complexity of the submarine problem nor the technology that would be needed to counter the threat.
TORPEDO WAR AND SUBMARINE EXPLOSIONS
I endeavoured for many years to get torpedoes introduced into practice in France, and in England; which, though unsuccessful, gave me the opportunity of making numerous very interesting experiments on a large scale …”5
Robert Fulton published his pamphlet “Torpedo War and Submarine Explosions” in 1810 as another war with England seemed inevitable. Fulton was attempting to convince Congress that his device could be “so arranged as to blow up a vessel which should run against it …”6 He had already been unsuccessful in selling his concept of a submarine, his Nautilus, to the French and English, and had turned to other methods of using underwater explosives. The word “torpedo” was apparently coined by Fulton during the first decade of the nineteenth century. In a September 6, 1807 letter from British Commodore E. W. C. R. Owen, distributed among the Admiralty, Owen included a “Description of the Machine invented by Mr. Robert Fulton for exploding under Ship’s Bottoms and by him called the Torpedo.”7 The term, however, was in reference to what is now referred to as a tethered subsurface mine. The following extracts are from the September 9, 1807 edition of the Connecticut Current:
[T]hese aquatic incendiaries have come forward at the present alarming juncture, and announced a most potent discovery, which is to guarantee our port from the visit of any foreign marauders … a cunning machine shrewdly y’clep’d a Torpedo, by which the stoutest line of battle ship … may be caught napping, and decomposed in a twinkling.8
The War of 1812 was primarily a naval war. There were stories of a submarine built by Silas Clowden Halsey, reportedly used in 1814 against a British warship anchored at the harbor of New London, Connecticut. Hartford’s Samuel Colt, who had proposed the use of electrically triggered underwater mines in the 1840s, drew a sketch of the vessel.9 The American Civil War brought on a flurry of submarine designs, few of which had any impact on naval warfare at the time other than the Confederate submarine Hunley.10 Floating and sub-surface mines, however, became a common defensive technology used by the Confederacy.11 The Hunley carried a device referred to as a “spar torpedo,” an explosive device held at the end of a long pole or spar. That system became a common weapon used on small surface vessels called torpedo-boats.
A self-propelled torpedo would not appear until after the Civil War, initiated during the late 1860s by an English engineer, Robert Whitehead, based on a concept by an Austrian naval officer, Giovanni Luppis. Several countries purchased Whitehead torpedoes, or the manufacturing rights, in the 1870s. By 1875, designs were being considered within the U.S. Navy, specifically at the Naval Torpedo Station in Newport, Rhode Island.
Introductory remarks to a publication titled “Notes on Movable Torpedoes” produced between 1874 and 1875 at the torpedo station defined the prevailing opinion regarding these new weapons. Submarine mines, or what were called “stationary torpedoes,” which proliferated during the Civil War, were considered primarily “for defense of channels against the entry of fleets.” Yet by the decade of the 1870s, these new “Movable or Locomotive Torpedoes to assail ships on the high seas” were becoming a reality.12 In this same publication was an 1873 article by an Austrian officer, Lieutenant J. Lehnert, titled “Torpedo Vessels in Naval Engagements,” in which he predicted the interest, and dread, this new weapon was about to bring to the world:
The gradual and probable introduction of Torpedo vessels into fleets, the general emotion which the appearance of these terrible engines has created, the attention with which seamen of all countries watch the progress of this new arm, now an offensive power, and finally the complete revolution which they will probably produce in naval tactics are sufficient reasons for rendering the study of Torpedoes not only necessary, but attractive to officers of all navies.
Torpedoes carried by vessels constructed for that purpose, and which, discharged in a given direction, retain under water a motion which is inherent in them and thus reach the enemy at considerable distances. This system is known under the name of Whitehead-Lupis [or Fish] Torpedoes.13
Lieutenant Francis M. Barber, instructor at the torpedo station, wrote his “Lecture on the Whitehead Torpedo,” a thorough description of what was known about the torpedo in 1874.14 At that time, the U.S. Navy was considering production of its own torpedo, which Barber described in a section titled “Plans for Fish Torpedo Submitted to Board of Ordnance, June 1st, 1874.” Barber mentioned that the “general idea which was originally intended to control the construction of this proposed fish was to approximate as closely as possible to what was supposed to be the plan of the Whitehead …”15 Barber then added a copy of a letter to Commodore Wm. Jeffers, Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, from Lieutenant Commander W.M. Folger, a naval observer at the Whitehead factory in Fiume, Austria, January 6, 1875. Folger had arrived at the factory two days earlier and met with Whitehead. The worldwide interest was becoming obvious:
The German government has ordered from the Messrs. Whitehead & Co. 100 of the latest improved torpedoes, and had advanced funds for the establishment of a regular torpedo factory…. The French government has ordered 50 … In addition to those already known to the Bureau, the subject is being considered by the Governments of Russia, Denmark, and Belgium.16
It was still premature to see these “fish” torpedoes launched from a submarine, but by the end of the century, John Holland was ready to provide the U.S. Navy with this capability. Other nations were also anxious to enter the new century with at least a small fleet of submarines outfitted with Whitehead torpedoes, and the Holland Torpedo Boat Company had a major influence on these early efforts. The Navy’s first submarine, the USS Holland (SS-1), commissioned in 1900, had a single torpedo tube and carried three torpedoes.17 As Germany quietly prepared for war, the next decade saw major changes in submarine designs and operational capabilities, along with improvements in torpedoes. This became the weapon that brought the U-boat its fame—and infamy.
