The Story of Our Submarines — Background and Themes

These were experiments by the Admiralty in building boats of foreign design, drawings being used of the Laurenti and Fiat firms. After these boats had been tried and their best points copied into our own designs, the standard British ideas were reverted to for war construction. The building of these boats served its purpose in giving us an insight into the lines upon which other nations were working, but foreign designs were not continued owing to the better performances of our own boats.

The G and J class were patrol boats--the G's being of 975 ton submerged displacement, and so larger and with more beam than the E boats; the J's were 19-knot boats of 1820 tons submerged, and marked a great advance in the big-submarine type. The year 1915 gave us the addition of a number of E class, while the G's began to join up with the Flotillas in November of that year. The first J boat commissioned in the spring of 1916.

The H class were small patrol boats of American design--a design later enlarged and improved in England. The L boats were enlarged and improved E's, and are probably the finest patrol submarines in existence.

The 4th August 1916 saw the commissioning of a boat which was a revolution in submarine design. This was the first K boat. This class was designed for the expected Fleet action; their qualities were to be--that they should have several knots in hand over the speed of the Battle Fleet, that they should be seaworthy and able to cruise with the Fleet, and that they should have the necessary submarine qualities to enable them to deal with the High Sea Fleet when it should be met. These qualities they have; but it is regretted that the enemy gave them no chance of trying their luck in action. They were used on patrol to keep them from getting stale during the long wait for their "Day," and their experiences on patrol, and when at sea on the periodic occasions when the Fleet went hurrying out in reply to reported enemy activity, have given invaluable data for future construction of large and fast submarines. These boats are of 1880 tons (surface) and 2550 tons (submerged) displacement. They have a speed of slightly over 24 knots on the surface, can carry a good gun battery if required, and their hulls being low and well stream-lined, and their torpedo armament powerful, they can act both as destroyers by night or as submarines by day.

These boats have a battery capacity sufficient for a day's Fleet battle, but no more. They may be described as having great _strategic_ speed and capacity, but small tactical radius: that is, they can get to the place where they are wanted quickly, but are circumscribed in their capabilities of remaining submerged in that spot for long, or of moving fast submerged for more than one attack without rising to recharge their batteries. In submarine design as well as in that of surface ships, you can't have everything; each type is a compromise.

At the other end of the scale we built the R boat. These were also "specialists," but of opposite qualities. Of 500 tons (submerged) they have a surface speed of about 8 knots, but a submerged speed of 14-1/2--a speed which will probably be slightly increased by alterations. These boats only joined up in the summer of 1918, and the enemy surrendered before they had really shown what they could do. A boat of this type (they are perfectly stream-lined, and, inside, they are all battery and torpedo tubes) can jog out to her assigned area at her leisure--it is no use sending her to cut off or meet a definitely reported enemy, as she wouldn't get there in time--and once in that area she can use her diving batteries for days without having to recharge them, should she be kept down by enemy hunters, and her high submerged speed and radius make her very dangerous to any target (U-boat or otherwise) which passes within periscope range of her.

There remains the submarine monitor, which will be described in due course. I will interpolate here an account of a typical trial of a new boat, using an E boat of the early 1916 vintage as an illustration.

The boat I would use as an illustration was in 1915 very new indeed. She was just a standard E boat, with war-taught improvements and additions, and with a war-taught complement of officers and a half-taught complement of men. For a month the men had been given a queer but useful course of instruction by being taken by their First Lieutenant at "Diving Stations," in a disused shed in the building firm's premises. On the walls and floor names and rough sketches of most of the important valves and wheels of the boat herself had been chalked, and though the men laughed and swore at the make-believe, they had learnt a good deal of their drill and the probable sequence of diving orders, without the work of the builders of the E boat being interfered with. Except in the dinner hour, or during the infrequent holidays, no drill could be carried out aboard owing to the crowds of men working there. Overtime had been continuously worked, and nothing could be allowed to interfere with the firm's sacred "date"--the day on which the Admiralty had been promised delivery.

The day dawned clear and fine, with no wind and every promise of calm spring weather. At six o'clock the submarine's whistle blew shrilly, and a few tardy passengers approaching from the direction of the yard gates broke into a run. As they climbed the iron rungs up to the low grey-painted bridge, the gangway by which they had boarded was lifted clear into the air and swung away to the basin-side by a hissing, clattering, 10-ton crane, and at an order from the boat's Captain the securing wires and hemp hawsers splashed into the oily still water. The telegraph clanged decisively, and to an answering whirr and boil under her stern the boat moved slowly ahead towards the open basin entrance. She increased speed as she neared the narrow passage, and the whirling eddies of a flooding tide outside came in view. As her stem came out into the river she took a sharp sheer up-stream, then came quickly round towards the open sea as the twenty degrees of helm that she was carrying took effect on her. Little puffs of white and brown smoke began to show round her stern as the engines were clutched in and started, and in five minutes she was heading down-river at a fair twelve knots, with the low sun glancing from her round hull and lighting the queer mixture of Futurist painting that covered her.

She carried a matter of eleven people on her bridge--a bridge designed to accommodate, perhaps, four or five. Her fighting complement was thirty-one all told, but at this moment she held over fifty. Needless to say, it was the passengers who seemed to take up most room. They comprised overseers, foremen, chargemen, a manager or two, about a dozen caulkers and engineers, and a pilot. In addition she carried an overseer of overseers--a Commander from the submarine Commodore's staff. He was present as schoolmaster, judge, and as friend to the Captain of the boat, and his job was one the Captain of the boat was not in the least envious of. The Captain knew that his crew were only partially trained, that he himself was new to E boats, and that the boat might not be all he hoped to find her in the way of reliability and hull-strength, but he felt that at any rate he knew more or less what the personnel, including himself, were like, while the Inspecting Commander must be, or ought to be, the most nervous man in submarines, with his job of travelling from trial to trial, unbroken by a chance of a trip in a fully-tested boat with a fully-trained crew.

As they swung round the last river-buoy and saw the outer lightship draw clear of the land, a destroyer overtook them, and passed on ahead to lead them to sea. The boat was going thirty miles out to get deep water for her hull-test, and it was not safe for a British boat to be that distance, or even a third of that distance, from the mouth of a British harbour unescorted, unless she was there on her war business. This was not because of the enemy--far from it; it was to save her from the enthusiastic but misguided attentions of the multitudes of "Fritz-hunters" who drew no distinction between submarines of their own or the enemy's flag. As she neared the light-vessel, the submarine increased speed and some of the "yarning-party" on the bridge departed below down the conning-tower. The programme included a full-speed surface-trial which was to start from the lightship and finish at the diving-ground, and for the next two hours the engineers and engine-overseers were to be the only busy passengers. From the engine-room bulkhead to the bows, the crew and officers moved to and fro--testing, instructing, and, it should be added, grumbling continuously, for the multitude of passengers were a considerable handicap in the way of an efficient and (the great ideal) an unexciting and placid diving-trial.

The inside of the boat was incredibly dirty from a naval point of view. She had not been built at one of these yards where no workman can live without a quid of tobacco in his cheek (in fact by the trials standard of some yards she was clean), but it was obvious that she would take a good month's scrubbing and polishing before she was, in her officers' estimation, even sanitary.

At ten o'clock an order came from on deck, and a couple of sailors ascended the conning-tower carrying a few rounds of 12-pounder ammunition. The trials she was to do were to be complete and to everybody's satisfaction, and the building firm, being a firm which would sooner see their work over- than under-tested, had suggested a few rounds from the bow-gun before the dive, with the idea that if the gun-mounting was going to cause leaks through to the hull as a result of recoil, it should be given the chance to do it now instead of later when the boat was in enemy waters. A biscuit-tin was dropped, the boat circled round, and at a range of a hundred yards the gunlayer proceeded to miss the box completely. However, the shooting did not matter--the gun had recoiled a few times and that was all that was required. The fact of the gunlayer finding later that he had shipped the sights of the H.A. gun on to his bow-gun before practice, was a merely trifling incident among the errors that one might expect to occur on trials.

At eleven o'clock the destroyer, which had been jogging along a few cables ahead, circled round and slowed up. The Submarine Captain rang "Slow" on his telegraph, smiled encouragingly at the civilians who still remained on the bridge, and made a pointing gesture with his thumb at the open conning-tower lid. The civilians, with a nervous straightening of bowler hats and several lingering looks at the sunlit sea and sky, clambered slowly below, and the Captain remained watching the whirling arms of the semaphore on the destroyer's bridge. He dictated a reply to his signalman, then rang down "Stop," and, leaving the lid open, descended to see what order his First Lieutenant was producing out of the crowded chaos below.

From the foot of the conning-tower ladder he could see nothing but a mass of humanity, mostly civilian, through which his uniformed crew moved apologetically and bent double. He moved forward into the crowd and assisted his officers in their efforts to station the passengers in positions where they would be as much out of the way as possible, and would at the same time be comfortable enough to lose their desire to move about. At the end of five minutes comparative peace reigned, and the crew were standing at their stations looking at their officers for orders across a new deck of caps and tilted bowler hats.

The Captain took a sweeping glance fore and aft, then ascended the conning-tower. He ordered the signalman below, looked across at the destroyer through his glasses, and then descended, closing and locking the lid above his head. As he re-entered the boat, he caught the eye of the First Lieutenant. "Flood one, two, five, six, seven, and eight," he ordered. "Slow ahead both--keep her level." The vent valves indicated their opening with a snort and a roar of air, and the rush and gurgle of flooding tanks cut off the chatter of the passengers, as the clang of a closing breech-block brings silence to a gun's crew. A few seconds later the Captain spoke again. "Flood three and four--take her down." Each order was repeated by the First Lieutenant--an officer whose eyes seemed to note the doings of every man in the boat at once. As the Captain moved to the diving-gauge by the periscope to watch for the first slow movement of the long black needle, the First Lieutenant's hand shot out and gripped the neck of a seaman by the starboard pump, and he spoke in a voice of concentrated, hissing rage. "_That's_ the main line, you fool! Close it, quick, and don't you dare touch it till I tell you!"

The gauge-needle quivered and began to rise. At eight feet the Captain stepped back, and, taking the periscope training-handles, began to look into the rubber-padded eye-piece, "Check at twenty feet," he said. "Take the angle off now, coxswain." "Twenty feet, sir, horizontal." The coxswain sat on a low heavy music-stool facing another white-faced diving-gauge, his big brass hydroplane wheel moving a turn or two each way under his hand. "Pump on Z internal--_don't_ start till I tell you." The Captain was watching the hydroplane helm indicators beside him, which showed, by the amount of "rise" helm they were carrying, that the boat had a touch of negative buoyancy.

"All ready the pump, sir!"

"Start the pump--keep her _up_, coxswain."

"Coming up, sir--horizontal, sir."

"Stop the pump--close main line--close Z internal."

On an even keel the E boat ploughed along--her periscope top four feet above the surface, and the periscope-wake bubbling and foaming on the perfectly smooth sea. The watcher in the following destroyer saw the wake die down till it was a barely visible ripple, as--her trim correct--the Captain eased the boat's speed down to less than two knots. Then the shining periscope began to disappear, slowly reducing in height as the planes took the boat down for her deep hull test.

Inside her hull there was silence except for an occasional whisper from one seated civilian to his neighbour. The gauge-needles crept slowly round, and as the depth increased the little spot of daylight thrown by the periscope eye-piece on to the pump-starter abreast of it changed from yellow to green of ever-darkening shades till the last link with the sun above them died away.

At ninety feet the Captain spoke again, and the hydroplane-wheels spun as her downward way was checked. "Keep her at that," he said. "Mr Ramage, will you send your men round now? We'll mark leaks before we go further."

The foreman addressed rose from his seat and called to his half-dozen caulkers sitting at hand. The boat dived easily on while the men passed fore and aft painting red dabs on rivets and seams overhead where trickles of water spoke of red-lead or packing which was not yet "set" or in condition to face the pressures of active service. Their tour over, the party settled back to their stations, and at a nod and gesture from the Captain the hydroplane men tilted the bow slightly down again for further descent. At a hundred and twenty feet the order came for the motors to stop, and with failing headway the boat sank gently down. One or two men (naval as well as civilian) reached out a hand to grasp for support as they stood, for the moment before touching bottom is always one of slight uncertainty; for, however reliable the chart, it is yet possible to bounce roughly on these occasions on such unexpected obstacles as isolated rocks or even wrecks. But there was no need for bracing against the unexpected to-day. The boat touched and slid on to a standstill so gently and imperceptibly that her Captain watched the gauge for at least thirty seconds after she had landed, with the suspicion that she might be only "statically trimmed" and that she had a fathom or two farther yet to fall. Then he spoke--"Flood A--hydroplanes amidships."

There came a bubbling roar from the vent of A, well forward, and then the clang of a heavy "water-hammer" in the pipe as the tank filled. The boat lay now as he intended her to do, bedded with negative buoyancy and with her bows well down, so that her screws and rudder were clear of the oozy mud in which she lay. "Carry on--all hands--and look for leaks."

The caulkers did not linger over the task. They did not (and small blame to them, for they were not case-hardened to the situation) relish the idea of staying longer than was necessary at a hundred and thirty-six feet by gauge and with a pressure of sixty pounds to the square inch trying to force the round steel hull inwards on itself. In a quarter of an hour they reported "All leaks located and marked."

But their ordeal was not yet over. The gloomy-eyed First Lieutenant (a pessimist, as all First Lieutenants should be) had found a new leak right aft, and the Captain was called into consultation over it. For ten minutes more the two officers conversed and searched, then came leisurely forward again. "That's all right, I think," said the Captain cheerfully. "Anybody want to look round any more? I can stay down here while they do--there's no hurry, you know."

There was an enthusiastic chorus from a group of overseers and officials--"Not at all, not at _all_, we're _quite_ satisfied--quite...." The Commander, who throughout the dive had sat unmoving by the periscope, notebook in hand and his eyes half closed, allowed himself a faint smile and a lazy yawn.

"Blow on A--fifty pounds--Blow one and two externals."

The air hissed and whined along the pipes, and the eardrums of those aboard tingled to the rising pressure from overloaded relief valves. For five minutes the hissing and roaring continued, then at a shouted order the noise stopped. The First Lieutenant looked back from the motionless gauge to the Captain. "Shall we put more on A, sir? Fifty pounds won't have moved any out at this depth...."

"No--don't put any more on, I've got One and Two pretty near out and the fifty will blow A as she rises. Then I'm going to fill One and Two again and catch the trim before we break surface. She's stuck in the mud, that's all, and we'll have to pull her out. Stand by the motors, aft there!"

The passengers were fidgeting slightly, and the Commander, noting the fidgeting, looked up and spoke, laughing, to the youthful Captain--_apropos_ of absolutely nothing at all. The Captain laughed back (for publication and as a guarantee of good faith) and turned to the motor-room voice-pipe: "Slow ahead Port--half ahead Starboard"--a pause filled by a dry humming from right aft where the big motors purred. "Stop both--slow ahead Starboard--half astern Port"--another droning pause, and then--"Stop Starboard--half astern Starboard." The boat quivered, then with a lurch she pulled free and her bows rose sharply. "Stop both--half ahead both--flood One and Two--flood A--_Dammit_--hard-a-dive, coxswain."

The angle increased fast, faster than the forward tanks could fill, and the boat rushed upwards with chests, men, and other loose impediments sliding and slipping aft. At eighty feet she began to level slightly, but the angle could not be taken off her in time,--the destroyer men had a vision of a grey conning-tower foaming ahead for a few seconds, surmounted by fifteen feet of silver periscope, before, to the drive of her powerful screws, the boat dipped again till only the tops of the hooded lenses showed as she settled at her diving depth.

"_Rotten_," observed the Captain gloomily to the First Lieutenant. "I mustn't break surface like that when we get to the Bight, or we all go West one-time,--I think that'll do for the dive, though. She'll be tight as a drum when the firm's had another day or two at her. We'll do the helm and speed trials now and then go in. Hands by the blows! _Surface!_"