Submarines

SUBMARINES

SUBMARINES. The first operating submarine was tested by the Dutch inventor Cornelis Drebbel from 1620 to 1624, but a submarine was not used in combat until 1776, when David Bushnell's one-man wooden craft, the Turtle, failed in its submerged attack on the British ship Eagle in New York harbor. Later, Robert Fulton, a famous American artist and inventor, built the Nautilus (1801) out of wood covered by iron plates. Although successful in submerged tests against wooden ships, the Nautilus failed to interest the government of France, England, or the United States. Bushnell produced another submarine for the War of 1812 against England, but his craft was unsuccessful.

During the Civil War the Confederacy undertook the construction of various submarines. Horace L. Hunley financed the building of the Pioneer (1862) by James McClintock and Baxter Watson, but it never entered combat. A second vessel was lost en route to the fighting. The first submarine to sink a ship was the hand-powered Hunley. This cigar-shaped boat was made of boiler plate and manned by a crew of nine. It took the lives of thirty-five volunteers in five trial runs and became known as the Peripatetic Coffin. On the night of 17 February 1864, it drove its spar torpedo into the Union Housatonic anchored at the entrance to Charleston harbor, South Carolina, and both vessels sank. The Union's one attempt to construct a submarine proved abortive; the main effort went into semisubmersibles and monitors.

England, France, Sweden, Russia, and Spain pursued submarine development in the ninettenth century. Modern undersea craft in America evolved from the pioneering work of John P. Holland, an Irish immigrant, and Simon Lake. Holland built six submarines (1875–1897), one of which, the Plunger, won the U.S. government's competition for a practical submarine design in 1893. It was never completed. His most famous craft, the fifty-three-foot Holland, was built at his own expense and became the U.S. Navy's first submarine in 1900. Lake, Holland's chief competitor, envisioned submarines mainly as salvage and exploration vehicles. Lake's company built seven submarines for Russia (1901–1906) and twenty-seven for the United States, with the first completed in 1911.

England and Germany had a delayed interest in submarines. England's first order came in 1901; the first German vessel, the 139-foot U-1, was not completed until 1905. At the outset of World War I, there were submarines

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in the fleets of all the major navies. The standard submarine was about two hundred feet long and displaced several hundred tons. German U-boats sank more than five thousand merchant and fishing ships during the conflict. After the war, the U.S. Navy built a series of classes leading to the successful Gato and Balao classes of sub-marine of World War II.

Germany again used submarines to good advantage during World War II, although its attacks failed in the end because of a devastating Allied antisubmarine campaign. In the Pacific, U.S. submarines sank 1,314 naval and merchant ships (1941–1945). Two wartime developments—radar and the snorkel (breathing tubes to draw in air from just under the surface)—made a major impact on submarine combat.

After World War II, the United States was quick to adapt advanced German submarine technology. War-built submarines were converted to the improved GUPPY-configuration (1946–1962), and the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus, was launched in 1954. With a three-thousand-ton displacement and 320 feet long, the Nautilus traversed the Arctic Ocean under the ice cap, crossing the North Pole on 3 August 1958. The U.S. Navy married the advanced Albacore "tear drop" hull with a nuclear propulsion plant to produce the Skipjack (1956–1957), and later the Thresher, Sturgeon, and Los Angeles, classes of very fast submarines, capable of underwater speeds exceeding thirty knots.

The majority of U.S. nuclear submarines are primarily intended to destroy enemy submarines; the remainder are the fleet ballistic-missile submarines armed with strategic Polaris, Poseidon, or Trident missiles for use against land targets. The Navy commissioned forty-one Polaris-Poseidon submarines between 1959 and 1967. Displacing between 5,900 and 7,320 tons each, these vessels were a vital part of the U.S. nuclear deterrent force.

The submarine played a vital role in America's Cold War military strategy. Beginning with the Poseidon missile (1970), all U.S. submarines carried submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), all of which carried multiple warheads, dubbed multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs). The Trident carries twenty-four Trident C-4 or D-5 missiles, each loaded with eight warheads. In 1988, the United States had sixty-six hundred warheads on thirty-two submarines and the Soviet Union thirty-four hundred warheads on sixty-three submarines. Both forces were reduced under the terms of the first Strategic Arms Reduction Talks Treaty (START I). The START II agreement in 1993 downgraded the U.S. force to about seventeen hundred warheads on eighteen submarines. The accuracy of SLBMs was greatly improved with the introduction of the global positioning system (GPS). Signals emitted from satellites in orbit enable the missile's computers to calculate its position with very high precision.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alden, John D. The Fleet Submarine in the U.S. Navy: A Design and Construction History. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1979.

Burgess, Robert F. Ships Beneath the Sea: A History of Subs and Submersibles. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975.

Cochran, Thomas B., William M. Arkin, and Milton M. Hoenig. Nuclear Weapons Databook. Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1984.

———, et al. Nuclear Weapons Databook. Vol. 4. New York: Harper and Row, Ballinger Division, 1989.

Hoyt, Edwin P. From the Turtle to the Nautilus: The Story of Submarines. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963.

Polmar, Norman. The American Submarine. Annapolis, Md.: Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1981

———, and Jurrien Noot. Submarines of the Russian and Soviet Navies, 1718–1990. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1991.

Roscoe, Theodore. United States Submarine Operations in World War II. Annapolis, Md.: United States Naval Institute, 1949.

Leo Sartori

Ken W. Sayers / a. r.

See also Atlantic, Battle of the ; Lusitania, Sinking of the ; Merchantmen, Armed ; Missiles, Military ; "Nautilus" ; Navy, Confederate ; North Sea Mine Barrage ; Philippine Sea, Battle of the ; World War II, Navy in .