Going Deep

by Lawrence Goldstone

  To Nancy and Lee

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE:

  DEATH FROM BELOW

  CHAPTER 1:

  BLURRED BEGINNINGS

  CHAPTER 2:

  MADE IN AMERICA

  CHAPTER 3:

  AN AMERICAN IN PARIS

  CHAPTER 4:

  STARS AND BARS

  CHAPTER 5:

  ENTR’ACTE: A FICTIONAL INTERLUDE

  CHAPTER 6:

  FOR AN INDEPENDENT IRELAND

  CHAPTER 7:

  THE FENIAN RAM

  CHAPTER 8:

  COMPETITION FROM THE CLERGY

  CHAPTER 9:

  TREADING WATER

  CHAPTER 10:

  CHASING THE CARROT

  CHAPTER 11:

  CHALLENGERS

  CHAPTER 12:

  UNEASY NEIGHBORS

  CHAPTER 13:

  ARGONAUT

  CHAPTER 14:

  THE PLUNGE

  CHAPTER 15:

  SHEDDING BALLAST

  CHAPTER 16:

  KING’S GAMBIT ACCEPTED

  CHAPTER 17:

  A NEW SKIPPER

  CHAPTER 18:

  JOINING THE NAVY

  CHAPTER 19:

  BOTTOM FISHING

  CHAPTER 20:

  DISPLACEMENT

  CHAPTER 21:

  COUNTERSTRIKE

  CHAPTER 22:

  PROXY WAR

  CHAPTER 23:

  SKEWED COMPETITION

  CHAPTER 24:

  A WARSHIP IN SEARCH OF A WAR

  CHAPTER 25:

  HOLLAND WITHOUT HOLLAND

  CHAPTER 26:

  EXCESSIVE BALLAST

  CHAPTER 27:

  THE NEW CLASS

  CHAPTER 28:

  SUICIDE SQUEEZE

  CHAPTER 29:

  GOING DEEP

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ENDNOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  PROLOGUE

  DEATH FROM BELOW

  September 22, 1914, 3:00 A.M. Six weeks into a war that was to become the bloodiest in human history. A tentative calm had finally descended on the North Sea after three days of savage storms, and the British Admiralty ordered a resumption of patrols off the coast of Holland. An hour before dawn, three aging battle cruisers were sent out to take positions on the line, three miles apart. While the ships were old, the crews were not. The Aboukir, the Hogue, and the Cressy were part of a five-boat contingent manned mostly by young reservists and thus nicknamed the “Live Bait Squadron.” They would certainly be so that day. With the seas still rough, the cruisers’ usual destroyer escort was ordered to remain at anchor.

  At 6:30 A.M., the three ships separated to take up their stations. Almost immediately, a huge explosion shook Aboukir, which “was seen to reel violently, and then settle down with a list to port.” The two other ships turned at once to steam to her aid. When they had closed sufficiently to lower cutters to pick up survivors, the Hogue to starboard and the Cressy to port, the cruisers came to a halt. As the rescue boats were returning with burned and wounded sailors, two tremendous blasts devastated the Hogue; she “leapt up like a roweled horse and quivered all over, just as a steel spring will quiver when firmly held at one end and sharply struck at the other.”1 Soon after that, the Cressy exploded amidships and, like the other two, sank almost immediately.

  Two Dutch vessels appeared quickly and helped rescue 60 officers and 777 men. But another 60 officers and some 1,399 sailors died in the explosions, were roasted to death, or drowned.

  In this singular battle, lasting less than ninety minutes, the three British cruisers had been attacked by a vessel that, until six weeks earlier, had never been employed by the German navy, or, in a real sense, by any navy at all. It sailed not on the sea, but under it.

  It was only after the Aboukir and the Hogue had been torn apart that Captain Robert W. Johnson, aboard the Cressy, realized what had befallen his comrades, although too late to save them or himself. According to the official report, “five minutes after Captain Johnson maneuvered the ship so as to render assistance to the crews of the Hogue and Aboukir . . . a periscope was seen on the starboard quarter, and fire was opened. The track of the torpedo she fired at a range of from 500 to 600 yards was plainly visible, and it struck on the starboard side just before the after bridge.”

  The periscope belonged to submarine U-9, commanded by dashing, thirty-two-year-old Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddigen. The boat was 188 feet long and only 19 feet across. Its crew of twenty-six officers and men lived in impossibly cramped conditions, stuffed along with provisions and armaments into a narrow cylinder that provided little room to move and even less to sleep. Fans to circulate the air were so feeble that most of the sailors were left constantly gasping for breath, even when U-9 was running on the surface. Heat from the engines was stifling and sanitary facilities were worse than in a prison. But neither Weddigen nor his crew would ever register a single complaint. They were pioneers, entrusted with a potent new weapon they were certain would be instrumental in their nation’s victory.

  Postcard depicting Weddigen’s triumph

  Weddigen had gained his commission four years earlier, when U-9 first put to sea, and just days before he left on patrol, he had been married to his childhood sweetheart. With the sinking of the Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy, U-9’s captain became a national hero. “I reached the home port on the afternoon of the 23rd,” he said later, “and on the 24th went to Wilhelmshaven to find that news of my effort had become public. My wife, dry-eyed when I went away, met me with tears. Then I learned that my little vessel and her brave crew had won the plaudit of the Kaiser, who conferred upon each of my co-workers the Iron Cross of the second class and upon me the Iron Crosses of the first and second classes.”2

  In Great Britain, the reaction was far different. Within days, the Admiralty issued a statement: “The sinking of the Aboukir was of course an ordinary hazard of patrolling duty. The Hogue and Cressy, however, were sunk because they proceeded to the assistance of their consort, and remained with engines stopped, endeavoring to save life, thus presenting an easy target to further submarine attacks. The natural promptings of humanity have in this case led to heavy losses, which would have been avoided by a strict adhesion to military consideration. Modern naval war is presenting us with so many new and strange situations that an error of judgment of this character is pardonable.”

  War on the high seas had changed forever.

  On August 12, 1914, roughly six weeks before Weddigen fired his torpedoes, John Philip Holland died of pneumonia at his home at 38 Newton Street in Newark, New Jersey. Holland, a former schoolteacher and once a choirmaster at his local church, was by all accounts a gentle, modest man, and he rated only a brief obituary in local newspapers. He had been born seventy-three years earlier on the west coast of Ireland, in County Clare. Gaelic was the chosen language in the Holland home, since his mother spoke no English. John had been a sickly child, plagued with chronic respiratory problems that followed him into adulthood and would eventually kill him. Because of his delicate health, he had been sent to the Christian Brothers for his education; he stayed on to teach but left the order just before he was to take his final vows. Shortly afterward, he immigrated to the United States, where he spent the remainder of his life. While he never waned in his passion for Ireland, Holland chose to be buried in his adopted homeland rather than the one of his birth.

  John Holland emerging from one of his creations.

  Although he had died in near obscurity, John Holland cast a shadow over those fifteen hundred deaths in the North Sea and also the thousands of other encounters between traditional warships and this new instrument of
stealth and surprise. He was then and still widely is considered the father of the modern submarine, but he would never know that he had helped create one of the defining killing machines of two world wars.

  For millennia, the ocean depths have held as great a fascination as the heavens, and undersea travel has been a fantasy equal to the dream of flight. Just as virtually every society created fanciful machines to allow men to soar into the sky, there were similar fancies about devices that could sustain humans under the water. Leonardo, as did many of the greatest scientific thinkers, theorized about both but failed to bring either to fruition. But, like Wilbur and Orville Wright, who had also followed in many of the same footsteps, John Holland did not fail. For decades, combining insight with perseverance, and enduring frustration, trial, and much error, Holland turned imagination into reality. And, as with every journey of exploration, death waited constantly in the wings.

  Frank T. Cable, an engineer who, after four decades, penned the definitive firsthand account of submarine development, wrote, “The submarine is an American invention—it is the genius of an ardent Irish-American patriot. It belongs to America—with the telephone, the telegraph, the steamship, the airplane, electricity, and the other wonders of the modern world that marked the beginnings of new epochs.”3

  John Holland was not the only man who labored for decades to design and build a successful undersea craft. Although twenty-five years his junior, a precocious inventor from New Jersey named Simon Lake would become Holland’s fiercest competitor, both under the water and in the committee rooms of Congress, where each man fought to have his design accepted as the paradigm for the American navy’s nascent submarine fleet.

  Lake and Holland were separated by a good deal more than age and could not have come to the quest by a more different route. Where John Holland initially had sought a means for Irish nationalists to combat the overwhelming dominance of the British navy, Lake was inspired by an adventure novel he read as a twelve-year-old boy. While Holland was an immigrant who never lost his Irish brogue, Lake was descended on his father’s side from one of the founders of Atlantic City, New Jersey, and on his mother’s from one of the founders of Hartford, Connecticut. Where Holland was self-taught, Lake received an engineering education at Pennsylvania’s prestigious Franklin Institute. Precisely because of their differences, however, and that they approached every problem from a different perspective, the two men became responsible for nearly every feature of the modern submarine.

  But theirs was a war with no winners. After decades of working to solve one of humankind’s great mysteries, Holland and Lake would be shunted aside, replaced by those for whom innovation was far less important than profit.

  One man in particular would be nemesis to both Holland and Lake. Isaac Leopold Rice was one of the most remarkable men of a remarkable age—a chess master, social commentator, musician, lawyer, innovator, philanthropist, and one of the most ferocious competitors of an age of breakneck innovation to rival any other. To Holland, in theory a business partner and ally, and to Lake, an avowed rival, Rice would demonstrate that an elegant design or watershed invention was no guarantee of success in either the boardroom or the marketplace. In the process, he would repeatedly confound Congress and then fashion one of the United States’ most powerful and enduring engineering conglomerates.

  And so today, when submarines can travel around the world and remain submerged almost indefinitely, limited only by the amount of food they carry, John Holland and Simon Lake have all but disappeared from the history books. Why these men are not known to every American and have not been accorded the same posthumous accolades as other great innovators of the period, is a tale of genius and stupidity, persistence and deceit, vision and blindness, and, ultimately, tragedy.

  CHAPTER 1

  BLURRED BEGINNINGS

  It is fitting, perhaps, that the first accounts of a working submarine are as murky as the underwater depths its inventor claimed to have navigated. The inventor himself, in fact, has been described as “a shadowy figure, a kind of dismembered historical ghost.” Now generally referred to as Cornelis Drebbel, he was at various times known to contemporaries as Drubelsius, Derbbel, Dribble, Tribble, and De Rebel.

  Drebbel was born in Alkmaar, Holland, in 1572. He received a solid education, became an engraver, and married an extremely profligate woman who kept him in constant debt and bore him six children, four of whom survived. Drebbel, always casting about for ways to earn a bit of extra money, came across the works of the renegade physician, astrologer, alchemist, botanist, and natural scientist, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, later known as Paracelsus.

  Paracelsus was half-genius, half-fabulist, a sort of combination Jonas Salk and P. T. Barnum. “Bombast” was coined from his name. He was the most prominent early proponent of the germ theory of disease; he also initiated the notion that some ailments spring from psychological disorders and others from environmental pollution, which he discovered by studying miners with lung disease. Paracelsus has been variously credited with founding psychotherapy, toxicology, and pharmacology. But he also claimed to have transmuted base metals to gold, to have cured the sick with spiritual intervention, and that the key to good health was an enema at the time of the full moon. Despite a brilliant record as a physician, Paracelsus was so personally unpleasant that he spent a good deal of his later life moving from one city to another to avoid being murdered by his enemies. The cause of his death, at age forty-seven, and whether it was from natural or unnatural causes, remains unclear. But Paracelsus left behind a stunning legacy in a wide variety of disciplines, which spurred generations of youthful acolytes across the scientific spectrum. Drebbel’s work too would cross many disciplines and be a combination of the practical, the unlikely, and the impossible.

  Brimming with ideas, Drebbel crossed the Channel in 1605, shortly after the ascension of James I to the English throne. James’s interest in science and innovation was well known and, with Mrs. Drebbel’s pecuniary appetites undiminished, the new king seemed the perfect patron.

  Drebbel had chosen well. He secured an audience with the king, who, impressed with what seemed a wondrous range of knowledge, sent him to live in Eltham Palace in Greenwich, where Drebbel would be left free to tinker as he pleased. James visited frequently to view his “wonder-worker’s” creations.

  James also appeared to have chosen well. Described by a visiting courtier as a “very fair and handsome man, and of very gentle manners, altogether different from such-like characters,”1 Drebbel designed intricate gardens and fountains, introduced to the English court Paracelsus’s notion of iatrochemical medicine, in which cures to disease are found in chemicals—drugs—rather than in a rebalance of the humors, and produced impressive innovations in pumps, clocks, and dyes.* He is said to have built improved telescopes and microscopes, although evidence for this is sketchy. Drebbel is also purported to have designed a perpetual motion machine mounted in a globe that tracked the time, date, and season. He put this device on display at Eltham and there demonstrated it to a series of notables. That a true perpetual motion machine is impossible—friction or energy loss will eventually slow it to a halt—in no way diminished the accolades. Even more dubious are Drebbel’s claims to have created a means of purifying seawater, fashioning a working torpedo, and bottling a liquid “quintessence of air,” this more than a century before oxygen was identified as an element by Joseph Priestley. Such were the range and mystery of Drebbel’s achievements that he has been theorized to be Shakespeare’s model for Prospero in The Tempest.

  And then there was the Drebbel submarine.

  The notion of underwater boats had been introduced to the English Court in 1578, when a mathematician, William Bourne, who had served as a Royal Navy gunner, published a treatise titled Inventions or Devices, “very necessary for all Generals and Captains, or Leaders of men, as well by Sea, as by Land.” In one section, Bourne wrote, “And also it is possible to make a Ship or Boat that
may go under the water unto the bottom, and so to come up again at your pleasure . . . that any thing that sinketh is heavier than the proportion of so much water, and if it be lighter than the magnitude of so much water, then it swimmeth or appeareth above the water, according unto the proportion of weight.” Bourne included detailed instructions on how to construct an underwater craft. “Let there be good store of Ballast in the bottom of her, and over the Ballast, as low as may be, let there be a closed Orlop [deck] such that no water may come into it, and then in like manner at a sufficient height, to have another closed Orlop that no water may come through it, and that being done, then bore both the sides full of holes between the two closed Orlops: and that being done, then make a thing like the side of the Bark or Ship that may go unto the side of the Ship . . . and that must be made so tight and close, that no water may come through it, and that done, then take leather, such a quantity as is sufficient for to serve your purpose, and that leather must be nailed with such provision that no water may soak thorough.” The vessel was to be propelled by oars, the exact placement of which was left vague.

  Bourne included a diagram that showed ballast controlled by drawing water into or forcing water out of the body of the vessel by means of a capstan screw mechanism.

  Bourne’s design

  There is no record of Bourne ever attempting to build such an impractical craft—it would have been fatally unstable and there was virtually no room for a crew—but the idea struck the fancy of many English nobles. (Naval officers, on the other hand, thought it ridiculous.) The underwater boat remained only an alluring theory until 1620, when Drebbel announced that he had built one.