Bauer’s craft proved satisfactory in diving and remaining under the surface, but less so in maneuverability. How Bauer steered the vessel is a mystery, as a rudder is conspicuously absent from prints of the period. A larger problem was that Russian naval officials, all drawn from the aristocracy, loathed Bauer for his middle-class origins—they called him the “Austrian corporal”—and attempted to derail the project at every turn.† Eventually they made his life so miserable that Bauer left Russia. As a result, after more than one hundred successful dives, the Bauer submarine was abandoned and left to rust. Bauer, who might well have perfected his vessel with a bit more support, abandoned his research and returned to Bavaria, where he lived the remainder of his life in obscurity.
Wilhelm Bauer was not alone in his inability to pierce the military bureaucracy. Almost universally accepted among military men was that pursuing an innovative weapons system, such as a submarine, announced that a nation’s traditional forces were substandard. The irony was that, in most cases, none more than Russia, traditional forces were substandard, made so in no small part by senior officers’ refusal to admit it.
To move submarine technology forward, therefore, would take a combatant so outmatched as to render the weak-navy-strong-navy argument moot. Improbable in some ways, obvious in others, that combatant would be the Confederate States of America, fighting for what seemed an increasingly hopeless cause in the American Civil War.
By early 1863, although holding its own on the battlefield, the Confederacy was feeling the impact of fighting an enemy vastly superior in manpower and industrial output. With each battle, the Confederate army, unable to fully replace its losses, grew weaker, while the Union simply drew from its immense reserves to return to full strength. In addition, the South’s two most important seaports had been rendered useless. New Orleans had fallen early in the war and the Union had successfully blockaded Charleston, South Carolina. In July, Lee would be turned back at Gettysburg and, of greater strategic significance, Grant would choke off the Mississippi by taking Vicksburg. Outmanned and outgunned on land and sea, its trade routes throttled, the Confederacy found itself willing to try just about anything to even the odds.
The Confederates chose as a first priority an attempt to break the blockade of Charleston Harbor, which would open Atlantic trade routes and allow sympathetic European nations, especially Great Britain, to supplement the South’s dwindling supplies. A frontal assault would have been futile, so Confederate engineers decided to attack by stealth. They cut a thirty-five-foot, steam-powered gunboat down to the waterline and covered the top with iron plating. A fifteen-foot spar protruded from the bow and held a sixty-pound gunpowder charge. The boat would hold a crew of four. A night attack was planned, of course, and while the boat could never fully submerge, it ran very low in the water, “awash,” with only a low conning tower and exhaust stack exposed. The low profile would give Union sentries little to spot and their gunners not much to shoot at. To make the craft even more difficult to detect, the exhaust stack was hinged and could be lowered during an attack. Either because of the respective sizes of the gunboat and the Union ship it was to assault, or just the state of the war in general, the builders christened their boat the David, as in David and Goliath.
A “David”
On October 5, 1863, at about 8:00 P.M., Lieutenant William T. Glassell maneuvered the David toward the new Union battleship USS Ironsides, which was lying off Morris Island in Charleston Harbor. It was history’s first attack by a motorized “torpedo boat” on a surface vessel.
Lacking the ability to fully submerge, however, would prove a major impediment. Despite its low profile in the water, the David was spotted fifty yards away and hailed by the Ironsides’s officer of the deck. Glassell, standing in the open hatch, responded with a blast from a double-barreled shotgun, killing the Union sailor. With both sides firing, the charge at the end of the spar exploded prematurely, sending a torrent into the hull. On the Ironsides, thinking the explosion would sink their ship, panicked sailors began jumping overboard on the far side until the captain, who had quickly surveyed the damage, convinced them that there was no danger.
On the David, there was panic as well. The crew thought that the water that had flooded into the hull had put out the engine’s boiler and that the boat was about to sink. Glassell and the fireman jumped overboard, taking the only two life preservers with them. The other two crewmen, however, restarted the fires and, with chaos reigning aboard the Ironsides, were able to steer the David once more through the Union fleet back to the pier at Charleston.
The Ironsides was damaged sufficiently that it had to be taken out of service and returned to Philadelphia for repairs. Word leaked out that the Confederates had employed “some kind of an infernal machine,” as the New York Times phrased it, although with the David avoiding capture, no one was quite certain of the vessel’s capabilities. But the result was clear enough. In his report to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, a Union admiral wrote, “The secrecy, rapidity of movement, control of direction, and precise explosion indicate, I think, the introduction of the torpedo element as a means of warfare. It can be ignored no longer.”1
To prepare for the next attack—Union spies reported that two-dozen Davids were under construction—the blockading ships altered their positions in the harbor and some dropped shot-weighted nets off their hulls. But a David-type vessel was not used again in combat. Running on the surface with the Union ships by then on their guard seemed suicidal. In addition, the Confederates had another design almost ready to go, one that would leave the Union gunners nothing at all to shoot at.
It was called the American Diver, and the Confederates believed it could change the course of the war.
In early 1862, in New Orleans, with Union admiral David Farragut’s fleet closing in, Confederate captain James McClintock approached Captain Horace Hunley and Baxter Watson, a local businessman, and asked for money to use in building an underwater craft he had designed. The craft had the virtue of sailing fully submerged, but as a result needed to be powered manually. But McClintock, who had likely read up on Fulton’s efforts, had included bow planes, which would help keep his boat stable underneath the waves. Hunley and Watson agreed to provide funding—without some new weapon, New Orleans was certain to fall. Even that early in the war, the South was short on supplies, so McClintock had to scrounge about to obtain enough scrap iron plate to forge into a hull. He named his invention the Pioneer. The boat required only one crewman to crank the screw propeller, and would carry an explosive charge that would be attached to an enemy hull and be detonated by a timing device.
But during tests, the Pioneer could not maintain either longitudinal or lateral stability. McClintock scuttled the craft rather than let it fall into Farragut’s hands, and he, Hunley, and Watson fled the city for Mobile, Alabama. There they built a second submarine, once more from discarded boilerplates. The boat, now called the American Diver, successfully completed practice dives, but when it was sent out to attack a Union frigate, a squall blew water into its open hatch and the crew was lucky to escape with their lives as it headed toward the bottom. When the Confederate government refused to participate to fund a third attempt, Watson and McClintock dropped out. But Hunley was determined to see the project through and financed the enterprise on his own. He would name the new machine after himself.
Once again, scrap metal was used for construction, this time a twenty-five-foot boiler, four feet in diameter, which was sliced lengthwise with a foot of iron plating riveted between the cut halves. Wedge-shaped, rounded bulkheads were attached fore and aft to serve as ballast tanks, which could be flooded by a valve in the main section. Hand pumps connected to iron pipes were used to empty the tanks.
As with all early boats, the Hunley was to run mostly awash with the hatch open, but to refresh the air when submerged, an “air box” was placed on top of the hull between forward and rear eight-inch-high conning towers. Hunley at first hoped to use steam or el
ectricity, but neither of these could be made to work with the boat submerged, so he was forced to settle for a crank. Eight sailors would sit lengthwise, providing power to a stubby, four-bladed propeller. Like the David, an explosive-tipped spar protruded from the front end.
CSS Hunley
Hunley’s creation had any number of obvious flaws. The boat was extremely slow, capable of only four knots at full crank. The air box turned out to be ineffective, so the sole way to refresh the air was to surface and open the hatches. Ballasting at the ends created extreme difficulty maintaining longitudinal stability. Weapons delivery was also problematic—the original plan, to drag a ninety-pound explosive on a two-hundred-foot towline under a target and allow the charge to explode on impact with an enemy’s hull proved unworkable in the shallow water. Also, the boat moved so lethargically that a strong current might well bring the explosives back to the submarine.
Tests were almost uniformly disastrous. During the first run, after cruising acceptably on the surface, the boat submerged and immediately sank to the bottom. The nine crewmen failed to get out, and drowned. Undaunted, Hunley had the boat raised and transported from Mobile to Charleston. To entice sailors to volunteer for what could well be a suicide mission, a South Carolina businessman announced a $100,000 reward—greenbacks, not Confederate—for the destruction of a Union battleship.
Dollar incentive proved effective. Lieutenant John Payne offered to the pilot the craft, and eight other sailors agreed to work the crank. The Hunley was fitted with a spar torpedo, the towline plan discarded. Just as the boat left the dock, however, a wave created by a passing steamer sent water pouring over the tiny conning towers and into the hull. Payne, who was standing in the conning tower, escaped, but the other eight did not. Penned in by the onrushing water, they drowned as the Hunley settled at the bottom of Charleston Harbor.
Once more, the boat was raised and refitted; once more, Payne took the boat out for an attack; once more, it flooded; and once more Payne escaped while most of his crew was trapped inside. Although the boat was again raised, Payne was done. He never again ventured into a submarine.
With Payne gone, Hunley himself took charge. He hired a crew, trained them, and on October 15, 1863, took the boat out for a test.
Just after the Hunley left its moorings, Hunley ordered a test dive. As soon as it disappeared under the surface, bubbles were seen rising to the top. The boat sank, nose down, in nine fathoms of water. No one got out. Horace Hunley died in the boat that bore his name. When the boat was located three days later, the forward ballast tank was full and the aft tank empty.
But the Confederacy was sufficiently desperate to keep trying. Engineers raised the boat yet again and manned it with another volunteer crew of seven. Lieutenant George Dixon assumed command and proved quite able. He drilled his sailors for months, first on the surface, and then with shallow dives. He pored over the Hunley, demanding alterations where needed—tighter gaskets on the hatch covers and a more effective sealing off of the ballast tanks. The line on the spar torpedo was lengthened to 150 yards to prevent the explosive from damaging the boat as it reversed away from its target. Only when he deemed his crew expert, would Dixon venture out for an attack.
On February 17, 1864, conditions finally seemed right. A mist hung over the harbor, which would make the boat difficult to spot, and the winds, and therefore the waves, were light. Shortly after sundown, the Hunley cruised awash toward the newly commissioned USS Housatonic.
As the Hunley approached its target, Dixon, peering out of the forward conning tower, prepared to dive. But before he could, the officer of the deck on the Housatonic spotted a school of fish and, with his attention drawn to the waters over the side, noticed the Confederate submarine and raised the alarm.
But it was too late. Before the Housatonic could make steam and cruise out of danger, Dixon struck with his torpedo. The explosion detonated ordnance in the Housatonic’s stern magazine and blew away the entire rear of the ship. The Housatonic sank almost immediately. But the torpedo had exploded prematurely, before Dixon could get safely away. Either the Hunley was sucked into the breach in the Housatonic’s hull or was swamped by the resulting wave. In any case, the boat sank, following its quarry to the bottom of Charleston Harbor, taking Dixon and his crew to their deaths.‡
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*One of the later failures, designed by two Americans, was the whimsically named Intelligent Whale. Its acumen turned out to be suspect when it flooded and sank during testing, but the crew managed to escape.
†The same epithet would be used sixty years later by German generals in describing Adolf Hitler.
‡Finding the Hunley’s wreckage defied explorers and treasure seekers for more than a century. P. T. Barnum offered a reward of $100,000 early in the twentieth century and bestselling author Clive Cussler funded a fifteen-year search, all in vain. Finally, in 1995, three archaeologists working for Cussler’s group located a metal object off the coast of Sullivan’s Island with a magnetometer. Under three feet of sediment in thirty feet of water, divers discovered one of the Hunley’s conning towers, and soon the entire boat. It was raised in 2000 and is now on display in a Charleston museum.
CHAPTER 5
ENTR’ACTE: A FICTIONAL INTERLUDE
While to the Hunley goes the honor of the first sinking of a surface ship by a submarine, it was still a submarine propelled in roughly the same fashion as a Roman galley. No one had figured out how to power a boat underwater, nor how to make one sufficiently stable to be navigated effectively. Steam was the prevailing technology for motive power, but steam involved fires and fires made smoke, which need to be vented. It was theoretically possible to vent smoke into the water, but no one had figured out how to do it. Venting it above the surface involved either running awash or piping the exhaust through an extremely long tube extended to the surface, which would always be prone to flooding in rough seas. The same was true of any tube to allow the crew of a closed vessel to breathe.
For a time, two French inventors seemed to have found the solution by abandoning steam for a promising new power source. In 1859, Siméon Bourgeois, a navy caption, and an engineer, Charles Brun, began construction of a 150-foot-long, 12-foot-wide cylindrical vessel they called Plongeur (Diver), which would be powered by an eighty horsepower motor that ran on compressed air. The notion of compressing air for mechanical tasks had been around since the bellows in 3000 BC, but the ability to harness the substance for industrial uses had only been introduced in the 1780s. And it was not until 1857 that French engineers developed a way to effectively “cool” compressed air so that it could be safely stored for use on demand, in this case to power pneumatic drills that were cutting into mountains to excavate for railroad tunnels. Bourgeois and Brun almost immediately recognized that here might be a power source for the world’s first true submarine.
In 1863, before either the David or the Hunley was launched, they began testing their design. The Plongeur was structurally quite advanced, built with iron plates riveted to a supporting frame and a heavy iron keel that extended ten feet out from the bow to hold a spar torpedo. Brun, who drew up the plans, was at least aware of the need for stability, as he installed “bilge keels” on either side to prevent rolling, but these would only function effectively when the submarine was running awash. Watertight bulkheads were installed both lengthwise and across to prevent flooding, and planes were fitted at the stern.
Plongeur
But the great departure was the twenty-three compressed air reservoirs, each of which could be charged to 180 pounds per square inch. Even at such a relatively puny compression—all that could be attained in an era before true high-pressure cylinders—leakage was a constant problem, so much so that when the hatch was opened upon surfacing a cloud of fog emerged before the crew.*
During tests in shallow water, the boat functioned well. It could remain submerged and invisible, with the crew drawing on the same air supply that would power the motor and blow the
ballast tanks. But when used so liberally, the air reservoirs, which took up most of the space in the boat, discharged very quickly. It would, then, be impossible for the boat to undertake anything but a very short journey unless a surface vessel carrying stores of compressed air accompanied it. In addition to the problem of depletion, loss of air also altered the weight distribution and therefore the longitudinal stability of the boat. In shallow water, the loss of stability appeared manageable, but when the Plongeur was taken out for deep-sea trials in autumn 1863, severe shortcomings became apparent.
According to one observer, the boat could not maintain either constant depth or stability and “kept bouncing up and down like a rubber ball.” In addition, “the horizontal rudders were not powerful enough, [and] consequently the boat, on more than one occasion, touched bottom, as she was always either up or down.”1 Although Bourgeois and Brun kept tinkering with the design, nothing seemed to work. The boat was simply uncontrollable and eventually the two gave up. The Plongeur was converted into “a common water-tank.”
But the Plongeur’s demise was not quite complete. During the International Exposition in Paris, in 1867, two models of Brun’s boat were exhibited and drew quite a bit of attention. One of the exposition’s visitors was particularly fascinated. He was not a trained scientist but had a keen eye for mechanics and an even keener sense of innovation. He was already famous in France for applying these skills to a series of novels that combined adventure with an enticing vision of the future. After his visit to the exhibition, Jules Verne would begin his most famous work, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers: Tour du monde sous-marin, which was translated, loosely, into English as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Verne’s novel, first published in France in 1869, was an instant sensation and did more to bring submarines into the public consciousness than any event prior to Weddigen’s three-destroyer sinking in 1914.
Going Deep Page 5