The 1st Stealth Weapon: The Submarine

^{National Archives from Nav.}

^{Torpedoed Japanese destroyer sinks while being photographed through the periscope of a U.S. submarine.}

On the night of September 6, 1776, a small group of men on the shore of New York harbor silently lowered a most peculiar‑looking object into the dark water. The strange contraption was made of two solid curved pieces of wood closely fitted together to form a waterproof joint. It had a hand‑cranked propeller, a rudder at the rear, and another propeller on its upper surface. One man, Ezra Lee of Old Lyme, Connecticut, had entered through a hatch at the top. Lee planned to propel his strange craft to the British 64 gun frigate H.M.S Eagle, dive below the surface when the got near the British flagship, attach an explosive charge to the ship, and leave as fast as he could.

The peculiar craft, named the American Turtle because it looked like a turtle tipped over on one side, was the brainchild of Captain David Bushnell, an engineering officer in the Continental Army. When he was 29, Bushnell had sold the farm he inherited and attended Yale, where he studied science for four years.

When the Revolution broke out, he joined the Continental Army. With the help of another Yale scientist, he designed an underwater bomb with a time‑delay mechanism. When the preset time was up, the mechanism activated a flintlock that set off the charge. That led Bushnell to consider some means of getting the bomb to the enemy. The British ships had lookouts watching the water at all times. Even at night, it was unlikely that a rowboat or canoe could get close enough to one of their ships to attach a bomb. And it was almost certain that the inevitable noise of the attaching work would attract attention.

The only sure way would be to approach under water.

So Bushnell designed Turtle. The boat would travel most of the way to its target with its hatch open and just above the surface of the water. Driven by a hand‑cranked propeller it would be too slow to make a noticeable wake. When it got near the British ship, Turtle’s pilot would use the upper propeller to force his craft below the surface. The bomb was attached to a screw on the front of the submarine that could manipulated from inside the craft.

Bushnell’s brother, Ezra, volunteered to bomb H.M.S. Eagle. He had piloted the submarine for weeks in waters where no British were to be found. But at the last minute, Ezra Bushnell fell ill. Ezra Lee volunteered to take his place although he had much less experience with Bushnell’s invention. With the hatch open and barely above the surface, Lee slowly made his way to the British ship.

In a modern reproduction of Turtle, built for a television documentary, the pilot found it was easier to move the boat by sculling with the rudder than cranking the propeller. An earlier reproduction, built for the U.S. bicentennial celebra‑tion reportedly worked as intended. Whatever method he used, Lee got near Eagle and dived. In addition to the difficulty in handling a brand‑new weapon of war and the danger that the British would learn what he was doing, Lee was working under a serious deadline. The timing mechanism of the bomb had already been activated. He tried to drive the screw into the hull of the ship, but Eagle was sheathed in copper below the waterline to foil barnacles. The screw wouldn’t penetrate the metal. Lee tried again and failed. Time was running out.

Lee jettisoned his bomb and moved away. The floating bomb exploded with a shocking flash and bang. The British ships hauled in their anchors and hoisted their sails.

On shore, David Bushnell roundly cursed the unfortunate Lee. Then he and his party loaded Turtle into a sloop to take it back to New England. A British warship chased the sloop and sank it.

After the Revolution, Bushnell petitioned the Continental Congress for some form of recognition or compensation. But, although General George Washington said in 1784, “Bushnell is a man of great mechanical powers, fertile in invention and a master of execution,” Congress ignored him. Bushnell moved to France and tried to interest the French in his submarine. He failed, although he apparently interested another American, Robert Fulton, inventor of the steam‑boat. Fulton launched another submarine, called Nautilus, in France in 1800.

Fulton, who had received a commission in the French Navy, almost succeeded, but at the last minute Napoleon decided that underwater warfare was also underhanded and cancelled the sale.

Bushnell had returned to the United States in 1795 but, disillusioned, he had changed his name and moved out of New England. It was only after his death in 1824, that residents of Warrentown, Georgia, learned that “Dr. Bush,” who taught science and religion at the local academy, was really David Bushnell, the Revolutionary inventor.

Bushnell’s submarine was not the first one, but it was the first to be used in war. The first sub was built in England in 1620 – the year before the Pilgrims landed – by a Dutchman named Cornelius van Drebbel and tested in the Thames.

After Bushnell and Fulton’s boats only Americans seemed to have any interest in submarines. Both the Union and Confederacy used submarines in the Civil War. In 1862, the U.S. Navy purchased its first sub, the U.S.S. Alligator, to plant mines (“torpedoes” in those days) in Confederate harbors. Alligator sank in April, but it was followed by several other submarines. Alligator carried two air purifiers, a chemical means of producing oxygen, and a bellows‑driven ventilation system. The Confederacy also had a fleet of submarines. One of them, the C.S.S. Hunley, sank the U.S.S. Housatonic, the first time a submarine ever sank an enemy ship. But the blast also sank Hunley.

After the war, John Holland, an Irish immigrant, and Simon Lake, a New Jersey foundry owner’s son, continued to work on submarines. Holland at first was financed by the Feinians, an Irish secret society dedicated to winning Irish independence from Britain. In 1881, he launched a submarine called Feinian Ram, intended to end Britain’s command of the sea. It needed further work, but Holland and the Feinians quarreled and the society cut off its financial aid.

Holland continued working and built a boat named Holland IV, which won a U.S. Navy award for submarine design. The Navy was not yet ready to buy a submarine, though. Holland designed more boats and sold Holland VI to the navy, which renamed it U.S.S Holland in 1900. Holland was powered on the surface by an internal combustion engine, which also charged storage batteries.

When submerged, it ran on an electric motor. That system was used by all modern submarines until the advent of nuclear power. In the meantime, Lake had been designing other subs. In 1898, he launched Argonaut, which sailed from Norfolk to New York, becoming the first submarine to travel a significant distance on the open sea. Argonaut, which had wheels beneath her hull, was also equipped to roll along the ocean floor. Lake also invented even‑keel hydro‑planes, ballast tanks, divers compartments, periscopes, and twin hull design – all of them essential to modern submarines.

In World War I, the submarine, like the airplane, came into its own as a serious weapon. Armed with torpedoes, German submarines seriously interfered with Allied supplies. Britain, an island that had to import much of its food, was especially hard hit. It was hit even harder in World War II. “The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U‑boat peril,” Winston Churchill said. At the beginning of the war, submarines had improved far more than antisubmarine tactics. Later, such innovations as airborne radar and the cracking of German naval codes more than evened the odds, but it was a close thing. It was a different story on the other side of the world. By 1943, U.S. submarines finally had efficient torpedoes. That year they sank 22 Japanese warships and 296 merchant ships. The next year, the submarine U.S.S. Archerfish sank the huge, 59,000 ton Japanese aircraft carrier, Sinano. A month later, another sub, U.S.S. Redfish, knocked out two more Japanese carriers, Junyo and Unryu. By the end of the war, U.S. submarines sank 2,117 Japanese merchant ships – 60 percent of all those destroyed – and 201 of the 686 Japanese warships sunk.

For most of its existence up through World War II, the submarine’s biggest handicap was speed. On the surface, it was the slowest of all naval vessels.

Submerged, it might have trouble outrunning a row boat. That changed after the war, when the U.S. Navy launched the U.S.S. Skipjack. Almost all previous subs had been compromises – designed for surface travel but usable under the water. The somewhat tubular hull interfered with surface speed, while the surface‑type bow and deck, not to mention the complicated conning tower, impeded subsurface travel. Skipjack, which resembled a whale with a smooth dorsal fin, was designed for subsurface travel alone. Submerged, she was faster than most surface craft. When the navy combined the Skipjack hull with a nuclear engine, in the U.S.S. Nautilus – the name taken from both Fulton’s submarine and the craft of Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo – the modern submarine was born.

Today’s nuclear subs can stay submerged almost indefinitely and outrun most surface ships. In contrast to the small, fragile submarines of World War I, they are extremely durable and huge. They carry torpedoes with a variety of guidance systems and three times the range of the best torpedoes of World War II. They also carry a variety of rockets, including intercontinental missiles, and they can fire them while submerged. During the Cold War, U.S. submarines were able to intercept Soviet messages by tapping undersea cables. During the Iraq War, American submarines fired Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iraqi targets – some from tubes designed for that purpose, some from ordinary torpedo tubes.

In the two centuries or so since David Bushnell created American Turtle, the submarine is now bidding to take the place of the aircraft carrier as the new capital ship.