A Higher Form of Killing by Diana Preston Read Free Book Online Page B

Baron Marschall, warned against the stupidity of making laws for naval combat that might be rendered useless “by the law of facts.” Although the delegates agreed to ban the use of unanchored submarine contact mines that remained armed for more than an hour after release, the major issues of Cruiser Rules, contraband, and neutral rights were deferred to a meeting of naval powers to be held in London the following year, 1908.
    Ironically, the second Hague Conference ended by adopting a resolution calling for a third in 1915.
     
     
    * In 1906 the winner of the physics prize was J. J. Thomson, discoverer of the electron. Marie Curie, her husband Pierre, Henri Becquerel, and Wilhelm Röntgen had all earlier received prizes for their work on radiation. Then considered pure science with its results openly published and internationally discussed, it would lead to the development of the atomic bomb—a weapon many times more powerful than any contemplated at The Hague.
     

CHAPTER FOUR
    “A Scrap of Paper”
    When the conference on marine matters convened in London in 1908, Britain was the dominant maritime power in both naval and commercial terms. Engaged in a naval race with Germany, Britain’s philosophy was that its navy should be equal in strength to any two others. (The U.S. Navy was omitted from such calculations indicating the growing closeness between the two countries and the consequent improbability of war between them.) Britain’s merchant fleet made up 48 percent of the world’s shipping and transported more than half the world’s total seaborne trade.
    Despite Jacky Fisher’s introduction of the dreadnought battleship, some naval strategists saw the torpedo-armed submarine as the greatest threat to Britain’s maritime hegemony. Fisher himself called them “the battleships of the future.” The concept of underwater warfare was not new. Thucydides described divers acting as underwater saboteurs during the Roman siege of Syracuse. Leonardo da Vinci sketched a form of diving suit. In 1578 an Englishman, William Bourne, designed a submersible that could rise and sink by filling or emptying ballast tanks on either side—a key characteristic of modern submarines. Early next century Dutchman Cornelius Van Drebbel reputedly demonstrated a vessel based on Bourne’s design on the river Thames.
    David Bushnell produced the first documented precursor of the modern submarine when he launched his submersible Turtle against HMS Eagle during the American Revolution in New York harbor on September 6, 1776. The egg-shaped Turtle was a one-man wooden vessel, seven feet long and four feet wide with four portholes, three sleeved armholes, and an access hatch on top. She was propelled by two hand-operated screws—a horizontal one to propel her up and down and a vertical one to move her backward and forward. A foot-operated valve let water flow in to help her descend, while a foot pump pushed it out again to enable her to rise. Bushnell’s plan for the Turtle to attach a 150-pound explosive charge to the Eagle failed because the operator, Sergeant Ezra Lee, could not get the drill bit designed to fit dynamite charges to penetrate the Eagle ’s metal-reinforced hull.
    In May 1801 Robert Fulton of Pennsylvania followed up Bushnell’s work, launching the copper-skinned Nautilus —the first submarine built of metal. He offered his designs first to France and then to Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. Both declined. British admiral Earl St. Vincent summed up the general view that they were “a mode of war which we who command the seas do not want, and which, if successful, would deprive us of it.”
    In February 1864, the USS Housatonic —a new 1,264-ton frigate serving with the Union squadron blockading the Confederate port of Charleston—was the first ship sunk by a submarine. On a clear, cold, moonlit night, the CSS Hunley , a slender submersible forty feet long but just forty-two inches in diameter and built of 3/8-inch