Blackett's War Read Online Free

could be stocked per rifle or carbine (400), was Article 191, which declared: “The construction or acquisition of any submarine, even for commercial purposes, shall be forbidden in Germany.” In the course of the war Germany’s submarines had sunk over 5,000 Allied merchant vessels, totaling 12 million tons of shipping. No one before the war had imagined that the submarine, barely more than an inventor’s crackpot dream a few years earlier, would have been capable of bringing Great Britain, and its mightiest fleet on earth, to the edge of catastrophe in 1917; no one had imagined the inhumanity that the submarine would make routine and inevitable once it was unleashed in the only way it could be truly effective as a weapon of total war. But what man’s sordid ingenuity for destruction had created, the majesty of international law as decently dreamed of by Woodrow Wilson, and cynically seconded by his more worldly wise allies in London and Paris, would nobly or ignobly contain.
    IT WAS THE SPEED of technological progress, more than anything, that had left conventional naval thinking so far behind. In 1887, a dredger working its way through Kiel harbor struck a large obstacle buried in the mud. After considerable effort the object was grappled to the surface, and when layers of seaweed and encrusted barnacles were scraped away, the astonished workers found themselves staring at a 40-ton, 26-foot-long hulk of sheet-iron plates, shaped like a child’s drawing of a rather rectangular whale. The relic turned out to be
Le Plongeur Marin
, a three-man submersible conceived by a Bavarian artillery corporal named William Bauer, who had dreamed of a daring strike against the blockading enemy fleet during Germany’s war with Denmark in 1850. During a trial dive on February 1, 1851, a slug of iron ballast that could be screwed forward or aft on a threaded rod to control the boat’s inclination came loose and slid to the bow. The
Plongeur
, true to itsname, promptly nosed straight down and headed for the bottom. Bauer and his crew of two came to an abrupt halt sixty feet below the harbor’s surface. With remarkable presence of mind, Bauer realized their only hope was to flood the compartment with water to compress the remaining air trapped inside until its pressure equaled the force of the seawater bearing against the hatches on the outside, allowing the hatches to swing open. Convincing his two sailors to carry out these orders was another matter, but after a violent argument—and five hours of effort—his desperate plan succeeded, and the men “shot up to the surface like corks out of a champagne bottle,” one witness recounted. 6
    The inventor of
Le Plongeur Marin
was scarcely distinguishable from scores of other obsessives, monomaniacs, and crackpots who for centuries had been drawn to the idea of undersea travel; only the dream of flying through the air held a greater allure for the legion of half-mad inventors. During the American Revolution and the War of 1812, intrepid American experimenters had built tiny submersibles with which they attempted to fasten explosive charges to British warships on dark nights off New York and Long Island. They all failed, but rattled the British nonetheless, who were left sputtering with indignation over such unsportsmanlike conduct; beside submarines the Americans had sent floating kegs of explosives adrift toward the anchored enemy ships and planted booby traps in decoy vessels filled with naval stores that they let fall into British hands. “It appears the Enemy are disposed to make use of every unfair and Cowardly mode of Warfare,” fumed the British admiral commanding the Royal Navy’s forces fighting America in the War of 1812. 7
    There was always something of the ludicrous and harebrained, or at least tragicomic, in these inventors’ schemes: their makeshift submersibles, looking about as seaworthy as a whiskey barrel, leaked furiously and were barely controllable. All were