Chapter 1: Giant Submarines
1. U 152 had an eventful surface gun action career during the last year of the Great War. Her victims included the armed transport USS Ticonderoga, which sank on 22 September 1918 after a long gun duel and a final torpedo hit, killing 213 US Navy personnel and Army soldiers. A week later U 152 engaged in a running gun duel with the large American tanker George G Henry, which managed to escape although damaged and set on fire by a 15cm shell.
2. All the drawings of Project 50 and her novel ‘diving boilers’ disappeared after November 1918, like so many other Great War German weapons and designs, from the monster Paris Gun to the 13mm TuF, the Tank und Fleiger machine gun (although one sole example of the latter weapon can be seen in the German Army’s Technical Museum in Koblenz).
3. U 140 spawned the giant USN boats; U 142 was copied by the Japanese as the I-1; experience with U 139 persuaded the French to build Surcouf, although the inspiration for her armament came from M.1; X.1 took up the idea of the gun-armed submarine from U 141, but in size and general appearance she was clearly a development of the RN ‘K’ class boats.
Chapter 2: Design Criteria
1. Previous Admiralty attempts at deliberate misinformation had mixed success. Their first major ‘spoof’ of the twentieth century succeeded in fooling the Imperial German Navy into putting 8.2in guns into their first hybrid battlecruiser Blücher, to match the 9.2in reportedly intended for Invincible, when of course the latter vessel was armed with 12in guns. The attempt to trick everyone into thinking that the second class of battlecruiser, the Indefatigables, carried thicker armour than was actually the case backfired with disastrous results at Jutland. However, the designation of the ‘Insect’ and ‘Fly’ classes as ‘China Gunboats’ was a good cover story for their planned deployment to, respectively, the Danube and the Tigris.
2. Max Horton, who sank T116, later wrote ‘To hit a destroyer always requires maximum luck’. Commodore Keyes commented ‘To get one of those wriggling destroyers is like shooting snipe with a rifle’.
3. T116 torpedoed in 1914 by Submarine E.9 off the mouth of the Ems.
T188 in 1915 by E.15 in the North Sea.
T191 in 1915 by E.9 in the Baltic.
S33 in 1918 by L.10 in the North Sea.
4. TB No 10 torpedoed in 1915 by a U-boat in the North Sea.
TB No 12 in 1915 by a U-boat in the North Sea.
Recruit in 1915 in the Thames Estuary.
Attack in 1917 off Alexandria by UC 34.
Itchen in 1917 in the North Sea by U 99.
Staunch in 1917 off Gaza by UC 38.
Contest in 1917 in the Channel.
Comet in 1918 in the Mediterranean.
Phoenix in 1918 in the Adriatic by the Austrian U XXVII
Ulleswater in 1918 off the Dutch Coast.
Scott in 1918 off the Dutch Coast by UC 17.
5. X.1’s projected sister-ship, the X.2, was never built. The designation ‘X.2’, long reserved for her, was eventually applied to the captured Italian submarine Galileo Galilei. X.3 was of course the first prototype of the successful midget submarines.
6. It was this problem which would fatally handicap the Kriegsmarine during the Second World War, culminating in the humiliation of the Battle of the Barents Sea (Operation ‘Regenbogen’) on the last day of 1942, when the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, the panzerschiffe (‘pocket battleship’) Lützow and six large destroyers attacked Convoy JW.51B. Held at bay by a screen of destroyers and corvettes, the heavy German ships withdrew when the RN 6in cruisers Sheffield and Jamaica came on the scene. This was the action which caused Hitler to fly into a rage and order the scrapping of all large German warships. It also resulted in Grand Admiral Raeder’s dismissal.
Chapter 3: Propulsion Machinery
1. The Liberty and Curtiss V-12 aero engines were small, lightweight petrol units, making extensive use of aluminium castings, and producing over 400hp – or more than half the output of the old German engines out of U 126. Their lightweight construction was required for use in aircraft, and of course they had an extremely short life between major rebuilds, the opposite of those qualities required for a marine engine, especially a diesel.
Chapter 5: Armament
1. Preserved in the Public Record Office, Kew, under References ADM 186/268 and 269.
2. For comparison, the twin 5.25in DP mounts on the King George V class battleships and Dido class cruisers achieved only seven to eight rounds per minute per gun. The triple 6in turret on the ‘Town’ and ‘Colony’ class cruisers fired at a rate of eight rounds per minute per gun.
3. All the preserved papers deal with what was NOT considered a suitable AA armament, rather than what could be.
4. HMS Excellent’s report of 18 February 1926 noted practical maxima of +35 degrees and −7 degrees.
5. The basic instrument was designated the Admiralty Fire Control Clock. When fitted with a plot which produced a paper record of the movements during a gun action, the instrument was known as the Admiralty Fire Control Table.
6. Notably the action off Calabria on 9 July 1940, when HMS Warspite landed a 15in shell on the Italian battleship Giulio Cesare at the unprecedented range of 26,000 yards (24,000m), while both ships were manoeuvring at high speed.
7. Examination of the wreck of M.1 points to the likelihood that her gun mounting was dislodged in a glancing collision, leading to uncontrollable flooding into the handling spaces below. Not only was X.1 much larger than M.I, but she was designed to survive an accidental flooding of her ammunition handling spaces.
8. Virtually all of the large Japanese boats would be lost to attack while submerged, including the giant aircraft carrier I-13 during her mission to Ulithi at the very end of the Pacific War.
9. Constructor Commander Stanton had already noted this problem during X.1’s first cruise to Gibraltar, and in his report dated 29 April 1926 he had recommended that the gun trunk glands should be worked by a separate motor, rather than having to rely on the hydraulic pump supplying the whole turret and hoists.
10. The 2pdr pom-pom was an excellent short-range weapon providing considerable firepower. In this respect it served with distinction in Coastal Forces’ motor torpedo boats and motor gun boats, and as a bow-chaser on destroyers hunting enemy S-Boats. The problems with using the pom-pom as the main medium-range anti-aircraft gun were numerous: multiple mountings were heavy and required a large crew and considerable power to operate them. In local manual control they were far too cumbersome to track a fast-moving aircraft. Combining four and also eight 2pdrs in one mounting could produce a lethal concentration of shells, but the other hand, if the gunners’ aim was off, all the guns missed. Fatally, the short barrel and cartridge case gave the weapon a comparatively low muzzle velocity and therefore a shorter range than, say, the 40mm Bofors of identical calibre. Coupled to this the 40mm HE shell was designed to self-destruct at the end of its effective range, but this was severely curtailed by the length of the fuse fitted. The most disastrous example of the pom-pom’s shortcomings occurred when HMS Repulse and Prince of Wales were sunk by Japanese aircraft off Malaya on 10 December 1941, when the gunners of Force ‘Z’, forbidden to fire on a torpedo plane after it had dropped its load, found to their dismay that the Japanese G3M2 ‘Nells’ were dropping their two torpedoes outside the range at which the Pom-Pom’s shells were self-destroying. The few Japanese planes to be lost during this disastrous engagement were almost all shot down by the gunners on Repulse, who disobeyed orders and fired on ‘Nells’ passing close overhead.
11. D J Dent, Rear Admiral (S), on 18 March 1921.
Chapter 6: The Ship, Her Hull, Fittings and Complement
1. The first all-welded warship built for the Royal Navy was the Halcyon class minesweeper Seagull, launched in the mid-1930s.
2. Published by ICT Nethercoate, Bryant, Hadley, Upper Beeding, West Sussex BN44 3TQ.
3. Against this, see the reports in Chapter 8 of swimming alongside at Malta.
4. This shade is depicted in Warship Profile No. 16 ‘HM SIM Upholder’ by Captain M.L.C. Crawfurd DSC* RN (Retired).
5. The meaning of the term Asdic never appeared in any official contemporary document. It is assumed to comprise the initial letters of the Anti-Submarine Division, completed by an abbreviation of ‘sonics’. The corresponding US acronym is SONAR = SOund Navigation And Ranging.
6. At the time, it was erroneously held that the use of Asdic by RN ships would nullify the future employment of ‘enemy’ submarines. The primitive nature of the early sets, the initial lack of depth ranging and difficulties caused by sea layers of different density, would prove this hope to be over-exaggerated during the Second World War. The Battle of the Atlantic would be won primarily because of radar, high-frequency radio direction finding and aircraft.
7. H.32 was also a trials submarine, like X.1, for closed ventilation battery cooling systems. It is likely the Admiralty wanted trials of these two innovations in both a coastal boat and an ocean-going corsair.
8. Every naval designer was only too aware of the near-tragic incident on 27 August 1862 when the huge steamer Great Eastern ‘discovered’ the uncharted pinnacle of rock in the approach to New York (which would later be named after her), when she ran into it. A historic voyage by a submarine into poorly charted waters had already resulted in tragedy. In September 1914 the Australian ‘E’ class boat AE.1 had been ordered to patrol off German New Guinea to hunt the small colonial cruiser Geier. She had set off accompanied by the destroyer Parramatta, but they parted company during the voyage, and the unfortunate AE.1 failed to return. It is suspected that she struck an uncharted reef somewhere in the Bismarck Sea, and her grave remains undiscovered at the time of writing. There is a memorial to the crew of AE.1 at the Bitapaka War Cemetery, on Rabaul, near the site of the colonial German radio station attacked by an Allied force in the Great War.
9. Except for the high speed of 15 knots reached underwater by the special ‘hunter-killer’ submarines of the ‘R’ class.
10. U 135 had been completed in 1918 at Danzig Dockyard, was surrendered to Great Britain at the end of the war, and in 1921 sank on her way to the breakers.
Chapter 7: Trials and Tribulations
1. The limit of 8in was set, not – as often quoted – by the RN ‘Improved Birmingham’ Class with their 7.5in guns, but because US armoured cruisers mounted 8in guns.
2. The Royal Navy alone had lost five pre-dreadnought battleships, nine cruisers, twelve armed merchant cruisers, thirteen escort ships and armed boarding vessels, one monitor, fifteen destroyers, torpedo boats and torpedo gunboats, three submarines, twelve sloops, sixteen Q-ships, two minesweepers and seven armed yachts and other auxiliaries, to direct enemy submarine torpedo attack. Dozens of other warships had been sunk or damaged by mines laid by submarines, the most notorious being the loss of HMS Hampshire off the Orkneys on 5 June 1916, drowning Lord Kitchener.
3. Beginning on the first day of the war when the Donaldson liner Athenia was torpedoed and more than 200 passengers and crew were lost.
4. The actual photograph received by the Daily Herald and the printing block used in the second edition have been preserved, in the file of papers on the case in the Public Records Office, Kew, under Ref: ADM1/8636/28.
5. The ‘Devastator’ midget submarine was conceived by Godfrey Herbert during the Great War and promoted by Max Horton as late as 1923. Displacing not more than 10 tons, and powered by multiple torpedo engines for an attack speed of 45 to 50 knots, the one- or two-man midget would carry a one-ton warhead to attack enemy vessels at sea. As per Herbert’s original plans they would be launched from capital ships once the enemy fleet was sighted. Max Horton’s proposals to the Admiralty in 1923 foreshadowed the use of midget submarines in the Second World War, in that he planned to use them to attack enemy ships inside their harbours. The crew was supposed to eject from the vessel once the midget was locked on target, in a sealed compartment which would cushion them from the warhead’s blast, and hope to be picked up by a friendly vessel. It was this semi-suicidal or at least ‘expendable’ aspect which caused the Admiralty of the 1920s to reject the idea.
6. This use of M.3 as a carrier for Devastators had been proposed by Horton. It would be enthusiastically taken up by the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the Type A midgets launched from mother submarines would open the attack on Pearl Harbor.
7. A British officer who according to MI5 files, spied on the US Navy for the Japanese. Frederick Rutland joined the Royal Navy as a boy and won the DSO at Jutland. A pioneer of naval air warfare, on 1 October 1917 he flew a Sopwith Pup off the roof of ‘B’ turret of HMS Repulse. Having transferred to the RAF, in 1922 he was approached by the Japanese for advice on aircraft carriers. A few months later, he resigned his commission. Watched by the British intelligence services, in 1933 his name came up in messages intercepted by codebreakers. Oka Arata, Japanese Naval Attaché in London, had recruited him as a spy. Rutland was told to go to California to set up a series of branches of an import-export business, including one in Los Angeles and one in Honolulu, from which he could spy on the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Codenamed Shinkawa (New River) he was given £100,000 to start up the business and £3,750 a year as salary, significant sums at the time. The British codebreakers learned that Rutland was setting up a branch of his import-export business in Regent Street as a ‘post box’ through which he could pass his intelligence reports to the Japanese naval attaché in London. Rutland was followed by MI6 to America where he was watched by the FBI. Over the next eight years his intelligence reports were monitored by the British. He appears to have spent much of his time living the high life in Beverly Hills. However, when in 1941 the FBI arrested a Japanese spy Rutland, fearing he would be compromised, approached the Americans offering to spy on Japan. The FBI declined the offer and put him in the hands of MI6. Rutland returned to Britain and settled down in Marlow. When war with Japan broke out, he was taken into custody. But the British were reticent to charge him because that could compromise their codebreaking operation, so in 1944 he was released.
8. The greatest irony is, of course, that if one openly behaves as if there is a threat of breakdown in relations, then such a breakdown becomes all the more likely. It is not inconceivable that the actions taken by Winston Churchill as First Sea Lord in 1914 to seize the battleships being built in Britain for the Turkish Navy, helped push the Turks into siding with the Central Powers in the Great War. The Sultan Osman I had been paid for partly by public subscription – the women of Anatolia had even shorn and sold their hair – to get revenge on the hated Greeks, and the heavy-handed British action outraged Turkish public opinion. This allowed the pro-German faction to gain the upper hand, and set the scene for Admiral Souchon to offer the battlecruiser Goeben to Turkey as a replacement. Thankfully the United States Navy never acted on one of its likely battle scenarios drawn up following the Great War, namely the possibility of armed conflict with Great Britain over world trade.
9. Advice on conversion of the Hosho from the oiler Hiryu was provided by the Semphill Technical Mission. Also, one of the eight production Parnall Peto floatplanes built for M.2 was transferred to the Imperial Japanese Navy, which promptly produced a copy for use by their own submariners.
Chapter 9: A Litany of Failures
1. A modern misinformation parallel has emerged with disclosures about the US Air Force’s ‘stealth’ bomber, the B-2. In the last days of Hitler’s Third Reich, the Luftwaffe discovered that their ‘flying wing’ prototypes had a very low radar signature. When the Northrop Corporation built on Nazi research and constructed giant B-35 and B-49 Flying Wing bombers they were soon dubbed a failure. It was only in recent years, with the public revelations of the B-2 Stealth bomber that the true story has emerged. The big Flying Wings also had a surprisingly small radar signature. The Americans panicked in case the Russians discovered this feature, and constructed similar jet bombers capable of penetrating the North American radar net to launch first strike nuclear attacks. So, the Flying Wing was dropped and labelled a failure.
Chapter 10: An Unlucky Fall
1. The Royal Navy, along with several other maritime powers, was no stranger to drydock incidents. The most notorious was the capsizing of the brand-new Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert in 1901, when the drydock in which she was being constructed was flooded to float her out. The cause of the disaster was uncontrolled adding of luxurious fittings high up, but the overall responsibility was Sir William Whites. The affair was the cause of his fall from favour, and one of our greatest warship designers was removed from the scene prematurely.
Possibly the greatest naval shipwreck of all time was the collapse and partial sinking of the huge Admiralty Floating Dock (AFD) No. 28, on 8 August 1944 at Trincomalee. The 80,000-ton AFD was seriously damaged, and a major section sank to the seabed 160ft below. The Queen Elizabeth class battleship HMS Valiant, displacing 35,000 tons, was in the dock when it collapsed, and narrowly missed joining it on the sea bed. As it was, Valiant was badly holed in the stern, and her two inner shafts were bent upwards. During her voyage to Alexandria and temporary repairs, both inner shafts had to be cut off together with the propellers and the shaft bearing brackets. Valiant never saw action again.
Chapter 11: Only the British were Fooled
1. The large Japanese boat I-8’s twin 5.5in DP mounting on her foredeck was not a turret. Raeder’s planned Type XI class never left the drawing board.
2. If X.1 had been renamed Drake or Grenville then her commerce-raiding potential would have been plain for all to see.
3. From 1929 France was engaged in completing the shield of the Maginot Line in the north-east and south-east. The French Army was building up a modern armoured force of tanks, armoured cars and APCs, and re-equipping the infantry with modern machine guns, rifles and anti-tank weapons. La Royale was constructing a modern surface fleet, which would become the fourth most powerful in the world. The Armée de l’Air was purchasing thousands of modern French and US planes.
4. Rudder problems were apparently common to many contemporary French submarine classes, and took some time to rectify.
Chapter 12: Reflections and Epilogue
1. A friend described to the author the story of his German father-in-law, who was ‘obliged’ to move to the UK in 1945 to act as a consultant on factory machine tools. He had been astounded to discover that far too many UK factories still used machine tools and processes that were almost a hundred years old.
2. The workers replaced the missing cork with newspapers, dated during the period she was under construction. Hot ashes piled up against the boiler room bulkhead set the newspapers on fire and the magazine burst into flames.
3. Fatally, this rebuilding programme was begun too late to include Hood, Barham or Repulse.
4. The private-enterprise R.100 was an unqualified success. The state-funded R.101 was an overweight vessel which should have never been granted a certificate of airworthiness, let alone be allowed to depart on her fateful flight to India.
5. As with the Royal Flying Corps Great War fuselage roundels painted alongside an aircraft observer, thus turning him into a perfect target!
6. The three products of Admiral Fisher’s last and wildest scheme – the Baltic Plan – were irreverently nicknamed ‘Outrageous’, ‘Uprorious’ and ‘Spurious’ (also known, under their correct names, as Courageous, Glorious and Furious).
7. The mystical sword of King Arthur, which could return to defend Britannia.