Herbert C. Fyfe

“ One by one they passed by, gathering speed as they went, and in a little while the last had disappeared into the mist and the rain and nothing remained to show that they had passed save a few white patches of foam scattered over the sullen waters.
What were the thoughts uppermost in the minds of those who watched these tiny engines of destruction? Were they not of the next occasion on which Great Britain shall require her navy to assume the offensive and “to take arms” against the foe that dares to threaten her proud supremacy? ”

“ In the hands of ignorant or careless people the Whitehead is nearly as dangerous to its friends as to its foes, but in the hands of skilful and resolute men it is the most terrible engine of warfare which the world has ever seen.”—Lieut. G. E. Armstrong, in Torpedoes and Torpedo Vessels.
“The spar-torpedo is the dagger which a determined man plunges into the body of an enemy who does not protect himself with a coat of mail; the Whitehead torpedo is the bullet which, easy to discharge from afar, kills the enemy in its path.”—Lieut. ”

“ The foremost quality of a submarine—its special guarantee of security—is that of being invisible. The Gustave Zédé will speedily have to be laid up if she betrays her presence so clumsily, but I have not much difficulty in reassuring myself. At the most, the Gustave Zédé could only have been seen when, instead of the vessel being nine feet below the surface, her optic tube, and probably even her cupola, were emerging above the water, an operation which is necessary for the discharge of the torpedo in the desired direction. ”

“ In one respect at least modern warfare is certainly more humane than that of olden times, and this is in the treatment of the wounded and the captured. In ancient warfare the fate of the captive was death or slavery, and in early battles no quarter was given, except to personages of great distinction, and the object of both sides was to slay as many of their opponents as possible, and as surrender only made the prisoner the perquisite of his captor, the fighting was both bloody and fierce. ”

“ At the utmost, the submarine will be used in narrow waters, in rivers, or to fluster or destroy ships in harbour, or with poor-spirited crews—that is to say, it will simply be an added power in the hands of the nation that is predominant at sea. And even then, it can be merely destructive, while a sane and high-spirited fighter will always be dissatisfied if, with an undisputable superiority of force, he fails to take. ”

“ It has been truly said that the difference between the methods of the Thirty Years’ War and of the War of the Spanish Succession is the difference between darkness and twilight; the difference between warfare as understood by Tilly and Pappenheim and that described in modern official Manuals is the difference between light and darkness. Everywhere is recognised that only effective injuries are justifiable. The modern soldier strikes hard, he doesn’t mutilate or destroy for the love of destruction. ”

“ Excitement may sustain them; they may figure it out that their chances of life and death are on a par with those of the soldier in a frontal attack, but it is at least doubtful. It is difficult to make the analogy; and, moreover, there is the chill of the water to consider. Nerves and courage both suffer from cold, and the interior of a submarine has always the chill of a tomb. Inside it men sit, and may not move without endangering the craft’s stability. ”

“ You may of course throw out a torpedo or so with as much chance of hitting vitally as you would have if you were blindfolded, turned round three times and told to fire revolver-shots at a charging elephant.... Given a derelict ironclad on a still night within sight of land, a carefully handled submarine might succeed in groping its way to it and destroying it; but then it would be much better to attack such a vessel and capture it boldly with a few desperate men on a tug. ”

“ But for the temptation of gaining equality with, and even mastery over, our possible foes, the art of submarine navigation would certainly not have been attracting the attention of some of our best and most scientific men, who are once again eagerly developing—
“Those dire implements
Which sombre science with unpitying pains,
That love of neither man nor God restrains,
To warring foes presents.” One can only be thankful that the world is so constituted and so ruled, that out of seeming evil often comes great good to men. ”

“ It is for the Parliament to decide if we shall be content with a modest defensive navy which would be unable, we cannot repeat too often, to do more than delay defeat in case of war, or whether on the other hand France is resolved to enforce her position as a great Power and to make the heavy but remunerative sacrifices necessary to give weight to her voice in the councils of Europe, thus attracting to herself commerce and riches, and spreading throughout the world her influence and her traditional ideal of justice and generosity. ”

“ A French naval writer commenting on the sums expended by the French Government on the construction of submarines writes—
“The cruiser which can guard itself from the ordinary torpedo-boat will be without defence against the invisible enemy slowly creeping up to it to discharge its torpedo. It will be no longer possible for it to enter narrow waters and to approach the enemy’s coast. Its only safety will be in flight, and it will become a relic of the past. The naval battles of the future will take place not on the surface but in the depths of the ocean.” ”

“ Before the advent of the torpedo boat, Great Britain was secure in her position of Mistress of the Seas, so long as she possessed more line-of-battle ships than any other nation. The arrival of the torpedo-boat, the destroyer, and the submarine, all armed with the Whitehead torpedo, has given weaker nations the chance of attacking our ironclads with new weapons, and there are even those who affirm that the battleship is doomed, and must give way to a different type of craft.
The whole trend of modern invention has been to the advantage of weaker nations. ”

“ There is always in warfare the possibility that the mine may fail to act at the critical moment, that the torpedo may not succeed in firing its mark and that the submarine boat may miss its prey.
The first occasion on which the moral influence of modern under-water methods of warfare made itself felt was during the American Civil War. ”

“ The heat, the smells, the toil must have been terrible to any one undergoing it against his will—so terrible as to suggest that even death itself were better than such drudgery. A dull dead feeling of despair must have crept over man and crew in such a case, and though the lash might keep them going under ordinary circumstances, such spirits could not be relied upon in times of emergency, Besides the question of discomfort, the actual danger was very great. ”

“ Are there not those who will bring their inventive talent to bear on the perfecting of the diving torpedo-boat and of the many contrivances that are needed to make it an efficient weapon of offence and defence?
It may be said that the encouragement given to the inventor by the Admiralty is so scanty as to make him shy of offering them his ideas. Let us hope, now that Lord Selborne and Mr. Arnold Forster are at the Admiralty, that the bad old days when inventors were snubbed, and novel ideas ridiculed, have gone never to return. The submersible craft of to-day is no longer an ingenious toy ”

“ It is exceedingly probable that the adoption of a new engine of warfare by a tribe would be condemned by another tribe—to whom it had not occurred to use it—as illegitimate, but it is equally probable that while sturdily protesting against the use of one weapon the tribe would be slily endeavouring to procure one more deadly still. ”

“ Those who discuss submarine navigation as if it were quite a new development are apt to forget that the earliest use of the torpedo was in an under-water vessel. Bushnell and Fulton, no less than the Confederates of a later day, saw that their best chance of success lay in attacking by stealth, and though the modern Whitehead is a very different weapon to the cases of explosive used by Bushnell and Fulton, or the spar-torpedo employed by the Confederates in their Davids, there are still the same advantages to be gained by a submarine attack. ”

“ Guy Fawkes is got afloat, battles in future may be fought under water; our invincible ships of the line may give place to horrible and unknown structures, our projects to catamarans, our pilots to divers, our hardy, dauntless tars to submarine assassins ”

“ Those who make the dogmatic assertion that the submarine boat cannot be very fast because she cannot be endowed with much power, remind one of the wiseacres who were so convinced that steamboats would never replace sailing-vessels, nor steam locomotives the horse-drawn coach.
“The power required to impel a vessel through the water is augmented by her submergence. If 5,000 1–h.p. are required to drive a displacement of 120 tons at 28 knots, then rather more power will be required to drive 120 tons wholly submerged at the same speed.” ”

“ As to the “inhumanity” of the submarine vessel, Mr. Nordenfelt, it may be noted, would not admit that there was anything especially cruel or horrible in the idea of a diving torpedo boat. War altogether was cruel and horrible, and caused an enormous amount of pain and suffering, but any invention which tended to shorten a war or to protect common or private property during war would really diminish this suffering on the whole. ”

“ The submarine compares naturally with the torpedo destroyer or torpedo boat; like them it will attack by stealth, and it has neither their speed nor radius of action. But, whereas searchlights and quick-firing guns are effective weapons against the latter, they are of little use against the submarine, and as all these craft are to act by surprise, the advantage is strongly in favour of the submarine, which can approach with little danger of being discovered, with the cupola only showing, until close to her enemy, thus rendering a close blockade by large vessels impossible. ”

“ Powder vessels, coal torpedoes, et hoc genus omne, are condemned because they pretend to be what in reality they are not, and torpedoes and submarine boats because they advance in secrecy without giving the enemy any chance of firing at them or of protecting themselves against their insidious attacks beneath the water-line.
The arguments of the humanitarians, who are doubtless well meaning enough, are inconsistent, because, while they raise no protest against certain modes of conducting war, they unreservedly condemn other methods—mainly, it must be observed, because of their novelty. ”

“ Officialism is, and always has been, a foe to inventive progress, and the official mind still seems incapable of realising that invention is a plant of slow growth; that improvements or innovations when first mooted do not necessarily represent their final form, and that all the great advances and revolutions in the past in the world of science, invention, and discovery have sprung from small beginnings which have grown gradually and slowly until they forced upon themselves the recognition that was their due. ”

“ THE AMERICAN SUBMARINES “The Submarine Boat is a small ship on the model of the Whitehead, subject to none of its limitations, improving on all its special qualities, excepting speed, for which it substitutes incomparably greater endurance. It is not, like other small vessels, compelled to select for its antagonist a vessel of about its own or inferior power; the larger and more powerful its mark the better its opportunity.”—Mr. ”

“ Nordenfelt remarked, “It is impossible to think of a submarine boat that actually manœuvres and does its work under water. I gave that up from the very commencement.”
By the term “submarine” we mean to imply a vessel capable of manœuvring on the surface like an ordinary torpedo boat, of running awash with her conning tower alone above water to enable her to be steered, and of totally immersing herself for short periods either to escape detection, avoid the fire of the enemy, or fire torpedoes. ”

“ One thing stands between the submarine boat and efficiency, and that is the motor by which it is propelled. But there is no disguising the fact that if you can add speed to the other qualities of the submarine boat, it might in certain circumstances become a very formidable vessel. We are comforted by the judgment of the United States and Germany, which is hostile to these inventions, which I confess I desire shall never prosper.— (Commander Young, M.P., said that if the Admiralty built any submarine boats, all he would ask would be that he might not be ordered to serve on one.) ”

“ To say that if a submarine rises anywhere near a destroyer armed with a spar, her destruction is absolutely certain, is, we think, going too far. To blow up a stationary barrel is not a very difficult task, but it must not be forgotten that if the destroyer sights the submarine, the submarine will also sight the destroyer and will endeavour to launch a torpedo at the destroyer before the latter can explode its weapon. ”