Читать книгу Submarine Warfare, Past, Present, and Future - Herbert C. Fyfe - Страница 11

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“War’s a brain-spattering, wind-pipe slitting art. It is not to be ‘humanised,’ but only abolished one fine day when nations have cut their wisdom teeth.”

“Inter arma silent leges.”

“All’s fair in love and war.”

“The sea fights of the future, with improved ships, guns, and range-finders, may be fought at ranges almost beyond the ken of unaided human vision. It is to be hoped that before that time arrives the progress of civilisation, intellect, and humanity will have consigned all weapons of war to the museum of the antiquary, and that other methods than war may have been discovered for preserving the peace and virility of men and nations.”

In the early years of the nineteenth century the writer of an article in the Naval Chronicle, devoted to a consideration of Fulton’s schemes, stigmatised his torpedoes and submarine boats as “revolting to every noble principle,” their projector as a “crafty murderous ruffian,” and his patrons as “openly stooping from their lofty stations to superintend the construction of such detestable machines, that promised destruction to maritime establishments.” He went on to protest against the policy of encouraging inventions that tended to innovate on the triumphant system of naval warfare in which England excelled, and he concluded thus:

“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; coffers, rockets, catamarans, infernals, water-worms, and fire-devils! How honourable! how fascinating is such an enumeration! How glorious, how fortunate for Britain are discoveries like these! How worthy of being adopted by a people made wanton by naval victories, by a nation whose empire are the seas!”

It is quite evident that even in this “so-called Twentieth Century” there exist many Britons who in their heart of heart agree with this writer, and who cherish the idea, though they may not openly express it, that there is something mean and underhanded, something dishonourable and “un-English” in all methods of under-water warfare. The Englishman prides himself on being a lover of fair play, and so long as the odds are more or less equal, he is ready to enjoy any contest or sport. The average Englishman is neither a hot-headed Jingoist, nor a peace-at-any-price humanitarian; he regards wars as unfortunate necessities of modern civilisation, and he likes to see them waged fairly and squarely, each side observing the rules of the game. As regards warfare on land, it must be confessed that he has had to correct some of his ideas since the Boer war. He would have preferred the enemy to come out into the open and fight like men. Instead of this, they took every precaution to avoid being seen, and our army found that it had to face an invisible foe. From the Boers we have learnt the lesson of the value of cover and entrenchments, and now officers and men, however much they may dislike it, are forced to seek and utilise cover whenever possible, making it their aim to hit their opponents and to avoid being hit themselves.

“Let us admit it fairly as a business people should,

We have had no end of a lesson, it will do us no end of good.”

In naval warfare we have had no opportunity of learning our lesson in the light of actual experience, for we have had no big battle on the seas since Trafalgar, and our naval supremacy has not been seriously threatened since 1805; it is thus possible for men to hold different opinions as to the value of submarine fighting, and we consequently find that there are numerous people who, whilst they would not go so far as to declare mines, torpedoes, and submarine boats unlawful, yet consider them as methods better fitted to the requirements of other nations than to those of the Mistress of the Seas.

Modern submarine warfare was introduced by two Americans, David Bushnell and Robert Fulton, and forced itself into prominence during the American War of Independence. The spar-torpedo originated in America; the Whitehead torpedo was first adopted by the Austrian Government, and Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, and Austria all began to build torpedo boats before Great Britain condescended to add them to her Navy.

As to submarine vessels Greece and Turkey purchased Nordenfelt boats in 1887. France built her first boat in 1888, and the United States purchased her first submarine, the Holland, in 1900. Great Britain, then, has followed instead of leading other nations in the matter of mines, torpedoes, and submarine boats, and has only been induced to adopt such methods of warfare because other nations forced her to do so.

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. Earl St. Vincent described under-water methods as “a mode of war which they, who commanded the seas, did not want, and which, if successful, would deprive them of it.” It is quite true that Great Britain would sooner trust to her guns and her line-of-battle ships than to her torpedoes and torpedo craft in actions on the high seas, but owing to other nations—admittedly weaker—having adopted the torpedo, she has no choice but to adopt it also in order to maintain her naval supremacy. So long as she provides herself not only with methods of submarine attack, but also with means of warding off the under-water attacks of the enemy, other nations are not likely to wrest the command of the seas from her.

It is idle to lament the advancement of Science. Man is an inventive animal, and is ever trying to inaugurate new devices and improve on old ones. For hundreds of years the sailing ship held the field, and guns and cannon underwent but little change. During the “Wonderful Century,” however, changes began in earnest. The wooden sailing ship disappeared, and the steam-driven ironclad took its place, whilst rifled ordnance, high explosive shells, and powerful propellants were introduced.

The fish torpedo made its appearance, and the swift torpedo vessel followed in its wake, and we are now threatened with submarine boats, turbine-driven men-of-war, and aerial machines for the launching of aerial torpedoes both on armies and on fleets.

What the future has in store none can foresee, and until the next great naval battle between first-class Powers comes to pass the value of modern engines of warfare will remain doubtful. All that is certain at present is that Great Britain cannot afford to dispense with mines, torpedoes, and submarine boats.

We may seem to have wandered a long way from the “morality of submarine warfare,” but our purpose has been to show that when certain people argue—as they do seriously in this year of grace—that torpedo warfare should be declared contrary to the laws and customs of war, they are, to a certain extent, influenced by the fact that the torpedo is a weapon which Great Britain could very well do without, provided it was tabooed by other nations.

No one, not even a member of the Peace Society, would urge the suppression of the Lee-Enfield, or the quick-firer, because Great Britain relies on these for the maintenance of her place in the front rank of the nations of the world, and the argument as to the “illegitimacy” of the torpedo depends largely on the fact that other nations gain and Great Britain loses by its adoption.

There have been persons who have argued in favour of giving no quarter to crews of torpedo boats and submarines that might fall into our hands, and have suggested that we could explain such action to the other Powers, to whose advantage it is to use such weapons, by saying that though we had been driven to employ such methods, we were forced to treat the practice with severity. Such a course of action would cut both ways, and we suspect our own torpedoists would be very much averse to it.

Strange engines of warfare and new modes of fighting are received by the bulk of a nation, whose instincts are conservative and whose minds are incapable of imagining a state of things other than that which prevails at the moment, in much the same way as are new inventions. They are first of all scouted as impossible; then, if possible, of no utility; and finally, when they have been universally adopted, they are declared to be no novelties at all. Just as many old ladies have been heard to declare that they will never travel by the Two-penny Tube, so nations have been known to disclaim all intention of using particular weapons. Yet after a time we find the old ladies in the Tube and the nations employing the weapons. Familiarity breeds contempt.

The earliest man—Homo sapiens—fought with his fists, his legs, and his teeth. Gradually he made for himself weapons, deriving his first instruction in their manufacture by observing the ways in which the animal creation fought one another. His earliest weapons were made of wood, bone, and stone, and in due course there was evolved the spear, the waddy, the boomerang, the hatchet, the tomahawk, the bow and arrow, the pike, the lance, the axe, the sword, and other implements.

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.

The first great revolution in the art of war was the introduction of gunpowder, both as a propelling agent and also as a charge for shells and bombs. Although the explosive nature of saltpetre when mixed with carbon and charcoal was doubtless known to the Chinese some centuries before the Christian era, our first knowledge of the use of gunpowder as a military agent dates from the seventh century, when it was used by the Byzantine emperors under the name of “Greek fire” in the defence of Constantinople against the Saracens.

“Greek fire,” the invention of which is commonly attributed to Callinichus in 668 A.D., consisted probably of pounded resin or bitumen, sulphur, naphtha, and nitre. There were three ways of employing it: it was poured out burning from ladles on besiegers, it was projected out of tubes to a distance, and it was shot from balistæ burning on tow, tied to arrows. Its effect was probably rather moral than material.

Geoffrey de Vinesauf, in an account of a naval battle in the time of Richard I., writes thus of Greek fire: “The fire, with a deadly stench and livid flames, consumes flint and iron; and unquenchable by water, can only be extinguished by sand or vinegar. What more direful than a naval conflict! What more fatal, when so various a fate envolves the combatants, for they are either burnt and writhe in the flames, shipwrecked and swallowed up by the waves, or wounded and perish by arms.”

Despite the lamentations of the humanitarians of the time, Greek fire and serpents (missiles resembling rockets charged with and impelled by the slow explosion of a certain mixture) continued to be used in the navy until the reign of Richard III.

Another favourite method of early naval warfare was the “fire-ship.” Falkiner, an old writer, tells us that fire-ships were used by the Rhodians in 190 B.C. They were certainly used by the Greeks; they were employed by ourselves against the Armada, and they first appeared in our Navy List in the year 1675; they were used in the Dutch and French wars at the close of that century, but probably fell into disuse in the eighteenth. It is quite clear that with the French, as well as with ourselves, the crews of fire-ships did not expect quarter. Admiral Gambier deprecated fire-ships as being a “horrible and anti-Christian mode of warfare,” while Lord Cochrane said that if any attempts were made upon the British squadron by fire-ships they would be “boarded by the numerous row-boats on guard, the crews murdered, and the fire-ships turned in a harmless direction.”

Lord Dunsany appeared to think that this apparently cruel rule of no quarter to the crews of fire-ships worked well for humanity in practice, and he seemed to be in favour of its being extended to the crews of torpedo-boats and submarines. His Lordship pointed out, in a lecture at the Royal United Service Institution, that the crews of fire-ships would not stick to their ships to the moment of explosion, but had after firing the fuse to make their escape in boats, which boats, as they passed through the enemy’s lines, would naturally become targets, and if meanwhile some ship clasped in the deadly embrace of the fire-ship had exploded, it was all the more likely that the fugitives would be the objects of unsparing vengeance.

“Probably then the vague but fatal epithet ‘un-English’ came to attach to men who used a deadly weapon, but withdrew themselves (sometimes too quickly) from the fray. I cannot produce evidence of the facts, but I believe that officers serving in fire-ships did not stand high with their brother officers. It is some confirmation of this creed that we do not find the Boscawens, Rodneys, Howes, Jervises, Nelsons serving in fire-ships.”

The first use of gunpowder as a propelling agent was in Spain in the twelfth century, at which period both the Moors and the Christians used artillery. It was first employed in warfare in England in 1327 by Edward III. in his war against the Scotch, the cannon from which the shot was fired being termed “Crakys of war.”

There is abundant evidence that the use of artillery in battle was at first thought to be improper. When cannon was employed at Chiaggia in the fourteenth century all Italy made complaint against this manifest contravention of fair warfare; the ruling classes, seeing their armour, lances, and knightly prowess rendered useless, vigorously opposed the newly-invented arms, declaring that they were calculated to extinguish personal bravery. Perhaps this sentiment may have had some weight with our navy, for it was not until towards the close of the sixteenth century that artillery finally assumed the position of the dominant arm in the service and that musketry fire altogether displaced the arrow and the bolt.

Shells appear to have been first used by the Sultan of Gujarat in 1480, and they were in general use about the middle of the seventeenth century.

There is no doubt whatever that shells and bombs were considered highly immoral by the side which did not employ them. To those accustomed only to fire solid shot there must have been something very terrifying in the hurling of shells fitted with explosives which when they burst slew those round about and set fire to dwellings and ships.

When the Bomb Ketch, a ship firing bombs and shells, was introduced into our navy in the seventeenth century, the French were particularly angered by the “inhumanity” of the English in firing “inflammable fire balls and shells.” Again in the eighteenth century we find the Marechal de Conflans issuing an order against the use of hollow shot or incendiary shell because they “were not generally used by polite nations, and the French ought to fight according to the laws of honour.”

At the battle of the Nile in 1798 the French flagship L’Orient took fire and blew up, and when the French sailors reproached the English for using incendiary missiles the latter repudiated the charge, and mentioned that they had found such unlawful weapons in one of the prizes they had taken; thus the hollowness of the French regard for humane warfare was neatly demonstrated.

Whilst Great Britain did not scruple to fire lyddite shells at the Boers, their wives, and their children at Paardeberg, she prided herself on her abstention from the use of explosive or expanding bullets, and much abuse was heaped on the Boers for their employment of such. It may, however, be doubted whether a bullet which kills you right off at once, or at any rate which disables you permanently for a long time, is not preferable to one which is of so mild a nature that you can be shot over and over again, alternating your appearances on the battlefield with visits to the hospital.

A lecture on “Explosive Bullets and their Application to Military Purposes” was delivered before the Royal United Service Institution in 1868 by Major G. V. Fosbery, the first officer to use these projectiles in the field, systematically and to any large extent, against some of the mountain tribes of the North-West frontier of India. The lecturer tells us that the natives considered them unfair on two grounds—firstly, because they exploded in an objectionable way; secondly, because there was nothing they could collect of them afterwards, as in the case of ordinary bullets. But more civilised people complained of the use of “rifle shell” on the ground of their Satanic nature, and to these Major Fosbery replies as follows:

“The arguments which condemn a warlike instrument simply on the grounds of its destructiveness to life, provided that it neither adds keen agony to wounds nor new terrors to death itself, are, if logically pursued, simply retrogressive, and even if not recommending by implication a return to the bow and arrow, at all events point to the old times of protracted wars and deaths from fatigue and disease far exceeding in number those caused by the weapons of an enemy. We can therefore afford to set these on one side, or rather we are bound to neglect them altogether and seriously consider any invention which under the conditions above laid down promises us a more certainly destructive fire than that attainable cæteris paribus by the arms at present included in our war material.”

In spite of opinions such as these the humanitarians have won the day, and explosive bullets are now tabooed by Great Britain. The great Duke of Wellington used to say that he should not like to see the bullet reduced in size, because it broke the bone, and the object of war was either to kill your man or else put him in hospital and keep him there. With the Mauser and the Lee-Enfield neither of these results is attained.

The prototypes of the modern submarine torpedo, although they were employed on the surface of the water and not below, were the “machine,” the “infernal,” the “catamaran,” the “powder-vessel,” &c.

“Machines” may be best described as fire-ships specially arranged so as to explode very destructively when alongside one of the enemy’s vessels. They are first found in the British Navy in the seventeenth century, but were soon discontinued, not we are afraid on humanitarian grounds, but because Bushnell and Fulton pointed the way to the more convenient explosive device known as the “torpedo.”

In the year 1650 Prince Rupert made an attempt to blow up the English Vice-admiral in the Leopard by a species of “infernal.” He sent a couple of negroes and one of his seamen in Portuguese dress alongside the Leopard in a shore boat. They carried with them what purported to be a barrel of oil, but the barrel really held an infernal machine to be fired by a pistol attachment, the trigger of which could be pulled by a string passing through the bung. The story goes that one of the crew of the boat, finding the lower deck ports closed, “uttered an exclamation” in English. This betrayed them, but Blake refused to take vengeance on them, though the trick was one he would himself have scorned to play on his adversary.

During the war between Great Britain and the United States in 1812 H.M.S. Ramilies of seventy-four tons, was so unfortunate as to be the object of attack both by a diving vessel carrying torpedoes and by a powder-ship. The Ramilies was lying off New London at anchor and maintaining the blockade. As she was known to be short of provisions the Americans fitted out a schooner and filled the hold with powder, covering it over in the hatchways with barrels of flour. By means of an ingenious piece of clockwork attached to a gunlock and a train leading to the powder its explosion was ensured at the intended time. The Ramilies suspecting nothing, but thanking Heaven for the gift, captured the vessel and the crew escaped to land. By some extraordinary chance (or was it destiny?) the schooner was ordered to anchor near another prize some distance from the Ramilies, so that when the clockwork reached the fatal hour, 2.30, the charge exploded and blew up, not the Ramilies with her captain, Sir Thomas Hardy, and crew of six hundred men, but only the prize crew who were in the schooner.

The naval historian James could not trust himself to comment upon “this most atrocious proceeding,” whilst a naval officer wrote: “A quantity of arsenic in the flour would have been so perfectly compatible with the rest of the contrivance that we wonder it was not resorted to. Should actions like this receive the sanction of Governments, the science of war and the laws of nations will degenerate into the barbarity of the Algerians, and pillage will take the place of kindness and humanity to our enemies.”

During the American Civil War a species of weapon known as a “coal torpedo” was employed. This consisted of a hollow lump of iron, fitted with a charge of dynamite. It was rubbed over with coal tar and dust, and exactly resembled a large lump of coal. Lord Dunsany thought that this certainly seemed to be on the verge of lawful, if not beyond it.

At the close of the eighteenth century David Bushnell inaugurated the era of submarine warfare by devising cases fitted with explosives, arranged to go off at a set time by clockwork. To enable these cases to be affixed to the sides of vessels, Bushnell invented the first boat capable of diving beneath the waves of which we have any definite details. His attempts to blow up the Eagle in 1776 by a case fastened on her bottom, and the Cerberus in 1777 by means of a towing torpedo, failed, owing more to the lack of skill on the part of the operator, Sergt. Ezra Lee, than to any defect in the apparatus employed. Nor was Bushnell successful in his effort to destroy vessels in the Delaware by the aid of a number of kegs filled with powder and set adrift.

The introduction of gunpowder, of Greek fire, of fire-ships, of artillery, of shells, of bombs, of machines, of infernals, of catamarans, of powder vessels having, as has been shown, been at one time or another denounced as immoral by certain “humanitarians,” it was but natural that a secret contrivance for bringing about a terrific explosion beneath an unsuspecting ship’s crew should have been believed to be an invention of the Evil One, and history affords proof that the novel modes of fighting introduced by Bushnell and Fulton were regarded with great disfavour by naval men, who considered the innovators as men “who would discredit the glorious traditions of our navy, and substitute a set of catamarans for the noble frigates that had carried our flag to victory and were the pride of the nation”; by humanitarians, who regarded the torpedoes as a “dishonest and cowardly system of warfare”; and by the public generally, who denounced the nations who attempted to compass the destruction of British ships of the line by dastardly tricks which England would never stoop to employ.

In a work written by James Kelly, and published in 1818, the author comments with great severity on “some infamous and insidious attempts to destroy British men-of-war upon the coasts of America by torpedoes and other explosive machinery.” This refers to the attacks on H.M.S. Ramilies by one of Fulton’s boats, attacks which failed, but which caused Sir Thomas Hardy to notify the American Government that he had ordered on board from fifty to one hundred American prisoners of war, “who, in the event of the effort to destroy the ship by torpedoes or other infernal inventions being successful, would share the fate of himself and his crew.” So frightened were the relations and friends of prisoners of war by these threats that public meetings were held, and petitions were presented to the American executive against the further employment of torpedoes in the ordinary course of warfare.

Those who endeavoured to perfect a system of submarine mining for the defence of harbours and coasts were abused in the same way that Bushnell and Fulton had been. Samuel Colt, the inventor of the pistol which bore his name, and one of the first to experiment with mines fired from shore by means of an electric current, was roundly denounced by John Quincy Adams, who dubbed him “that Guy Fawkes afloat.”

At the time of the Crimean War the popular term “infernal machine” was applied to the submarine mines laid down by the Russians to defend the approaches to Cronstadt. In the seventies Lieut.-Col. Martin endeavoured to establish, on the grounds of humanity, an international anti-torpedo association, while even to-day there are people found to protest against the employment of certain forms of torpedoes, as witness the following letter recently published in the Engineer. The author, Mr. Reginald Bolton, declared that while no one could object to the defensive lay torpedo or the spar torpedo, the same could not be said of the “Whitehead,” “Brennan,” or “Edison.”

“Surely,” he urges, “our forefathers’ code of morality in warfare should not be in advance of our own. All civilised nations have debarred the brutal explosive bullet, and why not the equally mean submarine torpedo? If such a remedy as Commodore Hardy’s were to be applied by any nation, could its opponent complain, and is there anything in the practice of morality to prevent, say, a thousand prisoners’ lives being presented as a bar to the use of an implement which was acknowledged to be a disgrace to its employers not less than eighty years ago?”

The methods of warfare which have most aroused the ire of humanitarians and “blatant platform orators, with their vulgar party cries of eternal peace,” are those which depend for their success on secrecy or deceit. 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. Such a class of person resembles the Quaker who found himself on a vessel engaged in a conflict with another vessel. He resolutely refused to assist in fighting the guns, but at last, when the enemy attempted to board, he collared the leader and pitched him into the sea, saying as he did so, “Friend, thou hast no business here.”

Major Fosbery, in a lecture on explosive bullets, asked whether any of the deaths due to fighting were, strictly speaking, humane, and if they were not, what was this humanity of which so much was made? “Have we not heard that in the dark ages humanity beat out men’s brains with a mace, whilst cruelty used the lance, the sword, and the arrow, and that bishops of the period rode into action with the mace so as to kill without shedding blood? A very nice distinction indeed, as you will admit. In later times, were not Congreve and Shrapnel denounced as monsters for the initiation of inventions in whose perfection we rejoice to-day?”

Inconsistency indeed is the particular failing of Peace propagandists. They not only condemn the use of certain weapons while raising no protest against others equally as destructive of life, but they also pretend to be horrified at deeds committed by the enemy which they themselves would not scruple to do should opportunity offer. Particularly is this the case in savage warfare. Captain Herbert has mentioned a striking instance during the Zulu War. One day the boys were calling in the streets, “Shocking murder of a whole British regiment” (it was at Isandlewana), and a few weeks afterwards the same boys were shouting, “Great slaughter of the Zulus.” This is akin to the practice of those orators who refer to the “expansion” of England, but to the “encroachment” of Russia.

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. Humanitarians had urged that there was something especially cruel in the secrecy of the submarine boat, but the whole tendency of war had, he pointed out, moved in this direction ever since the days of old, when Hector and Achilles advanced in front of their respective followers and spent half an hour in abusing their adversary’s parents and ancestors before they commenced to fight.