This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Underwater weapons and the Royal Navy : 1869-1918. Cowpe, A The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 09. Oct. 2021 1, ýýý 11 IIND1 TATFTWEAPONS AND THE ROYALIY AVY: 1869-1918 PhD War Studies. Alan Co'Trpe King's College ** 2. ALAN COIPF 1fl)ER 1ATFR °'EAPONS AND 'THE' ROYAL NAVY 1669-1918 The development of underwater weapcais in the mid-nineteenth centizry gave to small navies with small vessels the porter to destroy larger the larger vessels on which depended the supremacy of the navies; and this develec.. t was particularly cninous for the world'- largest navy, that of Britain. The Royal Navy's dilemma was whether it should exploit the new weaponry for its own use or whether it should concentrate on countering the dangers posed. The Admiralty reluctantly developed the 37hitehead torpedo because it could not afford to slip behind other nations technically. At the sr=e time however it sought to minimise expenditure by seeking a cheap national manufacture, and failed to adopt the radical alteration of priorities which was involved in providing battleships with adequato protection against a steadily increasing threat. Meanwhile there was little inclination either to use or develop the submarine mine, which was regarded as a static defensive weapon; and no attempt was made to come to terms with the threat it posed in the hands of an enemy. The torpedo was delivered by two weapons. In the nineteenth century the torpedo boat was the main threat against which the Admiralty developed counter-measures, though not without difficulty and confusion aggravated by some muddled thinking about the value of 'offensive' tactics. The aase thinking was applied with some individual exceptions to the similar problems posed by the submarine in the twentieth century with the result that no solution was available by 1914. By contrast the Navy's own submarine service was developed quite separately with considerable energy and effectiveness. 3. The Royal Navy failed to organise itself to cope with changing technology and its tactical and strategic implications; and failed to clawify its thinking sufficiently to identify and differentiate between the potential value and threat of the new weapons. \ 4" CCNTMTTS . 6 PFA ................................................... CHAPTER ONE - CHOOSING TF 17EAP( (a) The the Whitehead Torpedo 11 adoption of .. (b) The Torpedo Committee 18 .................. (c) The filternative Weapons 28 ................ CHAPTER TWO - DEVELOPIITG THE VIEAPON (a) Improving the. Vhitehead 35 ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, (b) Underwater Discharge 71 CUTLPi rE t TEREE - CODNTERIITGTH, V7EAPON (a) Nets 82 ................................... (b) Underwater Protection 91 .................. CHAPTER FOUR - THE FOREIGN CONTEXT (a) Foreign Wars 110 (b) ........................... Russia 1 14 and Germany ........ ............. (C) France 139 " ................................ CRAPT R FIVE - TIMEWEAPON IN ACTION (a) The Naval Manoeuvres: The 1880s 128 ....... (b) The Naval Manoeuvres: ' The 1890s 141 ....... (o) The Naval Manoeuvres: Evaluation 154 ....... (d) The Test War: The Par East 1904/5 167 of ... CH 'EM SIX SERVICE REACTION . - (a) The 1880s 172 (b) The 1890s ............................. lag ................... ......... CIIAFfiL''ft THE ROLE OF THE TORPEDOBÖAT DESTROYER _SEVII1 - .... 200 - 5. Pam CHAPTER-EIGHT - TAE SUE.4AR]NE - ITN7 WEAPON: OLD PROBL iS (a) The Submarine Emerges ................... 215 (b) Countering the Submarine 225 . ................ (c) Using the Submarine ..................... 232 THE SWflARIflE MINE': A NEGLECTED APCN CHAPTER NINE - ý, ...... 252 CHAPTERTEN - THETORPEDO SERVICE .......................... 275 C TE ELEVEN- THETEST CF WAR ........................... 298 ABBREVIATIONS .............................................. 332 13BLIO tAPHY ............................................... 3 34 J. 'PEs[DIGES ................................................. 342 6. ' PREFACE 'Pitt 'was the greatest fool that ever existed, to encourage a mode of warfare which those who commanded the seas did not want, and which, if successful, would deprive them of it. ' This was the comment alleged to have been made by the Earl of St. Vincent in 1805 an the subject of underwater 'torpedo' explosions. It is equally a remark which neatly summarises the problems of'deciding Admiralty policy in relation to the development of underwater weapons in the period 1869-1914. British command of the seas was rooted firmly in the power of its large number of capital ships. These vessels were the ultimate arbiters of 'the effective control of all such maritime communications 1 as are or can be affected by the operaticns of either bellifferent'. Not that their activity was necessary to exploit sea power. The exercise of that nebulous concept lay with the auxiliary and cruising vessels. which carried the war to the enemy, drove him from the seas and maintained freedom of transit for the shipping which sustained an immense empire. When faced with a strong challenge, ho: vever, these weaker vessels inevitably fell back upon their more powerful allies, who waited dutifully in the wings to bring their power to bear when the issue of 'command of the seas' was in doubt. Julian Corbett neatly expressed the position with the sentence: 'On cruisers depends our exercise of control; on the battleship depends the security of control. '2 1. J. R. Thursfield Naval 7arfare (Cambridge: University Press, 1913) p. 15. 2. Julian S. Corbett"Some Principles of Maritime Strati (London: Longaans, Green and Co., 1911) P. 113. 7. The 'wooden walls' which had won Trafalgar wore therefore the historical trustees of British söa power. Steam and steel replaced canvas and wood, as the enormous changes of the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century altered the shape and construction of major warships, and the wooden walls of Nelson evolved into the ironclads of the late Victorian Navy. Whatever its form, however, the capital . ship remained the key to British sea power. The development of underwater weapons threatened to undermine this pattern. The blow delivered below the lseU. line was capable of inflicting damage out of all proportion to the size of the explosive charge, by virtue of the effect of water pressure on the extent and direction of the explosion. When the expatriate English engineer Robert Whitehead developed a means of delivering such an explosion from a distance by use of the locomotive torpedo, even the most powerful ironclad was in danger. The peril was compounded by the ease with which the torpedo could be applied from even a small launch. When another Ihglishman, John Thorneycroft, developed a fast torpedo-boat suitable for this purpose, the delivery system was not only cheap and easy, but, by virtue of its speed, potentially deadly. The submarine was a still deadlier menace, because of the invisibility which enabled it to approach to a range suitable for launching the torpedo. The submarine mine threatened to be even more dangerous. Small and deadly, it required no fallible human hand to guide it, while its presence was revealed only when it struck. To an extent unrivalled by all the other advances in naval technology of the nineteenth century this mode of warfare therefore indeed threatened to deprive the Royal Navy of her 'Command of the Seas'. $. It is a commonplace to refer to the Royal Navy as 'unprepared' for war in 1914, *and in the field of underwater weapons no less than in other respects there were indeed many inadequacies of preparation. The Navy failed to resolve St. Vincent's dilemma satisfactorily. 'Underwater weapons were particularly advantageous to other nations, and, by the same token, disadvantageous to Dzgland. Should efforts therefore be made to develop them, should they be iiored as unsuitable, or should concentration be centred on counter-measures? Priorities were never decided, so that in 1914 the Navy was able effectively neither to use nor counter underwater attack. This work attempts to discover the causes of this failure by a detailed investigation of the administrative, technical, strategic, tactical and personality factors involved. Such an analysis serves to reject the concept of the Navy as a monolithic organisation, and reveals the variety of conflicting theories, departmental