In 1718 a carpenter Yefim Nikonov sent a letter to Peter I reporting that he can build an underground vessel. The first model was built and successfully tested in 1721. It had a cylindrical wooden hull, covered with leather. The submersion system consisted of a metal “water box”, a pump and metal pipes. The water box was filled with water through a number of small holes in special tin plates. It was about 6 meters long and 2 meters in diameter. The second, larger, vessel was finished in 1724, but it was damaged during the launch. After the death of Peter I, the supplies of materials and workforce stopped and in 1728 the Admiralty ordered to stop the works, Nikonov was found guilty in embezzlement in sent into exile to Astrakhan.

The Soviets had a penchant for claiming that many inventions originated with Russian scientists. They dismissed Thomas Edison as a late- comer, for the Russian inventor Paul Jablochkoff had created a small arc light “candle” that was a commercial success in 1887, when eighty of them were installed in the Grands Magasins du Louvre in Paris. [1] The Wright brothers are given similar short shrift thanks to the brief, ramp- assisted hops of Alexander Feodorovitch Mozhaiski’s steam-powered monoplane in 1884. And under the impetus of Peter the Great’s belief that Russia would not survive without a navy, Yefim Nikonov created the prototype of the modern midget commando submarine in 1720. [2] This antedated by more than fifty years David Bushnell’s more famous egg-shaped Turtle, which was employed in three (unsuccessful) submarine attacks against the Royal Navy in New York Harbor in 1775 and 1776, and which Americans have always considered the first submarine. [3]

Nikonov’s submarine was more conventional than the Turtle in appearance. The torpedo-shaped, oak-planked hull was covered with oil- soaked animal skins for waterproofing. The vessel was to be armed with rockets fired from tubes-an uncanny forecast of the nuclear future. Propelled by oars, an order was placed for a number of vessels, along with the rockets to arm them. This was the peak of Nikonov’s progress, however, for no successful production followed, and interest lapsed with the death of Peter I in 1725.

Notwithstanding Nikonov’s disappointment, later Russian patriots developed submarines of various types. The first one constructed of iron appeared in 1834. Designed by Karl Andreyevich Shilder, it was tested extensively. Propulsion was by manpower, using fin-like vanes. Armament again included rockets, but also featured mines. A second version successfully destroyed a target ship by the use of mines. Further designs followed during the Crimean War of 1853-1856, elicited by the Russian need to offset the crippling Anglo- French naval advantage. One of these was by an experienced German submarine practitioner, Wilhelm Bauer. Named Le Dia.ble Marin, it was the most successful submarine to date, despite still being powered by men straining on treadmills that looked strangely like modern exercise equipment. Le Diable Marin made 133 successful dives, but encountered trouble on September 6, 1856, when on its 134th dive underwater growth prevented its propeller from turning. Had the government bureaucracy functioned better, Bauer’s designs could have been improved upon, but as was so often the case in Imperial Russia, the project was dropped and Bauer returned to Germany.

Halfway around the world, another disadvantaged naval power, the Confederate States of America, also attempted submarine warfare on a minor scale. Two submarines, both named Pioneer, were tested unsuccessfully. 1′he third was the CSS H. L. Hunley, which began an inauspicious career by sinking twice, with a loss of life each time. The desperate Confederates raised it on both occasions. It sank for the last time on its February 17, 1864, attack on the USS Housitanic. This was the first successful submarine attack against an enemy warship, and the Housitanic sank with a loss of five lives. “The ill-fated Hunley went down for the third time, taking its crew with it. Unlike the South, the Hunley would rise again: It was lifted from the Atlantic waters outside Charleston harbor on August 7, 2000, at the conclusion of a $17 million recovery effort. [4]

In Russia, Major General Konstantin Borisovitch Gern created an advanced submarine design incorporating a self-propelled torpedo in 1867. More notably, Gern’s submarine was steam-powered, with com- pressed air furnishing the necessary oxygen for combustion when sub- merged. Successfully tested, it also ran aground on bureaucratic indifference, and development ceased-new rather than proven projects seemed to excite the Russian Navy procurement offices.

Ivan Fedorovich Alexandrovsky designed the largest of the nineteenth-century Russian submarines. An artist and photographer, he created a 355-ton iron monster powered by compressed air engines that had some initial success, but dived too deep in 1871 and was crushed by the pressure. This implacable phenomenon, the incredible pressures exerted by the weight of water twisting a sturdy iron or steel hull into a tortured mass of compressed metal, would haunt submarine designers and crews forever.

In 1865, Alexandrovsky submitted a design to the Naval Technical Committee for a “self-propelled mine”-a torpedo. (Mines were often called torpedoes during this period, and the United States’ first admiral, David S. Farragut, was referring to tethered mines when he gave his famous August 5, 1864, order in Mobile Bay, Alabama: “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”)

The Russians brought their concept of scale to the world of sub- marines for the first time in 1879, when Tsar Alexander III witnessed the trials of the second submarine built by Stefan Karlovitch Dzhevesky. The trials were so successful that a total of fifty of his submarines were ordered and built as the Type III. Thirty-four of these were assigned to Sevastopol in the Crimea and sixteen to the base at Kronstadt in the Baltic. While all fifty were pedal-powered craft, one of the sixteen assigned to Kronstadt was modified to hold storage batteries and an electric mo- tor-the world’s first submarine so powered.

Although no other submarines by Dzhevesky were electric-powered, electricity was clearly the motive power of the future, and was incorporated into the designs of submarines of other nations. This propulsion development was complemented by the advent of dependable self- propelled torpedoes, the combination of which gave the submarine a chance to become an effective weapon. England’s Robert Whitehead was the first to produce a self-propelled torpedo. Powered by a com- pressed air engine, Whitehead’s 1870 torpedo carried 18 pounds of dynamite as its warhead, and featured a self-regulating device that kept the torpedo at a constant preset depth-thus starting the trend to what would be called ‘smart weapons.” The torpedo became instantly popular, for small torpedo boats were seen as an inexpensive antidote to the increasingly costly large capital ships. By 1881 Whitehead’s torpedoes were in general use in Britain, which purchased 254, Russia (250), France (218), Germany (203), Denmark (83), Italy (70), Greece (70), Portugal (50), Argentina (40), and Belgium (40). [5]

Ironically, after all of its own excellent research and design, Russia turned to foreign countries for further submarine purchases. The first of these was designed by the Swede Torsten Nordenfeldt and built in Great Britain. With a submerged displacement of 230 tons, the Nordenfeldt was powered by a 1,000-horsepower steam engine on the surface. Pressurized steam provided underwater propulsion, and was good for about twenty miles at five knots. Unfortunately, the Nordenfeld twas lost at sea en route to Russia. [6]

In 1901, the Petr Koshka was created in the Kronstadt shipyard. A small vessel of some twenty tons, it was designed to be carried on board a larger warship, and launched at sea to attack the enemy. The first series of modern Russian submarines were built under the leadership of Ivan Grigorevich Bubnov, who would effectively be the superintendent of submarine construction until the Russian Revolution in 1917.

Under Bubnov, both indigenous and foreign designs were studied, and an initial prototype, the Delfin, the first true combat submarine of the Russian Navy, was built at the famed Baltic Works in St. Petersburg. The Delfin was followed by a construction program of the larger 140-ton Kasatka class. Six of these were completed and five sent to the Far East in November 1904.

Given the Cold War that lay in the future, it is ironic that the next series of Russian submarine efforts centered on boats developed in the United States by rivals John E Holland and Simon Lake. The advent of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 increased the Russian Navy’s already keen interest in submarines, and they secured rights to manufacture both Holland and Lake submarines. They obtained examples of both types clandestinely, since the United States government had prohibited the sale of arms to either opponent in the Russo-Japanese War. [7]

Russia’s geography created difficulties in acquiring a fleet of submarines for use against Japan. Submarines from the United States and Germany, as well as those built by Russia, had to be laboriously trans- ported by rail to Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan. [8] To do so, they had to be disassembled, shipped, and reassembled. The Trans-Siberian Rail- road tracks were hardly smooth, and the more than five thousand miles of jolting damaged components that were of course held together with nuts and bolts. The bumpy ride shook many of the fasteners loose so that they later admitted salt water and made the boats very vulnerable to corrosion.

Thirteen submarines-a mixture of Kasatka class boats with Holland and Lake Types-were operational by 1906, months after the end of the Russo-Japanese War. Seven other submarines were operating at other locations, and seven more were being built. In the succeeding years, enthusiasm for submarines would have to buck budget realities, and while the total number of submarines planned for the Russian Navy varied from over one hundred and fifty to as few as thirty-eight, only about thirty were available for operations in the last full year of peace, 1913. These early submarines would sortie out as far as one hundred and fifty miles from port, maintaining station for as long as two weeks. This was a remarkable performance for the time, and one must admire the hardiness of the crews, given the extremely primitive conditions on board the boats. In a typical submarine, more than twenty crewmen were jammed into a cylinder about seventy feet long and twelve feet wide at the broadest point of its beam. With no refrigeration and a minimum capability to cook, food was unpalatable while the drinking water quickly became rank. The interior was always dark, wet, and cold, filled with either the fumes of an early gasoline engine or the bitter acrid smell of overworked storage batteries. The gasoline fumes represented a far greater hazard than a bad odour, for any break in a fuel line or puncture of a tank could result in a spill that would create a catastrophic explosion from vapours set off by any of the thousands of avail- able electrical sparks on board.

But above all there was the omnipresent sense of impending danger, for any crewmember could make a mistake that would result in the deaths of all: a single valve thrown the wrong way, a single hatch left open, or a careless hand at the controls. Each could mean a fatal plunge to the bottom of the sea.

Despite these hazards, which would remain as a permanent feature of submarine duty, there was no shortage of volunteers, and some remarkable voyages were made, including the first underwater exploration of an oceanic ice field in December 1908. This chilling look into the future was carried out by the Kefal, a Simon Lake -designed and- built boat under the command of Lieutenant V. A. Merkushev, who cruised for one hour and thirty-two minutes (a distance of four miles) under the ice in Ussuriy Bay near Vladivostok.

The Imperial Russian Navy was in the same relative state of disarray as the Imperial Russian Army when the First World War began in August 1914. The Russian naval forces in the Baltic vastly outnumbered the op- posing German fleet, especially in capital ships. Despite this, the Russians elected to adopt a defensive attitude, depending upon minefields, shore fortifications, and the big guns of its ships to hold the enemy at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, well away from St. Petersburg. But by 1914, Germany’s U-boat fleet-its impressive Unterseeboote craft-had surpassed that of Russia in both numbers and technology. The U-26 sank the Russian cruiser Pallada on October 11, 1914, with a single torpedo. It was the first sinking of a Russian boat by a German submarine, and the start of a three-decade long interval during which Germany would hold a psychological edge over Russia in submarine warfare. The balance would not change until the waning months of the Second World War in 1945.

To offset the combat deficiencies of Russian submarines, British sub- marines were sent to the Baltic, working in cooperation with the Imperial Russian Navy. The British enjoyed relative success, forcing the Germans to direct more ships to the area and to lay many more mines, but the Russian submarines were for the most part ineffective-they fired fifty torpedoes during 1915 without achieving a single hit. [9] Three ships did fall to Russian deck-guns, however. The continued lack of success, along with generally declining morale, did not bode well for the Russian submarine force in the Baltic. It became almost useless, with its boats either scuttled to avoid advancing German forces, or transferred by inland waterways to Kronstadt.

Russian submarines did considerably better in the Black Sea, where the enemy was less formidable, and (after 1916) the leadership of forty-one-year-old Rear Admiral Alexander Vasilevich Kolchak would make a difference. (Kolchak would remain loyal to Imperial Russia, and head a White Russian Siberian government formed in early 1918, with its capital at Omsk. His forces were a mixed bag of loyalist Russians and the Czech Legion. Most of Siberia was in White hands by late 1918, and Kolchak claimed to be the ruler of all Russia, but Tsar Nicholas II and his family were murdered by the Bolsheviks at Yekaterinburg, formerly Sverdlovsk, that year. Early in 1920, Admiral Kolchak’s government collapsed, and he was executed. [10]

Under Kolchak, the submarines of the Black Sea Fleet conducted relatively low level but successful operations against coal shipping that was vitally needed by both Germany and Turkey. His leadership extended until he was deposed by a new phenomenon in Russia-a delegate assembly of sailors and soldiers. It was the writing on the wall, for on November 8, 1917, the Bolshevik takeover of power turned control of the Black Sea Fleet to the local revolutionary councils-the Imperial Russian Navy was no more.

The general lack of success of the Russian submarine force stands in marked contrast to the nearly war-winning efforts of the German Imperial Navy’s Unterseeboote.

The German U-boats had proved to be deadly; as Great Britain’s ship- ping losses were already exceeding its shipbuilding capacity by August 1915. [11] By the end of 1915, 640 ships totalling 1,189,031 tons had been sunk at a cost of twenty U-boats. Germany had averaged only ten U- boats at sea at any one time in 1915. This was lifted to thirty by the end of 1916, and that year’s campaign would see the destroyed tonnage nearly doubled, with 1,301 ships totalling 2,194,420 tons sunk. (This is merchant shipping only, and excludes warships.) By the end of 1917, the number of sinkings rose to an intolerable 3,170 ships, comprising almost 6,000,000 tons. Convoys reduced this to a still crippling 1,280 ships totalling 2,625,000 tons in 1918.

Despite its terrible effectiveness, the massive German submarine effort was to no avail; Germany was exhausted by almost four years of war on two fronts, and when its last great series of offensives on the Western Front ended in failure in the late summer of 1918, enough Americans had already arrived in France to turn the tide. Yet by any analysis, the German submarine war had been a successful, even brilliant, campaign. Submarines had cost the Allies more than 18 million tons of shipping, of which almost 11,000,000 tons were British, at the cost of 178 U-boats lost in action. The ratio of ships to submarines sunk was about 31 to 1. [12]

The marked contrast in operational effectiveness between the German and Russian submarine efforts in both the First and Second World Wars explains many of the problems the Soviets had to contend with during the Cold War in terms of tradition, doctrine, interservice rivalry, and developing leaders.

By Gary E. Weir LINK

1. http://www.geocities.com/Silicon Valley/Circuit/1858/ lampade.com.

2. Norman Polmar and Jurrien Noot, Submarines of the Russian and Soviet Navies, 1718-1970. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1991, p. 1.

3. Brayton Harris. The Navy Times Book of Submarines. New York: Berkley Books, 1997, p. 27.

4. Norman Friedman, U.S. Submarines Since 1945: An Illustrated Design History. Annapolis, Md: Naval Institute Press, 1995.

5. http: www.spartacus.schoolrlet.co.uk/FWWwhitehead.htm.

6. Polmar and Noot, p. 7.

7. The Holland Torpedo Boat Company later became the Electric Boat Company, which John Jay Hopkins combined in 1952 with Canadair and Electric Boat’s Electro-Dynamic Division in Philadelphia to create General Dynamics. Half a century later, those two shipyards would be

building nuclear submarines armed with ballistic missiles and tasked with deterring the Soviet Union.

8. Polmar and Noot, p. 18.

9. Polmar and Noot, p. 45.

10. .

11. V. E. Tarrant, The U-boat Offensive, 1914-1945. Annapolis, Md.:

Naval Institute Press, 1989.

12. Eberhard Rossler, Geschichte des deutschen Ubootbaus. Munich: J.

R Lehmans Verlag, 1975.