Blackett's War Read Online Free PDF

concern from the late 1870s on for their potential threat to the battle fleets of the world’s great navies; other fast warships known at first as torpedo boat destroyers, and later simply
destroyers
, were developed to counter them. 14 The idea of marrying the torpedo to the submarine took no great leap of imagination.
    On April 11, 1900, the U.S. government issued payment of $150,000 and took official delivery of the
Holland VI
, which would become the U.S. Navy’s
SS-1;
within a few months orders for seven more improved “Hollandtype” boats were issued. The improved models followed Holland’s basic plan but were bigger and more powerful, 64 feet long and equipped with a 180-horsepower engine. Over the next six years Holland’s Electric Boat Company licensed foreign rights to Britain, Russia, the Netherlands, and Japan. The first submarines of all the world’s major navies—save only Germany’s—would be built to Holland’s design.
    HOLLAND ONCE DISDAINFULLY REMARKED that naval officers didn’t like submarines “because there is no deck to strut on.” Yet even the submarine’s most enthusiastic supporters acknowledged that they could not imagine it ever having more than a distinctly limited role in naval operations. Above all, the submarine would be a
defensive
weapon, they believed. In his testimony to the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, Kimball had melodramatically offered to stake his life defending New York harbor: it was no coincidence he had invoked that scenario. The submarine’s primary function, in his view, would be to hold the first line of coast defenses, just beyond the range of shore guns. Submarines might also be useful, he told the committee, in harassing and driving off a blockading squadron, carrying communications through hostile lines, clearing minefields, and guarding channels and other narrow waterways against a fleet attempting to enter them. 15
    The last thing that any naval strategists contemplated for the submarine was that it would be a commerce raider. There were unshakable technical, legal, and strategic reasons for that conclusion. To cruise effectively against an enemy’s trade required substantial range and endurance, qualities thesubmarine seemed unlikely ever to possess. Capturing enemy merchant ships in wartime was a perfectly legitimate practice under the established rules of international law, but again submarines were remarkably ill-suited to the particulars.
    The rules for taking prizes at sea were grounded in precedents of admiralty courts going back centuries, more recently affirmed by a series of international conventions. The nuances of admiralty law were sufficiently complex to keep lawyers busy, but the basic principles for what constituted a legal capture, and the procedures a captor had to follow to ensure the legality of his actions, were universally recognized and uncontroversial. Warships of a belligerent power could stop, board, and search any merchant ship they encountered on the high seas; ships or goods found to be owned by enemy nationals could be claimed as prizes, as could neutral vessels transporting arms or other “contraband of war” to an enemy port. But every capture was subject to a proceeding in the capturing country’s admiralty courts upon their return. Showing an often surprisingly fierce independence, admiralty courts rarely hesitated to disallow improper captures, even awarding damages to a ship’s owner, when the letter of the law had not been followed.
    In general, the law permitted a captor to burn or sink a prize and its cargo only if its enemy ownership was beyond doubt; even in that case, the captor had an unambiguous duty first to remove the crew and passengers and to preserve the ship’s papers and other documents for examination by a prize court to validate his action. The London Declaration of 1909, an agreement on the laws of naval war signed by all the major European powers and the United States, reiterated all of these