Book reviews -- Stealth at Sea: The History of the Submarine by Dan van der Vat

DAN van der VAT. Stealth at Sea: The History of the Submarine. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. 374 pages. $30.00.

This book slices through the history of undersea warfare like a sleek craft with the engine room telegraph at "ahead full." Stealth at Sea is a pioneering book that traces the history of the submarine from the designs of William Bourne in the late 16th century to its role as a deterrent to nuclear conflict through fifty years of Cold War. Dan van der Vat, noted newspaper correspondent for The Times of London and, more recently, the Guardian, has emerged as one of the most prolific writers on naval warfare. Five earlier books deal with the Imperial German Navy and with World War II's deadly Battle of the Atlantic. Interested mainly in the operational histories of modern navies, van der Vat closely examines the impact of submarines on the two 20th century world wars. He concludes by briefly sketching the role of submarines in the Cold War era -- in Korea, Vietnam, Britain's conflict with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, Operation Desert Storm, and, of course, in the sometimes dicey underwater cat-and-mouse operations of the Soviet and NATO navies. An adequate bibliography will guide interested readers to more specialized published sources.

Sensitized perhaps by his British background, van der Vat believes innovations in underwater warfare owe much to the supremacy of the British navy. It was no accident, he writes, that Britain's rivals -- the Americans in the 18th and early 19th centuries and, later, the Germans in the 20th century -- devoted so much effort to finding ways to attack the greatest navy at sea by means of stealth. Proponents of surface fleets, of which there has been no shortage in Great Britain for the last three or four centuries, regarded submarines as cowardly and a technology appropriate for weaker naval powers. Admiral Sir Arthur Vickers, a future First Sea Lord, reflected the attitude of most senior British naval officers when he proclaimed that submarines were "underhand, unfair and damned un-English." This attitude was widespread even in the United States and Japanese navies on the eve of World War II. It is little wonder that those navies gave little thought either to how best to deploy submarines or how best to defend against them, although the Americans quickly learned.

After more than a century of experimentation, undersea warfare "made the transition from theory to practice during the American Civil War." An inferior Confederate navy struggled to find ways to overcome the blockade of southern ports. The Hunley, named after its builder, Horace L. Hunley of Mobile, became the first submersible to sink an enemy warship when it planted a 100-pound blackpowder mine, or what was known then as a torpedo, under the hull of the USS Housatonic that lay at anchor off Charleston, South Carolina, in early 1864. Moments later, when shock waves from the exploding mine swamped the departing Hunley, it became the first submersible to be sunk during an engagement with the enemy. In a footnote to this story, salvors recently discovered the intact hull of what is believed to be the Confederate vessel in the vicinity of Sullivan's Island off Charleston.

By the eve of World War I, the technology for offensive underwater warfare existed. Gyroscopes guided self-propelled torpedoes which were launched by compressed air from internal tubes on submersibles that were powered by diesel engines on the surface and by batteries underwater. Nonetheless, submarines played only a small role in the naval race before the outbreak of World War I. Dreadnoughts and cruisers were the darlings of the navies of the Great Powers.

Although Great Britain entered World War I with the largest submarine fleet, few were capable of operating on extended cruises in the open ocean. Antisubmarine defenses were virtually non-existent. On the eve of war, no navy in the world "could detect a submerged submarine," and, despite having formed a committee in 1910 to look into antisubmarine defenses, the Royal Navy "had no anti-submarine strategy, detector or weapon" when war came in 1914. Sailors on picket boats guarding Scapa Flow had orders to slip paper bags over the periscopes of enemy submarines and to shatter the optics with furious hammer blows]

Van der Vat rightly points out that success in submarine warfare in both 20th century world wars was closely related to the leadership qualities of individual commanders. Less than 5 percent of the skippers sank more than half of the tonnage destroyed by submarines. Lothar von Arnauld, whose World War I record still stands, sank 454,000 tons of Allied shipping, including 187 merchant vessels and two warships. Arnauld launched only four torpedoes in the entire war, and one of those missed. He relied, instead, upon his deck gun and boarding parties. Otto Kretschmer's 238,000 tons led World War II aces, who faced far more formidable antisubmarine defenses.

The outcomes of both world wars hinged, arguably, on whether the Allies had enough shipping to supply the needs of war. Despite Winston Churchill's candid assessment that the Allies almost lost World War II in the Battle of the Atlantic in early 1943, van der Vat makes a case that never in the history of warfare did submarines come closer to winning a war than in the spring of 1917. Rather than being foolhardy for goading the United States into joining the Entente powers, van der Vat argues, Germany's decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare in World War I nearly succeeded. Britain's naval staff pessimistically agreed with the German appraisal that Allied shipping would be hopelessly inadequate by mid-1917. Already at the beginning of 1917, life expectancy of Allied merchant ships was ten round-trip voyages. Worse came in April 1917 when the Allies lost more than 800,000 tons of shipping, a record unmatched even in World War II. By May, merchant ships that survived five round trips had already beaten the odds. "Britain's very fate," van der Vat writes, "depended on the outcome" of the war at sea.

In both 20th century world wars, the ability of the Allies to decode Germany's top-secret naval signals contributed to the survival of the Allies. Although the Allies had no means of sinking submerged U-boats in the first two years of World War I, intelligence from codes at least permitted the rerouting of shipping to avoid infested sea-lanes. In World War II, anti-submarine defenses, including surface warships and aircraft armed with lethal depth bombs, profited from intelligence gleaned from Germany's Ultra signals. Thus, the Allies hunted down and destroyed every German supply submarine sent into the Atlantic to refuel and resupply U-boats. Radar-equipped aircraft, commonplace by mid-1943, made even nightime surface attacks risky for U-boats. In both world wars, convoying of shipping -- formed in the teeth of resistance from merchant sea-captains and naval staffs alike -- proved to be the most effective defense against submarines. Large convoys accompanied by escort carriers offered the greatest security.

In the armed conflicts after World War II, submarines have played only limited roles. The Cold War era saw the development of nuclear submarines, the epitome of stealth because of their ability to remain submerged almost indefinitely. The driving forces behind nuclear submarines were the familiar Hyman Rickover and Russian admiral Sergei Gorshkov. Britain, France, and China round out the nuclear submarine club. By the mid-1990s the United States had thirty-four nuclear ballistic-missile submarines "accounting for forty-five percent of national strategic forces."

Originally developed as a weapon for weaker naval powers, "the submarine became the ultimate weapon of the strongest powers in the nuclear age." Although nuclear ballistic-missile submarines had effectively deterred superpower war, such a fleet, van der Vat believes, is an expensive redundancy that the United States, as the world's most heavily indebted nation, can ill afford. Rather, as limited, regional conflicts such as those in the shallow Persian Gulf have demonstrated, conventional diesel-electric submarines should remain in the arsenals of those countries with far-ranging strategic interests.

Allen T. Cronenberg is an associate professor in the Department of History at Auburn University and author of Forth to the Mighty Conflict: Alabama and World War II, The University of Alabama Press, 1995.

Copyright National Forum: Phi Kappa Phi Journal Fall 1995
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