This week: submarines

German U-boat UB-14 in the Black Sea, 1918. IMAGE: WikiMedia Commons.

Underwater warfare came of age on 15 September 1914, when Germany’s U-21 became the first submarine to sink a ship with a self-propelled torpedo. The U-boat’s devastating surprise attack, off the Firth of Forth, sank the British cruiser HMS Pathfinder in just six minutes, with the loss of all but 12 of its 268 crew members.

Seven days later, even worse was to follow when another German submarine, U-9, torpedoed three more Royal Navy cruisers in rapid succession in the southern North Sea. In one morning, around 1,600 British sailors lost their lives, provoking public outcry and shaking confidence in a Royal Navy that seemed completely to have failed to anticipate this game-changing new threat.

But if the early days of the First World War introduced the submarine as a sleekly effective and terrifyingly modern weapon of war – the first genuine stealth technology – the craft’s journey up to that point had not always been plain sailing.

This week on The Past, and in the new issue of Military History Matters, John Medhurst takes a deep-dive into the history of the submarine in warfare – from the unrealised visions of Leonardo da Vinci and the unlikely-sounding experiments of King James I, via the brilliant pioneering efforts of 18th- and 19th-century maritime engineers such as Robert Fulton and John Philip Holland, to the deadly technological advances ushered in by the Industrial Age.

Elsewhere this week on The Past, we have also been searching the archives for more about submarine warfare: we analysed how the Royal Navy eventually came to defeat the Kaiser’s U-boats in the first ‘Battle of the Atlantic’; we looked more deeply at the career of John Philip Holland, the ‘father of the modern submarine’; we immersed ourselves in knowledge at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, Hampshire; and we even studied the devastating use of ramming as a naval tactic, from ancient times to the Second World War.

And finally, if all that leaves you longing for more, don’t forget to have a go at our latest Quiz, which this week is also themed around submarines in history and culture. Good luck, and we hope you enjoy The Past!

–

The Past is powered by Current Publishing’s unique stable of accessible specialist magazines, each of which is a leader in its field, and by our global network of writers and editors.

Our aim is simple: to create a new essential destination for anyone interested in any aspect of the past – authoritative, easy to read and navigate, beautifully designed and illustrated, and with no annoying adverts, pop-ups and clickbait.

Whether you’re an armchair historian, a budding archaeologist or a heritage enthusiast, we hope that you like what you find on The Past – and if you do, we hope very much that you might also consider taking out a subscription. Subscriptions cost £7.99 per month, or £79.99 for the whole year. But early visitors to the website can save £30 – subscribe by the end of September 2022 and pay just £49.99 by entering the code September22 at the checkout.