Fisher, an early torpedo enthusiast, still wasn’t satisfied that battleships were adequately protected from torpedo boats. As a rear admiral and third sea lord in the British admiralty, he got the navy to change to a new type of steam boiler that greatly improved the power of its engines. Then he introduced a new fast ship, smaller than a cruiser but bigger, faster, and more heavily armed than a torpedo boat. It was called a “torpedo boat destroyer,” and that was its mission. Today, its name shortened to destroyer and with different missions, it is still a staple of all navies. Fisher also pushed for more and better submarines, but, although he eventually became first sea lord (the top officer in the Royal Navy), he could not totally overcome the opposition of other naval brass who hated the thought of submarines, which they saw as the greatest threat to the surface fleet. The British did adopt the submarine, but built only a few.
In both world wars, the submarine, whose main weapon was the torpedo, proved to be the most efficient user of those miniature submarines sailors call “tin fish.” (See Chapter 29.) Airplanes were a close second.
Surprisingly, in World War II, the United States, the country with the largest, and in most ways, most modern, navy, had the worst torpedoes. Admiral Samuel Morison, the official navy historian of World War II, attributed the deficiency to a combination of poor design, obsolescence, false economy and inefficiency at the navy-owned torpedo factory in Newport, Rhode Island. Most of the torpedoes were left over from World War I. The detonators sometimes failed to work even if the target was hit squarely, and too often the target was not hit because the depth regulator was faulty. Submarine commanders returned from patrol reporting they had heard as many as nine torpedoes strike a Japanese ship without exploding.
The U.S. Navy was convinced that the next war’s naval battles would be fought at long range with big guns, so it took the torpedo tubes off its cruisers.
The torpedo, in spite of the phenomenal Japanese “Long Lance,” was essentially a short-range weapon. And to much of the naval brass, and an even higher proportion of Congress, battleships and aircraft carriers were glamor weapons — not destroyers and submarines.
By mid-1943, however, American torpedo troubles had been cured, and U.S. submarines proceeded to sink most of Japan’s cargo fleet and a high proportion of its navy with torpedoes. (See Chapter 29.) Torpedoes appeared in a wide variety of forms during the two world wars.
Most, as with the original Whitehead torpedo, were powered by a miniature steam engine using compressed air or oxygen to allow combustion. The steam engine provide great speed and long range, but it left a visible wake, giving target ships a chance to evade the missile. The Germans introduced a torpedo with an electric engine that left no wake, but it was slow and short-ranged.
Later the Americans captured one and improved it, producing a faster, longer-ranged torpedo that still left no wake. The Japanese, not satisfied with their Long Lance, developed a special torpedo for use at Pearl Harbor, a location considered unsuitable for aerial torpedoes because of the constricted space and shallow water. The new torpedo traveled fairly close to the surface and armed itself almost immediately after it was dropped. Another German innovation was an acoustic torpedo that homed in on the noise of a ship’s engines and propellers. The Allies foiled this with the “Foxer,” a device towed by a ship that produced noises that made the acoustic torpedo hit the decoy. The United States also produced a homing torpedo and used it as an anti-submarine weapon. “Fido,” it was called, because it “smelled” its prey in deep water. When it saw a U.S. plane approaching, an enemy submarine invariably dived. When that happened, the plane dropped Fido, which pursued the now invisible sub and sank it.
A post-war torpedo guidance system uses active acoustic homing. The torpedo sends out sounds, like a sonar system does, to locate a submarine lying motionless on the sea bottom, then homes in on the target. Another type of torpedo is steered by signals reaching it over a long, thin wire. Wire guidance is not really new. The Brennan torpedo, a 19th-century rival of the Whitehead, used wire guidance. Wire technology at that time was primitive, however, and the wire was thick. The Brennan torpedo required a mass of wire so large it was inconvenient and even dangerous aboard a ship. The wire-guided torpedo had to wait another half-century.
With all its forms and ways of delivery — surface vessel, submarine, or aircraft — the torpedo has thoroughly changed naval warfare, and it may bring more changes in the future.
Chapter 27
10 Shots a Second: The Machine Gun
It was July 1, 1916. Nineteen British divisions, the majority of them part of Kitchner’s “New Army,” volunteers so far untested in battle, were poised to effect the breakthrough their commander, Sir Douglas Haig, expected to end the war. The Somme had been a quiet area for the last two years. For the last week, though, it had been anything but quiet. A thousand field pieces, 180 heavy guns, and 245 heavy howitzers had dropped 3,000,000 shells on the German trenches and artillery positions. The no-man’s-land and the German positions were a churned-up mass of shell holes. It looked as if nothing could have survived. To make sure that nothing did, the infantry would be preceded by a “creeping barrage”: the artillery would pound the first German trenches, then as the infantry drew close, it would shift to positions farther away. The attack was expected to consist of a stroll across a field, through the ripped up ruins of what had been a formidable German barbed wire entanglement and into the area that once held German trenches.
The Boer War had taught the British infantry “fire and movement.” Some of the men would rush forward for a short distance then take cover, while the rest, firing from prone or behind cover, would cover their advance with rifle fire. The advanced troops then would fire on the enemy while their comrades rushed forward. This greatly reduced casualties, but it was harder to control the troops. Because his soldiers were so green, and because much German resistance was unlikely, Haig decided to have the troops stay in line and walk to the enemy trenches. Also, if there were enemy fire, the high command was afraid some of the untried troops would flop into shell holes and refuse to advance.
Orders stated that “The assaulting troops must push forward at a steady pace in successive lines, each line adding fresh impetus to the preceding line.”
Nothing turned out as expected. The enormous artillery barrage did not cut the barbed wire. It just tossed the wire up and tangled it more. It was harder to get through than it was originally. Few of the Tommies even got to the wire.
The Germans had dugouts 30 feet below the surface in the chalky soil. They dragged their Maxim machine guns out and cut loose.
A German soldier recalled that attack:
When the English started advancing we were very worried; they looked as if they must overrun our trenches. We were very surprised to see them walking… When we started firing we just had to load and reload. They went down in the hundreds. You didn’t have to aim, we just fired into them.
Two British battalions were practically wiped out by a single machine gun.
Many of the troops never got farther from their own trenches than a few feet.
Long-range machine gun fire killed many others from reserve trenches before they even reached the British frontline trenches. On that first day of the Battle of the Somme, 20,000 of the 100,000 attackers were killed; 40,000 were wounded; and many of the wounded later died.
In spite of that, Haig kept the offensive going for more than four months. It was always the same: No matter how heavily the artillery pounded the enemy trenches, a few German machine guns survived and cut down thousands of attacking infantrymen. The British gained a little ground, but never achieved a breakthrough. For the first two weeks, they didn’t gain an inch. In the middle of September, the British introduced a new weapon: the tank. The tanks gained 3,500 yards, the biggest one-day advance, but by the end of the day, all 36 tanks had broken down. By November 19, when the offensive was called off, the deep-est British penetration was 7 miles from their
