Swimming with the Fishes

 

Left and right. Forward or backward. East, west, north, and south. Once upon a time the world was defined in just two dimensions because no matter where you went, your feet were always firmly affixed to the ground. Climbing a tree or digging a hole didn't count as basically you were always standing on a substitute floor. Even on a boat you were still floating on a ship's deck more or less at sea level.

 

It wasn't until the 19th century that a few clever and determined aeronauts discovered ways to defy gravity with balloons, gliders, and airships. Then in the 1900s powered aeroplanes opened the sky into a new dimension for mankind. People could finally experience flying like a bird.

 

In the same decade another invention unlocked the opposite direction. Nautical engineers figured out how to control buoyancy in marvelous submarine vessels that could dive beneath the sea. Now people could imagine swimming like a fish. It turned out that exploring the world underwater was just as complicated, and dangerous, as flying above it.

The idea of flying inspired countless men to build machines, both lighter and heavier than air, that would carry people up into the skyward dimension. But far fewer inventors had a passion to untangle the myriad difficult challenges of propelling a watercraft down below the sea. These pioneers of submersible vessels had a different motivation than the early aeronauts. Their goal was not to explore the ocean's mysteries, but to develop a stealthy warship that could hide beneath its surface. By 1900 advancements in marine engineering and manufacturing of ships, electrical motors, petrol engines, and military armament reached a level that made a powered submersible watercraft a viable reality. Just as the 1900s introduced a new age of aeroplanes, it also became a new age for the submarine boat. Mankind now had reasons to think both downward and upward.

This colorized picture postcard shows a naval officer standing half out of a turret on a vessel that is mostly concealed below water.  The caption reads:

U. S. Submarine Boat Plunger

 

The USS Plunger (SS-2) was the second submarine commissioned in the United States Navy. Her keel was laid down on 21 May 1901 at the Crescent Shipyard in Elizabeth, New Jersey. She was launched on 1 February 1902 and commissioned in 9 September 1903. The USS Plunger shared a name with an earlier experimental submarine that was powered by a steam engine. It was designed by inventor and submarine pioneer John P. Holland (1841–1914). His boat, (all submarines are called boats, not ships.) was evaluated by the U.S. Navy from 1898 to 1900, but was never accepted or commissioned. This second Plunger was the lead boat in her Plunger ship-class which resulted in seven submarine boats built on the same design.

The postcard was sent from Waterbury, Connecticut on 16 October 1906 to Miss Sophie Johnson of New Sweden Station, a tiny village way up in the northwoods of Maine, about 200 miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean.

Along the side is a message:

                                Dear  Sophie

                    Will write you soon  got the Book
                    also the letter  Johanna.

 

 

The USS Plunger was not intended for long voyages over deep water. It was a submarine torpedo boat meant for defending harbors. It was a similar concept to the ironclad monitor warships used in the 1860s that were armed with large naval cannons to guard ports, essentially as floating fortresses. The Plunger submarine was furnished with single torpedo tube, but unlike the monitor it could sink below the water to conceal its position from enemy ships.

 

 

USS Plunger (SS-2)
Source: Wikipedia

 

This photo of the USS Plunger shows it underway in the New York Navy Yard around 1908-09. At the time it was assigned to the First Submarine Flotilla which included its sister-ships USS Porpoise (SS-7), and Shark (SS-8). By January 1905 the other Plunger-class submarine torpedo boats, USS Grampus and Pike were on the Pacific coast at the Mare Island Navy Yard in Vallejo, California and the USS Adder and Moccasin were assigned to the Reserve Torpedo Flotilla in Norfolk, Virginia. 

 

 

In this colorized photo postcard, captioned: U. S. Submarine Boat "Plunger" , Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Plunger lies propped up in dry dock in front of another submarine. Both boats are dwarfed inside the gigantic basin that was built to support maintenance on great battleships.

 

 A message on the border reads:

                            You are a man of peace so I
                            thought you'd enjoy seeing this
                            deadly machine.   Almina Lictner (?)

 

The card was sent from New York City on 8 July 1907 to Mr. Harry Woodard, of Bartow, Florida which is near Winter Haven in between the state's Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coast. Harry was born in 1887 and in the 1900 census was the son of an "Engineer, Ice Factory" and then a student "at school". Later in 1910 Harry worked as a railroad "freight agent", so the writer's reference to a "man of peace" may be about the young man's professed feelings on war or the writer's joke. 

 

 

 

A Plunger class submarine was 63' 10" long with a beam of 11' 11". Most of the boat was submerged when it was at the surface so its draft 10' 7" was much deeper that a regular boat of the same size.  The boat's single screw propeller was powered by a 160 HP gasoline engine at the surface and by a 150 HP electric motor powered by 60 battery cells when submerged. This gave it a speed of 8 knots surfaced and 8 knots underwater. A Plunger submarine was capable of reaching a depth of 150' feet, but 100' was the tested limit. It was armed with one 18" torpedo tube and carried 5 torpedoes. Normal operation of the boat required a complement of 1 officer and 6 enlisted men.  

 

 

 

Diagram for USS Plunger
Source: Navsource.org

These two diagrams of the USS Plunger's construction plans reveal that this boat was very unsophisticated. Compared to modern submarines it was as primitive in design as the Wright brothers' airplane was to a jet plane. Shaped like a sausage the sub was stuffed with just the necessary marine requirements. The gasoline engine and electric motor were aft next to the prop and rudder. The torpedo tube was fixed in the bow. Arranged in the center was the large battery box, and several tanks for air, ballast, and fuel. The torpedoes were fastened to the inside. One writer of the time noted that

There was no accommodation or facilities for the crew. Food was cooked over a portable stove. A bucket served as a latrine. The engine fumes, battery acid, stale air, noise, and pervasive saltwater damp made life aboard this vessel particularly uncomfortable. Even by navy standards of the time it was considered very unhealthy and extremely hazardous to its sailors.

 

 

Plans for USS Plunger
Source: Navsource.org

A section view shows the cylindrical design of the USS Plunger with a radius of just 5' 10". When submerged the commander stood on a raised box in the short conning tower to operate both the steering and diving plane controls. There was no periscope, his only viewpoint was to look through small deadlight windows in the tower and try to blindly aim the vessel towards its quarry. Failure to secure the craft's single hatch before diving was a harsh lesson that several early submariners had to learn the hard way. 

 

San Francisco Call
26 August 1905

On 25 August 1905 the USS Plunger was towed to Oyster Bay on the north coast of Long Island, New York. Situated on the bay was Sagamore Hill, the home of Theodore Roosevelt who was then in his fourth year as president of the United States. In great secrecy the navy had arranged a private test of its new submersible torpedo boat for the president's personal inspection. On the day Roosevelt only decided to accompany the Plunger's commander, Lieutenant Charles H. Nelson at the last moment. Even his family didn't know about it.

The president squeezed through the hatch and was given a short tour of the boat. It then dived to a depth of 40 feet staying submerged for half an hour. This was followed by an exhibition of "porpoise diving" which "consists of dashing through the water a t high speed, alternately appearing and disappearing along the surface after the manner of a porpoise [i.e. dolphin]." 

 

 

New York World
26 August 1905

The Plunger then dove at an angle of forty-five degrees. stopped at a depth of 20 feet, reversed engines and popped back to the surface. It did two more dives, once remaining motionless with all lights extinguished to demonstrate how the crew was trained to work in total darkness. The president stayed on the submarine for almost three hours and several times was given control of the vessel.

In this front page from the New York World, a cartoon Roosevelt is drawn scrambling all over the boat which is depicted as much larger than it really was. Newspapers around the country had covered the movements of the submarine earlier in the week and reported on a possible inspection, generally presuming that the president would watch from the safety of a ship or at the Sagamore Hill dock. When it was revealed that he actually went down underwater the news went to the front page with many photos and illustrations. Most reports chastised the president's audacity at putting himself at deadly risk of an accident. But by the point in his term it only served to increase Roosevelt's reputation for courage and daring.

 

Later the next month, Roosevelt wrote about his inspection of the Plunger to Hermann Speck von Sternburg (1852–1908), a German diplomat.

 

        "I myself am both amused and interested as to what you say about the interest excited about my
        trip in the Plunger. I went down in it chiefly because I did not like to have the officers and enlisted
        men think I wanted them to try things I was reluctant to try myself. I believe a good deal can be
        done with these submarines, although there is always the danger of people getting carried away
        with the idea and thinking that they can be of more use than they possibly could be."
        To another correspondent he declared that never in his life had he experienced "such a diverting
        day ... nor so much enjoyment in so few hours."

Ironically this was written to a diplomat of Imperial Germany which in less than ten years would build a fleet of over 350 long range Unterseeboots (under-sea boats), or U-boats. These German submarines terrorized shipping lanes from 1914 to 1918 resulting in a loss to the Allied forces of 10 battleships, 18 cruisers, and numerous smaller navy vessels, as well as 12,850,815 gross tons in merchant ships. More than 3000 British civilian ships were sunk and almost 15,000 British merchant sailors killed. I featured a small collection of postcard artwork on these German submarines back in my story from March 2023, Terror on the High Seas. 

USS Moccasin, View forward of single torpedo tube, 1912
Source: Wikipedia

At the time of his inspection of the Plunger President Roosevelt was seeking an end to the Russo-Japanese War which was a conflict waged between the Japanese Empire and the Russian Empire over the acquisition of Manchuria and the Korean Empire. His diplomatic effort succeeded in a peace treaty signed by the imperial rivals on 5 September 1905 at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine. During this war the Imperial Russian Navy ordered a small flotilla of seven submarines built similar to the Plunger. These submarines were designed by American naval engineers for harbor defense, though they were stationed mainly on Russia's Baltic Coast. 

 

In August 1914 Japan joined Britain and France as an ally against the empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary. In return it acquired several of Germany's Asian colonial outposts. Japan's military planners paid close attention to the power of a submarine fleet as during WW1 its navy performed escort duty in the Pacific and Mediterranean and lost ships to submarine attacks. Two decades later Japan's submarines would prove a dangerous force in the Second World War.

 

The Plunger was decommissioned a few months after Roosevelt's inspection on 3 November 1905 and put into storage. It remained inactive until 23 February 1907 when it was recommissioned with a new commander, Ensign Chester Nimitz, who would later become a celebrated fleet admiral in WW2. Nimitz later recalled the Plunger as "a cross between a Jules Verne fantasy and a humpbacked whale".

 

The Plunger was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on 24 February 1913 and in 1916 it was designated as an "experimental target" for gunnery training and in March 1918 she was sank off New Suffolk, Massachusetts. In 1921 the sunken hulk was raised but the Salvage Diving School at New London, Connecticut and sold for scrap.

 

Whether you are up in an airplane
or below the sea in a submarine,
it's the safe return to the ground
or to the surface that is the happy goal.

 

 I can not resist including
the one song about submarines
that everyone knows.
Feel free to join in the chorus.

 

 

 

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday
where the one thing fishing teaches you
is that you've got to have hope.