As You Want It...
...Here it is. :-
Chapter Three : The Inspecting Captain of Submarines :
The most famous Naval officer associated with Heligoland was Sir Roger John Brownlow Keyes, a brilliant maverick who began as a junior officer on anti-slavery patrols off eastern Africa, spent time on the South American station, and finally became commander of the destroyer ‘HMS Opossum’ in 1892. However, his service in the Far East aboard ‘HMS Fame’ was epic – he seized four Chinese destroyers, blew up a fort and carried the Union Flag over the walls of Peking when the Legations were relieved in 1900. As an Intelligence officer, he won £66,000 compensation for Hull fishermen after a Russian fleet sank British fishing boats on the Dogger Bank in 1904; his exact information to the Hague Commission of Inquiry impressed the court and prevented a war.
His career continued as a naval attaché, then in 1906 Keyes married Eva Bowlby and hoped for a further naval command, possibly the cruiser ‘HMS Venus’, but that was not to be. The Sea Lords had already identified him as a useful maverick, who had supported the use of Heligoland as a base for torpedo boats and also for that dangerous and unreliable problem, the submarine. The first Inspecting Captain of Submarines, Reginald Spencer Bacon, was a brilliant, dogmatic and combative officer, who had turned the unseaworthy Holland boats into a working device with a conning tower and a good periscope. Spencer’s ‘A-Class’ boats were experimental and suffered accident and failure after failure; Keyes had turned round a unit of four destroyers to an efficient force in 1903, so he was to hand and he was dumped with the problem.
The new ‘B-Class’ had been completed, but they, too, were unsatisfactory, smelly and dangerous to their crews. Keyes was handed a load of files to read and quickly realised the problem; the design was incomplete and the submarines constructed (in his opinion) unfit for anything but local coastal defence. Petrol-engined and with few compartments, underpowered, unable to be lived in for long, they offered scope for a lot of improvement.
“I am Inspecting Captain of Submarines and in charge of you motley lot!” Keyes greeted his paraded submarine crews. “As Captain, First Submarine Flotilla, I mean to turn the submarines into a reliable weapon and you all into effective crews. So I will want to interview every man-jack of you, to see what you have learned and what we need to improve in the ships and in the men!”
Just looking at three of the men will give some idea of Keyes’s approach to his task. Engine Room Artificier Jupp later said that before then he had been regarded as a sort of pirate, but after Keyes interviewed him, the engineer felt as if he had found ‘a bloody good officer who understood technical matters’. Less colourful language from Lieutenants Nasmith and Horton supported this; Keyes was not interested in blaming men where equipment was deficient, but Heaven help the man if the equipment was blamed for a man’s inefficiency. However, something had to be done to improve the submarines – and Keyes did not agree with re-invention if an idea could be found. His approach was a mixture of technical development, training and the development of tactics; in the last, his subordinate Horton was to be a tactical genius.
“’...So much still to be learned about submarines. Tasked ERA Jupp with examining diesel engines for submarine use. Lts. Nasmith and Horton sent to Patents Office – to find every scrap of information on submarines and related ideas. Good men all...’”
Keyes’s naval logs and diaries for this period are full of incredible discoveries. Jupp uncovered James Richardson, an engineer in Scott’s Shipbuilding, a Clydeside shipyard. Richardson wanted submarines to use a device he named a ‘snorkel’, basically a hinged pipe raised from the after-deck and raised to periscope height, to let a submarine travel underwater on its air-breathing engines. Jupp thought it a good idea – as long as water did not pour down – to let breathing air be changed and let the submarine recharge its batteries. Nasmith suggested adding a telescopic tube, like a hydraulic periscope, with a ‘shoe’ at its top and a valve controlled by a float. Jupp argued about the risks of the engine sucking the air out of the boat, suggesting compressed air release at the same time, or else charging whilst hove-to underwater. Their cheerful no-ranks arguments were typical of what went on, with the Flotilla making little differentiation in rank when in the course of brainstorming a problem, for Keyes wanted results, not ‘pulling rank’.
The snorkel design was not perfect, but Vickers requisitioned Richardson from Scott’s and he went south to Barrow. Experiments began with Richardson’s original device, but with the objective of a telescopic tube that could be raised hydraulically. It was decided to retrofit a tube into the old 'HMS B-8' submarine as a trial, with a periscope-type telescopic tube mounted aft of the periscopes on the conning-tower. Richardson had warned that the tube needed to be wide enough to feed air into the engine manifold at low revolutions, so a twin six-inch intake was chosen. Keyes grinned and made them experiment with ‘HMS B-8’ in dock; results were inconclusive, but Keyes got them to continue and to find solutions to the problems with ship designers at Vickers yard in Barrow.
Another key aspect was communications; Marconi had produced radio sets usable by the Navy’s larger ships and shore stations, but was taking time to produce a radio transmitter that would work on even a surfaced submarine. Keyes lent them ‘HMS B-7’ for tests and experiments, then ‘HMS B-6’, although that nearly caused a petrol fumes explosion. It was easier to receive than to transmit, which led to a number of lower-deck jokes; an experimental station on the Isle of Wight was able to be received by many naval ships and four submarines listening in. Late in 1906, a sufficiently-small transmitter was produced for use on destroyers and naval trawlers, this Mark II set being just small enough to fit in a larger design of submarine. The joke was that ‘B-6’ was big enough to carry a radio – if it sacrificed a torpedo and stopped engines.
Torpedoes also turned out to be a thorn in Keyes’s side for the next six years, for Whitehead’s were still trying to develop a torpedo that would reliably damage or sink an armoured warship. They eventually did it by improving the warhead size and explosive and fitting a stronger contact-pistol, as the firing-pin was found to bend or break on impact. Keyes’s strong support in providing subs for test-firings was to win him the company’s whole-hearted support, as well as improving the torpedoes available to the destroyers and cruisers of the Royal Navy. Admiral Fisher – although now fading – called it ‘A partnership made in Heaven to manufacture Hell for enemies of the Empire’.
Gunnery from the deck of a small, heaving submarine, was not an easy task, but was made easier with the introduction of a ‘free-flood’ outer hull to provide a flat and perforated stable surface. This was not Keyes’s idea, as he was more concerned with supplies of Elswick-designed 12-pounder quickfirers (QF) to arm his submarines. Whether mounted ahead of the conning tower or astern of it, these guns were the most reliable weapon aboard the early submarines of any nation. The procedure would be to surface, load the gun from a ready-use locker, then to fire a few shells at the target, then to submerge, move to a new position, surface, and fire some more. Against a merchantman or other ‘soft’ target, these tactics would be quite effective, but the torpedo was the best ‘ship stopper’ in preventing a ship ramming the sub.
Anti-submarine warfare tactics were studied carefully by Keyes and his men; the submarine was a largely experimental item, so they looked towards the time when a cruiser, battle-cruiser or battleship, would be theirs to command. It was the shrewd Max Horton who remarked to Keyes that successful submarines would change the face of naval warfare forever, although both men agreed that naval artillery was still the deciding factor.
“’...Argued with Max [Horton] over the role of Heligoland. He sees it as a very useful sub base in wartime. A gun that does not reach Cuxhaven he considers of poor value. He argued that Heligoland only blocks daylight access to the Jade Estuary, Cuxhaven and Hamburg. That fellow Childers’ book points out that tides are quite high on the Frisian coast. Max wants to bottom submarines to ambush destroyers when they come out...’”
This December 1908 entry in Keyes’s journal shows that both men were deep in discussion of submarine tactics – Horton’s genius in this was the basis of the Admiralty’s later ‘Close Submarine Blockade’ that was such a disaster for the Kaiserliche Marine and such a man-eater for the Submarine Service. A bottomed submarine would need an air supply, so the importance of the snorkel tube was crucial even at that stage. Experiments in Portsmouth Harbour demonstrated that crewmen – if they lay still – could make the air supply of a sealed submarine last for sixteen to twenty hours, but at the cost of of risking asphyxiation from carbonic acid gas buildup. Much better, as Horton showed, to briefly ventilate ship every few hours through the snorkel, even to recharge slowly over hours with the engine just idling.
“’...Interviewed Robert Erskine Childers in London regarding his book ‘Riddle of the Sands’, published in 1903. Impressed by his seamanship and scholarship. Learnt his yacht ‘Asgard’ has been all over the Baltic and Frisian coasts. He is barred from using the Kaiser Wilhelm Kanal through Holstein due to his book. Determined to see Irish Home Rule, but agrees with me that ‘Kaiser Bill’ is a threat to the peace of Europe. ‘Not just a piece – he wants all of it’ – an excellent pun. Disturbed by his account of new coastal fortifications west of Cuxhaven near Duhne – nearest part of mainland Germany to Heligoland...’”
Keyes touched on something that became a feature of Erskine Childers’s next book ‘The Guns of Cuxhaven’, in which Carruthers and his crony Davies discovered that the Kaiser had authorised the construction of emplacements for a new and very long range German gun. This gun, an undefined achievement of the Krupps works in Essen, was an astonishing weapon able to hurl heavy shells at Heligoland’s gun turrets. The name given in a coded message was ‘The Five Fingers’, an allusion to five huge gun barrels. To Erskine it was nothing more than a literary device, but he had caused consternation in Naval Intelligence. By a curious fluke, there was just such a reference in their files to ‘Five Fingers’ as a Kaiserliche Marine weapons programme – and nobody outside Naval Intelligence was supposed to have heard about it.
“Coincidences occur.” Keyes reported. “Childers told me about a ‘Kaiser’s Hand’ that he thought sounded better as ‘the Five Fingers’. But he may just have stumbled upon a genuine threat to Heligoland. I suggest covert investigation.” He saw the Director of Naval Intelligence was unconvinced. “Sir, would you like me to investigate?”
“You? Good God, no!” Captain Edmond Slade was appalled. “Far too valuable!”
“Who, then?” Keyes wanted to know. “And how do we get him in? My boys could take him in by submarine, using Arbuthnot’s charts.”
“Nice idea – but we can get an agent in from a neighbouring country.” Slade assured him. “We need you to work up the submarine force – the Germans have been developing a range of new ocean-going Unterseeboote. That will mean a lot of trouble if they get out into the shipping lanes...”
Keyes and his ‘Pirates’ had already come up with tactics to counter the German submarines. Horton’s ‘Ambush Strategy’ was only one aspect; the Royal Navy planned to contain the ‘U-boats’ by stopping them in the Straits of Dover and in the Norway-Scotland gap. The Navy was very reluctant to try the most sensible proposal, which was to organise convoys protected by escorts of destroyers and other vessels, as this would take naval forces needed elsewhere. Plans were made for convoys in the Channel and the North Sea to protect ships bringing in imports and to protect the coastal freighters and fishing boats. The problem was, as always, detecting submarines and then attacking them – and that was a serious one.
It was Nasmith who had the bright idea of listening to the sounds underwater that reached a submarine’s hull, roughly identifying the different sounds as natural or coming from some ship or structure. He used a drinking-glass held against the inside of the pressure hull, later a conical metal megaphone, his ear against them. A visiting wireless operator from Marconi watched his efforts with astonishment, suggesting that instead he use a microphone connected to a one-valve amplifier and then a pair of standard headphones. Nasmith recalled that he stared at the Marconiman in amazement, but they knocked together a breadboard device that worked fairly well. The only headache was that the submarine had to have its engine stopped, or vibrations and background noise wiped out external sounds. The wireless operator realised that a carbon microphone was not very effective, but dynamic microphones – like loudspeakers working in reverse – were tried and made to work.
“We need an external microphone of some kind.” Nasmith reported to Keyes. ”But it will be vulnerable to pressure-changes. Difficult.”
“Keep at it.” Keyes told him, unconcerned. “Even if it takes years. You’re on the edge of developing something highly valuable.” His authority – and Nasmith’s own tenacity – certainly accelerated development of the hydrophone, but it was to be four long years before Chance would step in to help.
Attacking a submerged submarine proved extremely difficult; proposals to tow a mine on a cable and detonate it on contact with the hull proved useless – the seabed or reefs were more often hit, as the mine tended to change depth upwards when towed. A free-falling ‘sinking mine’ with a hydrostatic pressure-fuse was one offshoot from these and Nasmith’s experiments. The ‘A-class’ submarines were regarded as obsolete and were used as unmanned targets, but the 400-lbs of TNT had to be within 20 feet to do any damage and a destroyer dropping the charges too slowly was damaged and sent into drydock. The Royal Navy tenaciously kept experimenting, driven by a fear of what might occur if it did not, by 1910 establishing tactics and methods to attack submarines.
Although the Royal Navy was catching up fast – and, thanks to Keyes, was improving reliability and making significant innovations – submarines had been given far more prominence in Germany, Austria-Hungary, the United States, France, Russia and Japan. British Naval Intelligence spent time, money and agents, keeping tabs on the potential opposition, discovering that few had tackled the anti-submarine-warfare problem, Britain being the world leader. However, the Americans had had the kudos of the Holland submarine being the first commercially and militarily successful design, looking into such matters as underwater signalling and sound ranging. The whole period from 1904 to 1912 was a ferment of submarine experimentation and training, matched only by activity in trying to use the aircraft as a weapon of war.
But the Royal Navy had started a serious ‘Naval Race’ by launching the fast battleship ‘HMS Dreadnought’ in 1906, the high-speed, armoured heavily-gunned ship, expensive to build, fuel and operate. It began to seem as if submarines – like aircraft – were flimsy toys without the power to attack such terrible battleships, and were destined only to be a nuisance controlled by destroyers and light cruisers. Germany, France, Russia and Japan, all poured vast wealth into the construction of the huge new heavily-armed fast warships. The Battle of Tsushima Straits in 1903 had shown that secondary armament was useless against heavily armed and armoured capital ships, which by not having casemates could save weight and cost and reduce vulnerability. It also meant that the main armament could be of more powerful and heavier guns, which went over eight years from 9.2-inch and 12-inch up to 15-inch calibre.
‘Titanic’ changed liner design and safety by her collision with an iceberg in 1912, but she also generated a furore of activity in attempts to detect icebergs so they could be avoided. The initial solution was powerful naval-power carbon-arc searchlights, with a range of ten to twelve miles, but the scientist and engineer Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian who moved to the United States, had produced a device he called the ‘Fessenden Oscillator’. The Fessenden was able to send and receive high-frequency sound signals underwater over a reasonable distance, using a dynamic microphone and speaker. The US Navy had moved smartly to acquire the device, but not nearly fast enough to stop Keyes learning about it. By 1913, the ‘D’ and ‘E’ classes of submarine were being built or retro-fitted with hydrophones based on the Fessenden. The London Radio Society was in the meantime looking into providing audio (spoken) radio by frequency modulation, using another development by Fessenden. Marconi’s original spark-gap radio equipment was going to be superseded by Fessenden’s more advanced oscillating valves, initially for Morse signals and later for voice wireless.
The breakneck speed of development, re-design and construction, had led to the British ‘E-Class’ submarine, diesel-powered, with radio, with Fessenden hydrophone, with Mark VII 18-inch torpedo and 12-pounder Elswick QF gun. Above all, it had four torpedo tubes and a reload capability and the crew had bunks and a galley for hot food. The snorkel was now a telescopic tube that could be raised hydraulically to periscope height and used to ventilate ship with the diesel idling, a safety pressure-valve letting compressed air into the submarine when the float-valve was closed by wave-action. Max Horton and Nasmith showed how a well-trimmed submarine need not suffer this constant waste of high-pressure air and were using ‘D-6’, the last of the ‘D-class’, as a training vessel to show other officers. In fact, with Keyes’s influence, experienced men were soon running a training course at Fort Blockhouse in Portsmouth, teaching young officers and men how to run and fight a submarine – the first of the so-called ‘perisher’ courses, based around effective use of the submarine periscope for torpedo-shooting.
Keyes knew he was not the only one with technical developments; the other new area of interest to both the Navy and the army was aviation – still very fragile and rather uncertain, but with real possibilities for reconnaissance. To the dismay of his wife Eva, Keyes wangled several flights on landplanes and seaplanes, coming back down with some decidedly outré ideas. Like many military men, he had known of the balloon flights out of the Siege of Paris and the German AA guns that tried to stop them. Italy and Japan were known to be interested in the possibilities of a machine gun. The weight of Maxim and Vickers guns told against them, but the lighter-weight Lewis gun had potential to be a very effective weapon indeed. The most vulnerable part of an aircraft had turned out to be the pilot, not the engine and propeller, so a design able to shower an opponent with high-velocity bullets was likely to kill or disable the enemy pilot. Keyes insisted upon the fitting of a machine-gun to those of his submarines that could carry them, as a deterrent to future air-attack.
During discussions with Marconi engineers of the new submarine-mounted radio sets, Keyes idly remarked on the possibilities offered by aviation. He wondered if a large aircraft could carry a wireless to signal its observations to warships or ground stations – say, for artillery spotting. Once the radio engineer stopped laughing, the man looked very thoughtful.
“Power’s a problem, of course, but I suppose you could trail a long antenna.” The engineer said. “And everything would have to be reduced to a small size. Certainly it’s not impossible, but batteries are heavy.” A pause as Keyes raised an eyebrow. “Possibly a small windmill generator? I say – can you get me a flight in a Navy plane?”
“Delighted to arrange it, old boy.” Keyes grinned. “Dress warmly – it’s cold up there.”
Commander Charles Rumney Samson of the Naval Air Station at Eastchurch gave the engineer a flight after a personal request from Keyes, who he knew of and vastly respected. Anything that would benefit his ‘kites’ was worth investigating, even if the current weight of radio equipment was far above what a plane now in service could carry. The delighted engineer came down from the flight scribbling in a notebook; he promised to discuss the matter with Guglielmo Marconi himself and to involve the London Radio Club. It looked as if wireless telegraphy would advance into the air, as soon as technical considerations permitted. In return, Samson took photographs of surfaced and submerged submarines from the air, to assist with anti-submarine warfare operations and submarine evasion plans. It was a remarkable example of co-operation that cemented relations between these two ‘Cinderella’ newcomers to Naval operations. Samson himself was to propose scouting with his aircraft from Dover, Harwich and Heligoland, to detect Kaiserliche Marine ships, Zeppelins and U-boats and report back. He suggested that the submarines be fitted with smaller and cheaper radio receivers, so that they could receive encoded orders and information from the transmitters on ships and at naval bases.
Experiments and tests of Samson’s idea proved worthwhile enough for submarines and aircraft to be tasked to work together from Dover as a block to German attempts to run through the Channel. When coupled with destroyers and cruisers, the result could be a very effective wartime barrier; it would also reduce deployment pressures on the Royal Navy’s battleships and battlecruisers. Keyes extended the idea to a blockade of the German ports by submarines, destroyers and aircraft based at Heligoland, after discussion with Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt, controlling the Harwich Force and the Destroyer Flotillas.
But Keyes was still regarded as a maverick by the Navy; several Admirals – most notably his predecessor as Inspecting Captain of Submarines, Reginald Bacon - were shocked and disgusted at the way he was turning the ‘Pirates’ into a disciplined fighting machine with considerable power. The last straw for them was when he looked into ways of boosting the torpedo warheads, with the objective of sinking capital ships. The battleship Admirals decided that this impudent rascal had to be moved – fast – to somewhere that might give him naval guns instead. But Keyes had one further aggravation for them; he had been able to meet a shortfall of cruisers and destroyers by at Heligoland by deploying two ‘E-’ and two ‘D-class’ submarines there. Keyes quietly took ‘E-6’ there on a ‘training mission’ to meet Childers at Heligoland, to secretly investigate ambush-sites for the High Seas Fleet. The Inspecting Captain of Submarines was recalled to London and told he had a new command – he was going to be the next Captain-Governor of ‘HMS Heligoland’.
“’...A confounded imposition, just as I was establishing myself at First Submarine [Flotilla].’” Keyes recorded in his journal. “’Eva certain it is right to accept. Warned her Heligoland is tiny – 0.4 square miles in area – and much is underground. She is determined to follow me there, but the children will stay in Knoydart with her parents. Had interview with Her Majesty at Buckingham Palace – Queen Alexandra finely dressed but her mind as good as a Naval officer on Heligoland. Told by her that Heligoland of enormous strategic importance in a future war with Germany. Gathered that the guns are too short in range and I suggested my subs may be the way to carry war to the enemy. Did me the honour of saying I was the man for the task and that I had Royal patronage, if it would help. Eva present and considered her a v. great lady...’”
Despite his obvious dismay, this entry from his diaries shows how Keyes had outflanked the Admirals in his own mind by bringing his submarines to the fore. However, his reaction appears to have been regarded as predictable by at least one Admiral; in his own diaries, Fisher had made a revealing comment :-
“’...That maverick Keyes will be useful when he takes command at ‘HMS Heligoland’. Right or wrong, there are guns, submarines, torpedo boats and the new aircraft. I agreed to his posting in the belief that he is able to weld them into an effective force. If nothing else, he will deny the use of Heligoland to the enemy and will be an annoying irritant to the Kaiser...’”
Fisher plainly tolerated Keyes as being the kind of loose cannon who was bound to cause more trouble for the Kaiser than to the Admiralty; in this he was to be proved right, but others – including Keyes himself – at first regarded the posting as a demotion.
...So there you are - the pre-Heligoland Roger Keyes. I hope you enjoyed it...
