The March of Time - 20th Century History

[Karelian]

Engineers, chemists, sportsman shooters, expert marksmen, infantrymen and cavalrymen. Historians, military theorists, generals - and the common soldier.

Not to mention the self-proclaimed experts at the press and the man on the street. Everyone had an opinion when it came to the topic of modern military rifles.

It all started from the measurements. Every ounce of weight had to be taken into consideration, for weight saved in the arm could be added to the ammunition and other equipment carried.

At the same time the rifle had to be obviously strong enough to stand rough usage and strain of bayonet fighting. The older rifles had been longer partially to make them better for bayonet work, but also to enable for rank firing in close order.

Bolt actions had become universal, but aside from that several features separated the similar-ish rifles of the armies of the world from one another. A straight pull action, such as in the Austrian or Swiss rifles, or a turning bolt?

A box magazine - a narrow or deep one, with a single or double row of cartridges? And with a cut-off or maybe even a horizontal Krag-Jorgensen type box with a trapdoor in the side of the rifle?

A charger system or a clip magazine? How many cartridges per clip?

A box magazine, bolt action and the placement of the breech action all curtailed the size of the barrel. The barrel had an important bearing on the velocity.

And the cartridges, oh! Rimmed cartridges took up more room in packing than rimless ones. They were also more liable to jam.

Rimless cartridges had nothing more than the taper at the neck and the extractor hook preventing them being accidentally forced too far forward into the chamber.

And their propellant! The legendary cordite had survived much criticism. It imparted high velocity for bullets fired from shorter barrels than before in a way that had been impossible with black powder.

It had many merits: it was stable, efficient, very controllable and trustworthy in all climates of the British Empire.

Excessive barrel erosion, its chief drawback, was lately being greatly diminished with modified mixture containing only 30% of nitroglycerin instead of the old 58%.

With the propellant debate more or less settled, there was the question of bullet velocity: the designers were after the "impossible ideal" of a bullet travelling for 3 000 yards in a straight line and then dropping to the ground.

Penetration and force of blow of the bullet were of course important as well. But the experts agreed that the main difficulty for efficient musketry in a modern war was that of adjusting the aim to the distance of the mark.

As long as range finding remained little more than a matter of guesswork, the importance of a flat trajectory was enormous, for it diminished the necessity of accurate guessing.

But higher velocity could only achieved by larger flow of gases under increased pressure. As charges in the cartridge grew, pressures were increased in turn.

This could only be avoided by an equal increase in the capacity of the cartridge to achieve a reduced gravimetric density.

If the pressures were to be kept within reasonable limits, the cartridge had to be enlarged to an awkward shape, while the barrel necessarily suffered more from the action of the gases and the bullet upon it.

The caliber was really the crux of the matter.

 

[Karelian]

The change which had taken place in military arms c. 20 years ago had been a success because of practicable smokeless propellants. As the reduction of the calibre reduced the size and weight of the ammunition, it enabled the soldier to carry a much increased number of rounds, and made the box magazine a practicable feature in modern rifles.

The rapidity and certainty of fire from weapons capable of firing bullets travelling 2 miles with great accuracy, and with such velocities that they would penetrate a foot of timber at 1 000 yards had been a military revolution that had defined every military conflict ever since.

The .300 to .315 inch (7½ to 8 mm) calibre had been the choice of most foreign Powers. By 1900 opinion of nations seemed to be divided as to the advantages of further reduction of calibre. Italian .256 (6½-mm) Mannlicher-type had been in service for 14 years. Romania (1893), Holland (1895) and the Japanese (1900) had followed suit.

Spain used an intermediate calibre, the .276 (7mm), similar to the arm of the Boers. The US Navy had boldly adopted the very small calibre of .236 (6mm), but had abandoned it shortly afterwards, altering the form of their cartridge to get a higher velocity, while retaining the .300 calibre.

Germany had modified the pattern of the Mauser rifle without changing the cartridge, and the Swiss had followed suit in 1900 by modifying their rifle but maintaining their calibre.

Many military experts felt that undue reduction of the calibre would mean a loss of wounding power at very long ranges, while also increasing deflection of the bullet by the wind.

Then war came to Scandinavia.
The Norwegian Krag-Jorgensens and Swedish Mausers both fired .256-caliber (6½-mm) ammunition. The caliber gave a velocity of 2,400 f.s. without immoderate pressures, with a well proportioned bullet, and no significant deficiencies in wounding power.

It had indeed been "an admirable choice" for soft-skinned game hunting among British officers in India well before.

Though it provided less of a blow at extreme ranges, the higher velocity gave it an advantage in penetration and in flatness of trajectory - both very important matters.

Even before the war the smaller caliber had compared favorably to .315-inch ammunition in tests conducted in Norway by having a flatter trajectory, greater accuracy, especially at the shorter distances.

Drift and influence of the wind had been practically identical for both calibers, but the smaller .256 penetrated further in wood and as far in earth as the larger, while remaining less deformed.

The .256 ammunition had one extra definite advantage over the .315: a 15% lesser weight - 22% less than the new U.S. cartridge of .300 bore (which gave the same velocity), while the .256 was decidedly less bulky when compared to either.[1]

Opponents of smaller calibres were quick to point out that after firing hundreds of bullets in battles lasting for several days in a row, the barrels of the Norwegian and Swedish service weapons must have had gone through extreme wear and following loss of accuracy.

The proponents of the .256 granted that the chief point of doubt about the calibre the increased wear and erosion, and granted that cordite as it was used in the British rifles with the original mixture was indeed perhaps too erosive a propellant for a .256 rifle; but the countered that by pointing out that ballistite, such as used by the Italians, had much the same character and could offer an alternative.[2]

The Norwegian Secession War offered an interesting angle to the debate about the current status and future design choices of the British service rifle.

1: All quotes are from lecture called "Modern Military Rifles" held by Major T. F. Fremantle 1st Bucks Volunteer Rifle Corps at the Royal United Service Institution on Tuesday 28th March, 1905.

The Swedish 6.5×55mm really was the topic of the aforementioned comparisons and favorable quotes, while it also plays the role of OTL 6.5x50 mm Arisaka as a smaller calibre used in a modern war.
2. Just like they pointed out the alleged condition of Japanese and Russian barrels during the Russo-Japanese War in OTL.

 

[Karelian]

The evolution of the current British service rifle had started with an upgrade to the .303-inch ammunition. In 1892 the old black-powder-load had been replaced by new smokeless cordite - a new mixture of nitro-glycerine, gun cotton and mineral jelly.

The “Emily” MLE firing this new ammunition was born from the inventions of two inventors: William Metford and James Paris Lee. Metford had been an advocate of smaller calibres for his entire life, and had created a new barrel rifling system to overcome problems associated with black powder fouling.

Lee, in turn, had developed a new ingenious bolt-action, magazine-fed mechanism.

The new rifle combining these two inventions had been plagued with problems from the start. The higher temperature of the new propellant that had produced little to no fouling in the test trials soon started to have an unforeseen degrading effect on the shallow groove rifling of the Metford barrels, turning them dangerously unreliable after c. 6000 rounds.

Cordite had also increased the bullet velocity from 1,850 fps to 1,970 fps. The Mk VI cartridge with the old round-nosed 215 grain bullet was simply unable to cope with this increase, and became too unstable at extended ranges.

To remedy the fouling, the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield had designed a new rifling, using five grooves with a left hand-twist. A committee program to improve the ballistics of the bullet was also launched.

The old Lee-Metford, now upgraded with the Enfield rifling, had been adopted for service in 1895 as the .303 calibre, Rifle, Magazine, Lee-Enfield.

It had seen service in Sudan, Nigeria, North West Frontier and South Africa.
The “Long Lee” also saw service during the Boer War, but it still wasn’t a universal British rifle.

The forces in South Africa fought the war with a variety of different service rifles, including older Lee-Metfords, as well as cavalry and artillery carbine versions of both Lee-Metfords and Lee-Enfields.

As the carbines proved themselves unsatisfactory weapons, the desire to save money led to the decision to arm both infantry and cavalry with the same rifle.

This led to adoption of the “Smelly” - SMLE, Short Magazine Lee-Enfield.
It featured a Mauser-type charger loading system. The war experience showed: the new rifle was lighter, easier to handle, and had better sights and a charger-fed magazine system to improve reloading. It also utilized draw pull, which had already been universally in use in Continental rifles. Safe margin of weight combined with comparatively delicate release further increased the accuracy of the weapon.

The new rifle was also shorter, as the name implied: the Snider, the first breech-loading rifle in British military service, had a length of 4 feet 7 inches. The Martini-Henry was 5 and half inches shorter. The new Short Lee-Enfield measured 3 feet 8 inches without the bayonet.

A further update, the SMLE Mk III, introduced on 26 January 1907, had a simplified rear sight arrangement and a fixed charger guide, improved handguard and magazine, and it was built to fire the new Mk VII High Velocity spitzer .303 ammunition that was still in development.

Following the example of the French 1898 Lebel “boat-tail” bullet, the British had changed the shape of their bullets to improve their aerodynamics. The new ammunition had a lighter 174 grain spitzer bullet.

The new rifle and ammunition received criticism. While a .303 rifle with a well-made barrel and properly designed bullet was deemed capable of making quite as accurate shooting as the best of the Continental rifles, with ordinary service ammunition the SMLE was deemed less accurate than rifles like the Dutch pattern .256 Mannlicher and the Mexican pattern .276 Mauser.

Both the ammunition and the rifle were mocked as obsolete, for only Portugal, Denmark and Britain now had service rifles with working pressures under 16 tons. The "measly" 15¼ tons for the Lee-Enfield and 15¾ tons for the short L.E. made the British small arms look weak in comparisons. The Ottomans, Austria and Belgium used rifles with working pressures of 19½, while Germany had 21![1]

The new short rifle of the US Army was designed to have a normal pressure of 20, with the action successfully tested with cartridges loaded to give 29 tons.

The defenders of the upgrade replied by stating that the ability to penetrate 9 inches of bricks, or 14 inches of mortar, or 18 inches of packed earth at 100 yards showed that the new Enfield ball ammunition was not short of power.

But for the critics of the rifle and ammo, the speed of the bullet was still too low for their liking. They were quick to point out that a combination of entirely another rifle and ammunition was currently dominating the long-range target shoot competitions such as Bisley and Camp Perry.

1: All OTL. Pre-war, many regarded the SMLE as an obsolete ad-hoc interim update that would have to be replaced with a truly modern military rifle as soon as practically possible.

 

[Karelian]

Even after Lord Roberts and his Indians had joined forces with the Cavalry faction of the British officer corps to adopt the new short Lee-Enfield, the rifle question was far from finally settled.

There remained a number of constituencies within the Army who were unconvinced about the SMLE and in particular were concerned by the ability of the weapon to stop an enemy dead. The SMLE allowed the various branches of the Army to continue to think about the battlefield and tactics in ways that suited them - but for some of them, the Army needed an entirely new weapon, and quickly.

Made up of members of the NRA and doubting politicians such as Hugh Arnold Forster, the Secretary of State for War from 1903 until 1905, these actors questioned the need for a short-barrelled rifle and were concerned by the Army's decision to abandon the Lee-Metford.

The NRA had been established in November 1859. Formed by members of the Volunteer Force, the ambition of the new association was to improve not only the shooting skills of the Volunteers but also of rifle shooters generally. By holding regular competitions the hope was to make shooting as popular as other British sporting events. With the Prince Consort as Patron and the Duke of Cambridge offering an annual prize, the NRA had very close links with Royalty and the British military establishment.

The appointment of Lord Roberts to the position of Vice-President of the Association in 1901 and the eventual death of the Duke of Cambridge in 1904, had kept the NRA quiet when the SMLE had been adopted. Despite its official position of neutrality in the issue, individual members tended to have very particular views about rifles, and they brought them up in a number of newspapers and journals. Wedded to hitting conventional bull's eye targets at set distances, the association encouraged a view of marksmanship that was invariably at odds with the new demands of the battlefields of South-West Frontier and South Africa.

As far as the NRA's membership was concerned, the key ability of a good service rifle was the capability of accurately striking targets out to long range distances. Accordingly, members took a dim view of the SMLE because it did not fit with their ideas on marksmanship and rifle design. In particular they were not happy with the shortness of the rifle, the lack of a wind gauge for the rear sight and the suitability of cordite ammunition for target shooting.

By 1908 they had found their new favourite, and influential political forces were soon once again at work to influence the procurement decisions of the British military.

 

[Karelian]

He had returned from South Africa with a firm conviction: a small-bore bullet fired at high velocity was clearly the way forward. The Austrian, von Mannlicher, had clearly been right: the ideal bullet diameter was .280, with a 150-grain bullet. The muzzle velocity would have to reach the magical plateau of 3,000 fps. It would have to be rimless, slightly larger than the 7x57 currently in military use.

The man hired to turn this vision into reality as a consultant was one of the best experts available in the entire world, “the father of smokeless powder” - even though his methods merely opened ways for further development. Frederick W. Jones had patented a method of coating smokeless powders to regulate their burning rate, and had worked for Nobel, Imperial Chemical Industries, New Explosives Company, Eley Brothers and the British government.

Combining theory and practice, Mr. Jones was a distinguished member of a high-level competition rifle shooting club competing in the the English Elcho Shield, a competition shot at 1000, 1100 and 1200 yards.

His initial testing of the .28/06 with a 150-grain bullet recorded a muzzle velocity of 2,735fps, a marked improvement over the .275. Then the case was lengthened and the base was widened a bit, improving the taper. By 1907 a new .280 ammunition was ready for production. Eley Brothers were happy to produce it for him, since the business was booming and the new round was in high demand.

Initially a target cartridge, it was designed with military and hunting uses in mind from the start.It triumphed at Bisley in 1908, prompting gunmakers to start chambering hunting rifles for it, as well as developing new competing cartridges. The new magnum action of Mauser worked well with the new round.

Always conscious of the importance of high-profile supporters, the inventor had made good use of his contacts to high society. In 1900 he had presented his rifles to Field Marshall Roberts, and most importantly, to the Prince of Wales. His Imperial Majesty, King George V duly returned the favour and endorsed the .280 cartridge after extensive use during his 1907 grand tour of India, shooting everything from rhinoceros to Bengal tigers.[2] The King used a Lancaster .280 double, for Charles Lancaster & Co. had more royal warrants than any other London gunmaker. And just as it happened, Lancaster was already in a lucrative business contract with the inventor of the new .280.

Sir Charles Ross was now the man of the hour.
2: As the old king dies earlier, the tour happens just before the famous success of .280 at Bisley in 1908.

 

[Karelian]

Adding to the .303 only the simplest possible mechanism for quick loading as a temporary measure, while embarking at once on a rifle more up-to-date in certain respects at a much increased cost was a risky decision. We will never know whether the converted SMLE would have lasted us satisfactorily till yet greater changes had begun to press? Such questions as these are not easily answered with certainty, since they imply a correct judgement of the future, yet upon a right answer to them much may depend.[1]

British Small Arms Committee made two important decisions in early 1907:

1. some form of standardization of existing rifles was in order
2. there was a need for an entirely new rifle that would incorporate the lessons of the war.

The decisions made under the Master-General of the Ordnance, Colonel (temp. Major-General) Sir Charles Frederick Hadden reflected the views of the members of the Small Arms Committee:

President (ex officio): Colonel Charles Monro, The Commandant of the School of Musketry at Hythe. Monro was a high-flier appointed by Roberts to follow Ian Hamilton, an influential musketry drill reformer and another member of his Indian entourage. A self-declared "musketry maniac", Monro stressed the importance of infantry marksmanship with relentless vigour.

Another key member was the Chief Inspector of Small Arms, Lt-Colonel John Hopton. Hopton was one of the greatest rifle shots of his day, an Olympic Marksman at the 1000 yard free rifle event 1908 (his ranking there was 24th out of 50).[2]

The Naval Member, Col. Pease, had little influence to this decision.

The Military Members represented the three most influential groups within the British Armed forces: Major McEven for Cavalry, Major Matheson for Infantry, and Lt.-Col. Fremantle for Auxiliary Forces.

Out of the three, Fremantle had the highest rank and most clout, since he was the former Assistant Private Secretary to former War Minister St John Brodrick.
Fremantle had published three books on the subject of rifle shooting, had shot in the English Eight for years. He had also competed in the 1000 yard free rifle event at the 1908 Summer Olympics with Hopton (16th out of 50).

The Secretary, Captain Douglas of Royal Artillery, had his own views. As the RA was already getting a massive share of the available Army funds, his influence was however rather limited.

Increasingly worried that the German Gewehr 98 and the US M1903 Springfield developed considerably greater muzzle velocity than the short Lee-Enfield, the British Small Arms Committee was asked to list features to be incorporated into an entirely new rifle. The Germans had already introduced a spitzer-type S Patrone, and had by 1905 replaced their older Patrone 88 as the primary ammunition of their infantry weapons. Seen at the light of the recent war in Scandinavia, the British Small Arms Committee concluded that instead of reforming the old .303, Britain would have to upgrade not only the ammunition but the rifle as well.[3]

In their final report in 1910 the Committee concluded that as much of the SMLE was to be retained as possible, but a Mauser-pattern action was to be used, and an aperture backsight substituted for the open notch. An experimental .276-calibre cartridge was being recommended for field trials early to replace the rimmed .303. Shooting new rimless, or cannelured cartridges instead of the rimmed .303, the new caliber was called .276 or .280, showing the clear similarity to the .280 " cartridge of Sir Charles Ross .

The engineers of the Enfield company dutifully took these design specs and went to work.

With a swept-back bolt handle placed close to the trigger, the design aimed to produce a weapon capable of great volume of rapid rifle fire. The fact that continental armies were beginning to wear khaki uniforms, fight from cover and use artillery and machine guns to provide their volume of fire did not diminish the British desire for a weapon capable of delivering the type of infantry firepower that had defined the Boer War and stopped the Mahdist forces cold at the battle of Omdurman in 1898.

Closing stroke of the bolt completed most of the cocking action of the firing mechanism. Whereas Mausers used the opening action of the bolt to cock the piece, the British designers (being no strangers to gritty or sandy conditions of colonial campaigns) felt that the full force on the opening stroke should be reserved for extracting the fired cartridge case.

As the new Enfield rifle and modern ammunition for it were being tested, the truce achieved within the Army brass by the adoption of the SMLE was now broken. The Cavalry faction was now out for blood.

1. Another OTL quote from Major T. F. Fremantle, 1st Bucks Volunteer Rifle Corps
2: To say that this guy was a marksmanship ethusiast is an understatement: his mausoleum allegedly marks the spot from which he once hit the bulls-eye of a target 1500 yards away...
3. In OTL the Small Arms Committee recommended the adoption of the new bullet for the British Service as a temporary expedient pending the introduction of an entirely new design of rifle and ammunition. This had a lot to do with the fact that northern France was now the planned OTL battlefield, and all planning and procurement was made accordingly.

TTL the different Army reforms, the "gravel-belly" lobby of Fremantle and Hopton within the Small Arms Committee, the strong Volunteer background of both War Minister Dilke and PM Spencer and the Royal preference for .280 Ross (not to mention the Liberal reluctance towards all forms of military spending) all combine into a decision that deviates from OTL decision to procure the Mark VII spitzer ammunition as a further upgrade to the SMLE that many prewar OTL critics viewed as an anachronistic stopgap weapon.

 

[Karelian]

The French 1st-line battleships of 1897 were no less sad and peculiar designs than their foreign contemporaries.

On paper, the French fleet of 1897 was a naval force to be reckoned with. From 1886 to 1895, the French had launched nine fleet battleships, with three further placed on the stocks. This construction was part of a dedicated drive to prepare a 28 battleship-strong squadron, envisioned in the Programme of 1896.

Such grandiose plans were nothing new in French naval policy. The establishment of the Third Republic after the Franco-Prussian War had witnessed the declaration of a grand naval plan of 1872, calling for a massive expansion of the navy. A soon-to-be-familiar pattern then emerged: the plan proved untenable from a budget perspective, and was only partially completed, only to be swiftly followed by a new, equally grand and ambitious (and unrealistic) naval plan.

Nevertheless reforms and the additional construction had enabled the French to use their actual fleet to vastly expand their colonial empire during the last three decades of the 19th century.

The French naval designers had been busy. They were serving a state that constantly struggled to secure the funds to both maintain an army large enough to defend France on the Continent and to maintain a navy strong enough challenge the British at sea on their terms. Thus it had been the French who had for decades always eagerly pushed forward into every promising new naval technology, constantly seeking ways to change the rules of naval warfare.

This focus on new technologies, generational change in the French politics, and a renewed colonial rivalry with Britain due the new French colonial holdings had enabled Admiral Thèophile Aube to bring forth his personal ideas as the new leader of the French naval ministry in 1885. Section technique was created, and Émile Bertin, who would soon establish a reputation as a highly influential naval designer, had been tasked to head the new bureau in 1896.

When new political and economic developments made larger tonnages possible, the French ship designs were being standardised at last. Stopping the constant meddling and tinkering that had made every French battleship of being slightly different from another - the notorious "fleet of specimens" - now promised to make the future French fleet easier to both command and operate.

The past, current and future Ministers and the Conceils de la Marine were however soon engaged into a fierce debate, when the wider implications of the ideas of Aube became apparent.

Aube and other proponents of "la jeune Marine" viewed the existing French battleship fleet as unfit for war. The defenders of status quo were willing to point out that these "Cathedrals of the sea" were certainly far from perfect. Their main flaw was that they were top-heavy to the point of being potentially unstable with their excessive superstructures. But despite being mocked as "floating hotels" by their critics, their armor protection and armament were on par with the other contemporary battleship designs.

But Aube was not after better battleships. The admiral and other proponents of their novel, markedly anti-British naval doctrine had in mind something completely different.

 

[Karelian]

The premise of the new strategy had been simple enough.
Modern torpedo, a new weapon system in naval warfare, posed a new threat to heavy battleships of old. Suddenly it seemed possible for any type of naval vessel to inflict massive damage to previously impervious battleships. This made the old tactic of a close naval blockade extremely risky, as new fast attack craft - torpedo boats - and even more novel new warships - submersibles and submarines - could use the new weapon to ambush battleships.

Building from this idea, the French naval doctrine sought to turn British strengths into weaknesses.

The French navy would build a string of fortified naval bases from her Channel coast ports at the continent all the way to Africa, Asia and Pacific. Torpedo boats defending these fortresses would then rapidly sortie against any hostile fleet attempting to blockade them, rendering close blockades impossible and keeping these coaling stations open for long-ranged French cruisers. These ships, in turn, would be able to wreak havoc in the shipping lines vital for the British trade, sinking and capturing ships at will. The French army would guard the French coast against enemy incursions.

With her long shipping routes exposed to merciless raiding and her home waters under constant threat, the British would be powerless to prevail.

The Jeune Ecole had numerous opponents in the French naval and political establishment from its start in the 1880s. They promoted the validity of the concept of a battleship-centered fleet located at home waters, with a reduced commitment to overseas possessions.

The doctrinal debate was also partially a discussion about the navy itself. The French naval force was not nicknamed "La Royale" only because of a street address - the fleet still proudly upheld conservative Catholic traditional values, and thus served as a useful arena for the cultural struggles between radicals and conservatives of the Third Republic.

While the colonial lobby wanted to secure more overseas stations, battleship proponents wanted to defend the status quo and the radicals wanted to use the new doctrine to attack the inherent conservatism of the Navy as an institution, it was hardly surprising that the war scare brought along by the Fashoda incident caught the French fleet by surprise.

When the British fleet was mobilised in late 1898 and Salisbury refused to even call the following diplomatic exchange negotiation, the French political elite was devastated to hear the reality of a navy that was on paper only second to the British in strength. The naval staff had to confirm that the French lacked a definitive campaign plan, and that the Navy was too plagued with material and organisational difficulties to be able to meet the Royal Navy with any chance of success.

The Navy was simply in no position to sustain a war against Britain, period. It was an absolute impossibility, even with Russian help - which would not be forthcoming in months even in the best-case scenario because of the ice conditions. The French society was luckily distracted by the latest turn of the Dreyfus Affair, and this turn of events enabled the French diplomats to climb down from the escalation ladder without a fuss (and without completely losing face.)

Each previous French naval bill had been an attempted compromise between the three factions, providing for the construction of battleships, coastal defence ships, torpedo boats, cruisers and dedicated station ships. These plans were ultimately too ambitious for the French budget, and the constant shifting of priorities in line with power struggles over construction plans and reforms of the naval bureaucracy meant that little construction was actually completed. Ships had languished for long periods on the ways, victims of funding difficulties and the use of naval construction as a means to promote full employment of yard workers no matter the cost or a pre-set timetable.

To make matters worse, neither the battleship proponents or the radicals had been willing to spent money on colonial defence, and in 1898 it had been painfully obvious that the perfidious Albion was once again in a position where they could rip the entire French colonial empire apart should they wish to do so.

The British had not been idle.
They had seen what the French had had in mind, and had met the challenge by altering their current designs and then engaging in massive production to thwart any potential competition.
The Royal Navy had already set the pattern for the pre-dreadnought battleship with an all-steel construction, draught engines, a main armament of four guns in twin mounts, one forward and one aft, with secondary guns mounted along the broadside in 1882 by launching the HMS Collingwood.

The basic design had been greatly improved at the end of the decade with the Royal Sovereigns: they were faster, featured guns in covered barbettes, and first and foremost had an increased number of quick-firing guns on board to deal with torpedo boats.

Culminating to HMS Majestic, a class that ultimately included a massive 37 ships, the Royal Navy kept her battle line both up to date and more numerous than any would-be competitor at the beginning of the century.

Just to drive the point further home, the British had also built more armored and protected cruisers in the ten-year span of 1890-1900 than it had done during the previous two decades combined. Purpose-built to hunt down French commerce raiders, the cruisers were complemented by a completely new ship class - torpedo boat destroyers, a class of ship designed specifically to screen larger fleet units from torpedo boat attack, armed with quick-firing guns and built for speed.

These new ships were also employed with a sound naval strategy, observational blockade, which the impressed French labelled système Ballard after its perceived inventor. The Royal Navy had actively wargamed a naval war with France, and adjusted her tactics and ship designs accordingly.

After Fashoda it was clear that the French would have to come up with a new plan - or any actual plan at all - to meet the British challenge.

 

[Karelian]

Defeat is an orphan, as the old saying goes. But being placed in a perceived position of peril can also make people to put aside their differences to survive. In the case of French, the old political divisions over naval issues from the 1890s were swept away overnight by the aftermath of Fashoda.

By 1900, every person who had a say in French naval policy agreed that urgent change was needed. The French retreat from Fashoda forced a general reappraisal of French diplomatic and military strategy, centered around a reevaluation of the navy.

The critics of Jeune Ecole rushed in like the glorified torpedo boat flotillas. All ships were now faster than before. British battleships were armed with their own quick-firing guns, and escorted by new torpedo-boat destroyers and light cruisers.

Even the Germans were now building new warships in a determined drive to seize control of the North Sea from the French and British alike. The French planners felt that Germany, with her small and insignificant overseas empire, would be less vulnerable to commerce raiding. But unlike the menacing Royal Navy, the Italian, German and Austrian fleets of the Triple Alliance were still small enough for the French to try and build against.

Taking advantage of the national outrage of Fashoda, Jean-Louis de Lanessan, in office from 1899 to 1902, led the creation of the first naval program formally signed into law in nearly half a century.

Just like Éduard Lockroy who preceded him, de Lanessan actively ignored the Jeune École as a strategic alternative.

Waldeck-Rousseau ministry, concerned with France's naval and colonial weakness, sought to address all aspects of the maritime security of France with a set of five bills. Once again the goals were ambitious and grand: new warships, improved arsenals and port facilities both in metropolitan France and overseas, improved colonial defences, and new extended overseas submarine cable network.

The cost was originally set at one milliard francs , to be financed over a period of eight years.

And for once, for the first time since Hamelin and Dupuy de Lôme’s Programme of 1857, France now had both an actual parliamentary acceptance and secure funding for a major naval programme. The resulting Programme of 1900 focused on the battlefleet, at the expense of coastal defence. Based on the ideas of Admiral Fournier, the plan called for a single fleet, stationed in European waters and consisting of battleships and large cruisers, capable of being used either against Britain or Germany.

Jeune Ecole ideas were not completely ignored either. By sending out commerce raiders the French fleet would cause enough damage to British shipping to force the Royal Navy to blockade French ports, bringing them within the reach of French torpedo boats. The main French fleet would maintain an active defensive posture, thus wearing down the British while seeking an opportunity for a decisive battle.

The new battleships would be larger, over 14 000 tons from the previous 12 000. The question of standardization was also now finally addressed: henceforth the combat fleet would include only three types of ships: battleships, armoured cruisers, and destroyers. Submarines and torpedo boats would take care of coastal defence.

The colonial overseas stations were relegated to use cast-offs from the combat fleet, with obsolete ships and few specialised gunboats maintaining the French presence outside her home waters.

The plan was sound, but it had only truly gotten underway when the results of the 1902 legislative election arrived. Waldeck-Rousseau, contemplating his ailing health and pleased with the success of the Left, announced that he was leaving office. It would be Émile Combes and his Radicals who would form the new Cabinet, and take over the Naval Ministry.[1]

1: And we're approaching our POD here, since so far everything else has been 100% OTL.

 

[Karelian]

Émile Combes entered office with a firm intention to mostly ignore the Navy. The Dreyfus affair was dividing the nation and pulling political attention towards the Army. The political aspirations of the new French governing coalition were firmly anti-clerical, and thus the Navy, a known stronghold of monarchists and conservatives, was more of a collateral target of opportunity rather than main target of reforms for the new cabinet.

The initial idea of Combes was to appoint a Parisian Radical to the task. Camille Pelletan, an archivist by training, had thirty years of party seniority in his resume, and seemed as good appointment as anyone else available. The fact that he had a reputation as a firm supporter of the already disgraced Jeune Ecole did not really interest Combes. Pelletan had in mind sweeping reforms of the recruitment and structure of the Navy, but this old-style neo-Jacobin never got the chance to leave his radical imprint to the French Navy.

The Dreyfus affair was not the only scandal that drew major headlines during the tumult of year 1900.
As the Boxer War shook the international financial markets, Jules Bizat, a dutiful French banking official, had taken renewed professional interest to the personal finances of Thérèse Humbert.[1]

The famous Parisian socialite had been a target of persistent press war by Le Matin whose owners were convinced that Humbert was a dangerous fraud and a con artist instead of a wealthy heiress. As her creditors sued Humbert after Bizat had discovered major inconsistencies from her personal finances, Humbert fled the country. The scandal hit the forming Combes government in 1902 by surprise. Gaston Calmette, editor of Le Figaro, was determined to deter Pelletan from becoming the new Naval Minister.

The attack article from May 25th would have had little impact in itself - Pelletan had many political enemies - but for the fact that the newspaper claimed to hold a document linking Pelletan to the Humbert case.

This was indeed the case. A copy of a letter sent by Armand Parayre, one of the suspects, to Pelletan, asking the latter to intercede with the Minister of Justice Vallé to ensure that Parayre would avoid prosecution. In the letter Parayre reminded Pelletan that he had handed Pelletan "a considerable sum" as a reward for a speech Pelletan had held at the Chamber of Deputies, praising the Humbert family for producing excellent republicans and condemning the accusations against their finances as false rumours. The newspaper also had photostat of a registered-mail receipt for the Parayre letter, showing that it had been logged into the Ministry of the Navy as document 450.[2]

Pelletan first tried to say that he had not seen the letter at all, then hid from the reporters for a few days, and appeared back to public with his chef de cabinet, Tissier, to claim that this letter must have somehow disappeared at the internal mail. They were also all too anxious to deny the allegation that Parayre would have ever given Pelletan "any 30 000 FF", or that there had been any attempt to influence the Ministry of Justice not to persecute Parayre. Le Figaro was not the only media to gleefully point out that Parayre letter had only spoken about "a considerable sum" of money instead of 30 000.

Combes, determined to hold his shaky majority together to ensure the passage of his key political aim, the legislation separating the Church and State, had no reason to jeopardize his main goal by defending a single minister. Pelletan had to resign before even taking office.[3].

1. In OTL this part of the decades-long scandal started a bit later, but for the exactly same reason.
2. In OTL this letter was written in September 1902, and dutifully logged as Document 706.
3. In OTL Combes defended Pelletan, who did not resign. Here the war in China and the French intervention to it has made Combes much more cautious about the unity of his government, and the earlier timing of the scandal makes ditching Pelletan potentially much easier. In OTL Pelletan was nicknamed "the Wrecker", and his work as the Naval Minister is widely considered near-disastrous for the procurement, readiness and morale of the French Navy.

 

[Karelian]

French parliamentary politics were in flux at this era, and therefore finding new ministers after their predecessors had been ousted by one scandal or another was rather routine business. What Combes was after in 1902 was a person who had to meet a specific criteria:
- acceptable political credentials among the Bloc des gauches (in practice at least a republican pointcarist or someone from further left)
- anticlericalist
- Dreyfusard
- preferably someone with former ministerial experience
- even more preferably someone with a reputation of actually getting things done!

This check-list of demands narrowed the number of potential candidates down considerably.
Most importantly Combes wanted to swiftly proceed with the main domestic policy agenda of his new government, and thus the new minister had to be found rather quickly.

And thus the name of a man who had vigorously promoted the key Radical agenda of reform was brought up. He had steered through a comprehensive reform bill of education during the previous Waldeck-Rousseau government as the Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts (the second time he held this office) in the face of determined conservative opposition. He was also a former Minister of the Interior, with a reputation of a firm Dreyfusard.

A part of the same new generation of prominent future politicians as Delcassé, Poincaré and Barthou, he belonged to the ranks of men who had risen to prominence after the Panama Scandal had swept away many old faces from the lists of the French deputies.

He was a skilled orator, renowned for his poetic rhetoric, and had gained a ministerial position before turning 40 during the 1890s. And while he had associated himself with the most famous poets and musicians of the day, he was also the chairman of the Association des Cadets de Gascogne, a group of southwestern French politicians who promoted their mutual careers with the best of their ability.

And most importantly, he did not turn down the offer of taking office in a position that had reputation of being rather windy after the Fashoda fiasco.
Never shy to challenges, he privately still recalled how he had originally wanted to become a naval officer before his mother had convinced him to study law instead.

Thus Combes had found a suitable replacement, and named Georges Leygues as the Minister of Navy to his new cabinet in autumn 1902. The foundations of the future of French navy were thus laid out seemingly at random, without any pomp and circumstance.

 

[Karelian]

The growing tensions between the Major Powers at the beginning of the century were very much maritime affairs, as practically every crisis of the first decade of the century from the Boxer War onward had a major naval element involved.

But while the Pacific, Baltic, Black Sea and the North Sea were all potential flashpoints, Mediterranean formed the scene of the most complex naval arms race of the era.

Every Great Power in the region was building larger navies, while none of them was able to force the others to accept dominance outright. This gave room for diplomacy.
In the North Sea, diplomacy culminated to a joint efforts to prevent various international issues stemming from the war in Scandinavia from spiralling out of control in 1905.
In the Mediterranean, with several Powers all pursuing their own agendas through naval power, the situation could only be more complex, with more variables, problems and other issues for each power to explore and consider.

Geographically, the Mediterranean was a British lake due the control of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal.
It was also linked to equally landlocked Black Sea through the Ottoman-controlled Bosphorus.
Internally it was however much more complex area of operations than the wide open North Sea.

Not only were there several Great Powers with coastlines on the Mediterranean. There were also numerous minor powers and strategically important islands, all providing the various powers on the Mediterranean even more problems to face. As always, personaly diplomacy played a prominent role in the politics of the day, emphasising the role of the key diplomats and decisionmakers over the future course of events. Upset from the Fashoda war scare and with her metropolitan mainland up north and her North African colonies at the southern shores of the Mediterranean, the French political and military leaders begun to seriously reconsider the strategic priorities of French naval efforts.

To them it was clear that in order to succeed, they would have to be be able to take into account both the current and future British, Italian, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian and German naval plans in the region. And in order to do so, they started by compiling a detailed analysis of the status quo of each would-be ally and competitor.

 

[Karelian]

"...to catch it called for harpooning it—which was Ned Land’s business; to harpoon it called for sighting it—which was the crew’s business; and to sight it called for encountering it—which was a chancy business."
― Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

The first problem of French naval strategy that had emerged during the Fashoda Crisis was the threat of a Royal Navy close blockade of French ports, a repetition of the British naval strategy from the Napoleonic Wars.

With her ports blockaded, the French surface raiders - 23 armoured cruisers built between 1888 and 1904, universally recognized as the best larger units of the diverse French fleet - would be unable to carry out guerre de course against British merchant shipping.

Vice Admiral Fournier, the leading Jeune Ecolist, was a former disciple of Admiral Aube. He felt that the offensive role Aube had once assigned to the torpedo boat could be turned into reality by new submersible ships.

The new hope of the French navy was championed by Gustave Zédé, a new experimental craft built in 1892-3. The 270-ton vessel had been the largest submarine in the world for more than a decade after her launch. The last heralds of Jeune Ecole, Paul Fontin and Matthieu Vignot, had placed their hopes upon these vessels in their Essai de stratégie navale from 1893.

Fournier, their supporter, championed a navy consisting of truly seaworthy torpedo boats and submarines, as well as armoured cruisers for commerce warfare. He was convinced that with 40 submarines in the Mediterranean and 25 in the Channel, France would make itself master of its maritime destiny and gain the ability to dominate the choke points such as the Straits of Dover, Gibraltar and Messina. Denying them to the Royal Navy would enable the French cruisers to threaten the British shipping lines.

The new French submarine technology arrived too late to save the Jeune Ecole from the general refocus to battleships in every navy in Europe after the introduction of lighter nickel-steel Krupp type armour. It did, however, caught the attention of the British. And they were not amused.

 

[Karelian]

Pioneer of wireless telegraphy, Henry Jackson was initially ignored on the matter of submarine threat as well.

The British naval attachè in Paris was up to date. Cpt. Henry Jackson, a pioneer of wireless telegraphy and a scientifically minded officer kept a close watch to the French experiments with pioneering prototype designs such as the small 11-ton Le Goubet.

His conclusion was clear: “These submersible vessels have reached a practical stage in modern warfare, and will have to be reckoned with, and met, in a future European war.”

The British ambassador endorsed Jackson’s report in 1899 and warned the Admiralty that “belief in the success of this invention is likely to encourage the Frenchmen to regard their naval inferiority to England as by no means so great.”

This was so unusual from a diplomat that Capt. Edmund Jeffreys expressed real interest in the report, even though it was actively ignored by the rest of the Admiralty.

He wanted to know more about submarines, since, “whether...their development continues, might not be of great value for offensive purposes against an enemy’s fleet in their ports...As we could convoy or tow them across to within short distances, I am of the opinion that they might be used most effectively.”

Reginald Custance, the director of Naval Intelligence, buried the Gustave-Zédé report by summarising the new French vessels as “a failure”, insisting that “her return from Marseilles after her recent trip was very problematic. “For political reasons”, the French ship was “bound to succeed and they said she did so, but she is not worth much.”

The technology-oriented faction of the Admiralty knew that the submarine would eventually mature as a weapon of war, but that it would take substantial sums of money and a lot of effort to reach this situation.

More reactionary views were also present.
Admiral Sir A.K. Wilson described submarines as “underhand, unfair, and damned un-English”. Lord Charles Beresford echoed the notion, dismissing the submarine as “a useless weapon, always in a fog.”

The Royal Navy had kept watch of all types of naval development across the world for centuries. It was not that the potential of submarine was ignored. It was merely estimated that submarines - British or French alike - could not cross the Channel and blockade the coast in a way that a surface vessel could not, while at the same time costing less and having the ability to remain in place for a longer period of time.

The news from France were thus hushed for a year, until the Naval Intelligence Division was literally flooded with reports indicating that submarine development was now in rapid progress across the world. Something had to be done.

 

[Karelian]

The new naval attaché in Paris, Captain Charles L. Ottley, sent in to replace the troublesomely alarmist Jackson, soon turned out to be a similar disappointment. He supported the views of his predecessor. Describing the Gustave-Zédé-type boats as real success, he added that “the extremely difficult problem of submerged navigation is looked upon as practically solved after ten years of laborious experiment."

Dismissing a single technology enthusiast like Jackson had been one thing. Ignoring a second opinion as well as Foreign Office reports would have seemed too unreasonable. Slowly the general opinion in the Admiralty begun to change.

But the Admiralty attitude was far from energetic, at first. “The French seem to be overcoming the difficulties of the submarine boat, and we cannot altogether afford to disregard them and their increased proficiency”, noted Admiral Lord Walter Kerr.

And Jackson was no longer alone in his opinion. After Paris he had been appointed to H.M.S. Vulcan, for command of the torpedo boats of the Mediterranean Station. There he had made quite an impression to his new Commander-in-Chief.

Vice-Admiral Sir John A. Fisher wrote, "I cannot speak too highly of this officer's ability & his usefulness in the exercises of the fleet & the excellent use he makes of the resources of the Vulcan."

Soon Fisher was pestering the Admiralty about the matter, requesting advice on how to best protect warships at anchor from the threat of a submarine attack. Fisher expressed his opinion that the easiest solution would be to plant a protective barrier of contact mines around his anchorage.

Fisher, who knew full well that the Admiralty policy since 1895 had been to actively avoid using or even experimenting with contact mines so as not to “justify and encourage” the efforts of other powers.

Predictably enough, the Board initially refused. But a committee report of the matter concluded: “...foreign nations, especially France and Russia, have not waited for our “justifying and encouraging them”, but have already adopted contact mines on an extensive scale. The submarine boat also appears to be rapidly approaching a defined position as a new instrument of warfare, and it seems likely that very soon British warships would find themselves confronted with underwater craft.

So far the only practical way to stop these boats, or frighten them so much as to keep them at home, seems to be by blockade mines. If so, he concluded, the ban on using contact mines ought to be lifted.“

Dispatch of contact mines to the Mediterranean fleet followed. Fisher knew the Admiralty politics. It could hardly be accepted that the blockade mine, that loathed infernal machine, would be the only practical way to meet the submerged boat.

The old admirals might have disliked the notion of submarines, but they absolutely loathed the idea of widespread mine warfare. Thus, in order to promote the cause of submarines, one had to present an even worse option.

 

[Karelian]

The Admiralty was predictable.
Soon after Fisher got his contact mines, it was announced that "...the march of events now calls for some response on our part to the action taken by foreign powers in their construction of submarine boats. The success of French submarine boats appears to be sufficiently assured to make it necessary now to meet them."

The final excuse was from the United States. The United States Navy was now sponsoring a program of submarine development after Fleet Admiral George Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay, had strongly advised Congress to grant funds for such a project.

As Lord Charles Beresford observed: “when a common sense level headed nation like that of the United States has tried and adopted submarine boats, it would appear probable that such craft must have some value in wartime operations.”

Navy torpedo schools at Portsmouth and Devonport were tasked to organise a secret program of experiments, with the mission to discover the best means of dealing with submarine boats and destroying them when discovered. Portsmouth delegation immediately announced that they now needed a submarine of their own, preferably several, since it would be hard to develop means of avoiding and destroying them otherwise.

Buying a boat “for the purpose of ascertaining for ourselves the limit of the powers of these vessels and the best means of avoiding and destroying them” was based on irrefutable logic. But acquiring a practicable submarine design for the Royal Navy was easier said than done. After the Nordenfeldt experiments of the 1880s, no shipbuilding firm in the United Kingdom had experience in building such craft. Thus the Admiralty gazed across the Atlantic.

 

[Karelian]

The Irish-American inventor Seán Pilib Ó Maolchalann, born in County Clare, was a former school teacher from Ireland. He had migrated to the United States and submitted his submarine plans to the U.S. Navy in 1875 only to be rejected.

The plans of man known as John Holland in English only bore fruit after Holland received initial funding from the Fenians, who hoped to use the invention to destroy the British naval power. With the Fenian funding Holland was able to continue his work, and finish his 28-year old plan to privately build and launch two prototype submarines in 1895. The Holland VII and Holland VIII were revolutionary.

His key invention was the combination of a petroleum engine for surface propulsion and an electric engine for submerged operations. His boats combined an internal combustion engine for surface propulsion, electric underwater propulsion from batteries charged by the engine while surfaced, and the torpedo. In 1900 the US Navy finally bought his ship, named it the USS Holland, and asked the inventor to build several more ships like it for further testing.

Soon afterwards the British delegation announced their intentions to buy one as well. It was their luck that Isaac Rice, a Bavarian-born immigrant businessman, had bought the company from Holland. He was willing to sell, despite the fierce objections of Mr. Holland himself. Five boats were ordered in November 1900 from Vickers Shipyard. They were laid down at Barrow-in-Furness with the American patent and engineering assistance, with the first launched in November 1902 and commissioned in 1903.

With their own submarines for further testing, the Admiralty was happy to toss some money to the problem and forget about it. Inspecting Captain of Submarine Boats, Reginald Bacon, received relatively free hand in developing and modifying this new weapon system. He wasted no time in devising a periscope, and improved the new submarine systems further. Bacon instituted a series of trials, supposedly to evolve tactics against submarines. In reality Bacon started a determined program to develop submarine tactics for use against surface ships.

A new naval arms race had begun, because the French submarine force had not spent these years in idleness.

 

[Karelian]

The French interest to submersible warships had been waxing and waning before the determined phase around the turn of the century.

A key event took place in 1898, when the French Navy announced an open international submarine design competition. Maxime Laubeuf won with his Narval.

It was a double-hulled craft, with an inner hull strongly constructed to resist water pressure, while the outer hull was lightly built and optimised for surface performance.

The space between the hulls was filled with ballast and trim tanks. Conceptually a surface torpedo boat with the ability to submerge to make its escape after an attack or for a chance to launch an ambush from underwater, the Narval was built more of an evolution of an older idea rather than the revolution it turned out to be.

The 1901 French naval budgetary estimates called for the construction of 23 new submarines to add to the existing stock of about 14. During 1901 manoeuvres Gustav Zede independently transited a distance of 149nm from Toulon to Ajaccio, attacked the French Mediterranean Fleet as it departed, and the umpires concluded that it had successfully torpedoed battleship Charles Martel.

More trials followed in 1903. The French had been testing two types of vessels capable of diving underwater: the sousmarin had only electric motor propulsion powered by a large battery, and had to return to port to be recharged. Meanwhile a submersible had dual propulsion, and used either steam, petrol, kerosene or diesel power for surface travel. When underwater, it operated under battery propulsion.

In 1903 the two different submarine types were pitted against one another: the submersible Aigrette competed against sousmarin “Z.” Submersible was deemed better, and the French Navy decided to build only submersibles in the future.

Like most early French submarines, the early submersibles were mostly steam powered.
As it was, all potential surface propulsion systems for submersible vessels were riled with technical difficulties and disadvantages.

Steam plants allowed high surface speeds and the technology was mature, but they required long dive preparations which could last from 5 to more than 10 minutes. And once underwater, they could not dissipate the heat that the steam plants produced, quickly turning the insides of the boat too hot for the comfort of the crew.

Paraffin, known as kerosene in the US, combusted with heavy smoke. It required long ventilation pipes that had to be rigged for diving, thus slowing submergence considerably. The smoke was also highly visible from afar.

Gasoline did not have this problem, but gas fumes were much more volatile, and gasoline vapour explosions were not uncommon. In addition gasoline vapours were dangerous to the crew, who would risk nausea and even death if exposed to them for prolonged periods of time.

The solution to this dilemma was obvious in retrospect: Utopian socialism.

 

[Karelian]

“Noch kein menschlicher Motor hat das erreicht, was der meine ergab, und so habe ich denn das stolze Bewusstsein, in meinen Fache der Erste zu sein.”
Rudolf Diesel, 1897.

In 1880 Rudolf Diesel, residing in Paris, had focused his attention on the workers’ question. He studied the works of French utopian socialists, finding ideas such as cooperative factories most interesting. Diesel felt that what was missing from the equation in the industrial world was an inexpensive, small, and light engine. The size of a sewing machine, it would be able to work without water or electricity.

This invention would undoubtedly allow the existence of worker-run factories, with identification cards and contracts for the workers. The new cooperatives would act like beehives, each worker bee working for the greater whole, free to choose his own employment at will. He solified his ideas to a book called Solidarismus: Natürliche wirtschaftliche Erlösung des Menschen (1903)

“It is undoubtedly better to decentralise small industry as much as possible and try to get it established in the surroundings of the city, even in the countryside, instead of centralising it in large cities, where it is crowded together without air, light, or space. This goal can be achieved only by an independent machine, which is easy to service. Undoubtedly, the new engine can provide a sounder basis for the development of small industry than recent trends, which are false on economic, political, humanitarian and hygienic grounds.”

With a lofty cause to inspire him, Diesel produced the theoretical foundation for his new rational engine between 1890-1892.

After that things moved forward rapidly.
In 1893 he signed agreements with Maschinenfabrik Augsburg, the leading mechanical engineering enterprise of Germany. A deal with Krupp followed in 1983, and the industrial giant gave Diesel both an annual salary as well as an extremely generous royalty deal of 37,5% percent for every engine sold! After the two German sponsor companies agreed to share the developmental costs of the new engine and focus the R&D efforts to one laboratory, the conditions were suitable for further development.

Patent rights were sold to Frédérick Dyckhoff in France for 600 000 francs, with exclusive patent rights ceded in 1894 and Société Française des Moteurs R. Diesel was set up in 1897. Britain, Sweden, Russia and Denmark followed suit, and Danish Burmeister & Wain would soon pioneer marine diesel propulsion.

His biggest triumph came when Anheuser-Busch bought the rights for manufacturing in the US as the Dieselmotor Company of America.

It was all too much. Patent feuds and the stress related to his work drove Diesel to voluntarily check himself into Neuwittelsbach sanitarium near Munich in October 1898. Diesel left Paris in 1899 to act as Linde’s Berlin representative, but his sanity never fully recovered.

He was most bitter about the fact that Diesel would go to his grave seeing the small electric motors patented by Nikola Tesla in 1888 to take over the roles he had envisioned for his own Diesel engine, whereas the utopian book of Diesel sold only 300 copies out of the first print of 10 000. His career would ultimately end in financial tragedy and an early death, but by then his engines had transformed the world - but not in the way he had envisioned.

In 1903 Vandal, a small river tanker owned by the Nobel Petroleum Company used on the Caspian Sea and the Volga used a diesel engine in maritime traffic for the first time.

Just a year later Aigette was the first French submarine built with diesel engine for surface propulsion and electric engine for submerged operations, as Sautter-Harlé installed a four-cylinder 150-kW engine. The French tested both domestic and foreign engine designs: M.A.N. delivered their first four marine engines, 300hp four-stroke Diesel units, for the French submarines Circe.

Sautter-Harlé and Co. started the process of developing their engines further in 1904, and in 1906 they were fitted in the Emeraude and Opale. The engines were used on trial at 340 revolutions per minute and developed 395hp. In September 1907 Opale made a successful voyage of 550 miles, and a year later the Emeraude a voyage of 692 miles. While reliability continued to be a problem, the French had finally solved question of propulsion. But while they had been pioneering the submarine development, other naval powers had not been idle.

 

[Karelian]

"Ah, you would attack the English battleships with submarines?"

"Sire, I would never go near an English battleship."

"And why not?"

"Because they might injure me, Sire."

"What, a sailor and afraid?"

"My life belongs to the country, Sire. It is nothing. But these eight ships - everything depends upon them. I could not risk them. Nothing would induce me to fight."

"Then what will you do?"

"I will tell you, Sire." And I did so.
~ Arthur Conan Doyle, Danger!

The Admiralty spent a lot of time and effort thinking about how the Royal Navy would deal with the submarines, and how their own submarines should be employed.

It had by now become common knowledge that Whitehead torpedoes and the new submarine torpedo boats provided an increasingly deadly threat to the world's navies and merchant fleets.
Early exercises and manoeuvres demonstrated that even the crude first submersibles with their limited range could “sink” major warships close to a port.

The main effect of the war in Scandinavia in this regard was to prove that this was a new fact of life in naval warfare from 1905 onwards, instead of a mere theoretical research paper. What had happened to Harald Haarfagre could happen to any warship.[1]

But no one of naval strategic note envisioned anything more, as far as the historical record is concerned. The idea of a major anti-shipping campaign was simply unthinkable, as the submarines lacked both range and endurance to conduct any type of cruiser warfare.

Besides, the international legal procedure called for stopping a merchant ship, inspecting it for contraband, and then either capturing it or sending it into a neutral port for adjudication. Sinking the vessel was only legal after the crew and passengers had been taken aboard the capturing vessel.

Admiral CC Penrose Fitzgerald wrote: "I do not myself think that any civilized nation will torpedo unarmed and defenceless merchant ships." Admiral William Hannam Henderson added: "I do not think that territorial waters will be violated, or neutral vessels sunk. Such will be absolutely prohibited, and will only recoil on the heads of the perpetrators."

However, the naval war at the fjords did inspire both admirals and authors. Arthur Conan Doyle, famous for his Sherlock Holmes-stories, was suitably impressed by the events of Norway to write a short story featuring submarines. It was at the same time eerily prescient and very much a product of its day.[2] Doyle wrote about the growing importance of British food imports, and the terrible threat that discriminate submarine attacks against civilian shipping would pose to the British Isles.

But while the Admiralty dismissed the Doyle work as yet another book to the growing pile of alarmist "invasion literature", First Sea Lord Fisher had turned out to be quite impressed by the growing capabilities of British submarines. By 1906 the Royal Navy had compiled a list of potential wartime uses for them:

1. Attacking enemy ships on the high seas. 2. The protection of friendly coasts; 3. Barring narrow passages, notably the Dover Straits. 4. Action against the enemy coast, primarily penetrating enemy ports; and 5. Intervening in a battle between squadrons.

Having set upon the tasks, the British now focused to build the ships capable of fulfilling them. Other Powers had done similar calculus of their own, and reached their own conclusions and technical solutions.

[1] In OTL the closest actual sinking of a ship by a submarine had been the H.L. Hunley attack against the USS Housatonic over 40 years ago, and no surface ship had yet been sunk by a submarine-launched automotive torpedo. As a result, the admirals all over the world persisted in thinking of the submarine primarily fit for observation duties and minelaying.
[2.] OTL version came out in July 1914, TTL in 1906. OTL version is freely available online here.