The Stirling Letter and How it Helped to Change the Navy

I am reading about the early American efforts to build submarines. There is a lot of great reference material out there that talks about how we entered the submarine race. In the beginning, there was a gap between the creative forces that invented the early technology and the reality of how to make the submarine […]

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Shipbuilding – January 3 1941

In January 1941, it was becoming obvious that the weapon that created so much trouble in the First World War was once again raising its ugly Spector: The German U-boat. In 1939, 165 ships were sunk and by December 1940, 563 more would join them at the bottom of the ocean. Britain was heavily dependent […]

The submarines now in operation are sea-worthy and the living quarters are commodious – April 1920

One hundred years ago, most discussions around submarines focused on two things. First, for most of the world. The all too recent painful memory of the death and destruction caused by the German U-boats. The strangling effect on the English economy was still being felt long after the last ship was sunk. Submarines were viewed […]

Pirates of the Seven Seas – Those Dastardly Submariners

1920 The new decade had begun. The echoes of the war were still reverberating in society with the recent return of so many of the men from overseas that had seen the ravages of that horrific conflict. The emergence of the submarine as a frightful weapon spawned many stories in the press. People across the […]

“The submarines could lick us” … 1950 – The submarine missile threat emerges

THE SUBS COULD LICK US With the Second World War less than five years in the past, Naval Authorities were sounding the alarm that technology was about to let the Soviets take a leap forward in the ever expanding chess game called the Cold War. As this article relates, the Soviets were already beginning […]

Oil, cabbages and very little oxygen… Life aboard a WWI Unterseeboot

May 7th is the anniversary of one of the most significant seagoing tragedies in the annals of submarine history. The sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. (Note: The article is a good read for a day when you can have some quiet… at the end of the article is a link to a classic documentary […]

Blockades and Submarines – An Opinion From a Master Submariner in 1939

Simon Lake was by any measure a Master Submariner. A prolific inventor, he held over two hundred patents at the time of his death in June of 1945 (just a few months short of the end of the war that was largely shaped by submarine warfare). Lake was a dreamer and had many ideas about […]

Fringes of the Fleet

Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves When your country is an island, it is only natural that you would come to rely on the ocean for commerce with others. When that island is vulnerable to attacks form others, it is even more natural that the ocean would serve as a means for your defense. To […]

Grand Theft Submarine – Stealing the U-111

Note: This article is a result of some research I have been doing in the past few days about an amazing submarine story related to the technological development of American submarines. The story was researched and developed using two reference books: United States Submarines, Naval Submarine League, published in 2002 and United States Submarines by […]

PQ 17 July 4th 1942… 2132… “Scatter”

The summer of 1942 was not just a horrible time for merchant shipping long the east coast of the United States, it was also one of significant losses in the Atlantic U-boats were coming out in larger and larger numbers and even the convoy systems were being tested to the limits with the existing escorts. […]