History’s First Torpedo Strike

In 1900, the first submarines were commissioned in two of the world’s navies. Serious students of American naval history are familiar with the USS Holland (SS-1), which entered service on 12 October 1900. As her first commanding officer noted: “The submarine problem, which had beset experts for a century, had at last come within the field of practical and successful application.”¹ Over the years, many writers have characterized the invention of the submarine as “a product of American ingenuity.”² The Holland, however, was not the first submarine to be commissioned as a naval warship. Before she entered service, both the Morse and Gustave Zédé already had been commissioned in the French Navy.

Like the Holland, whose design was perfected from a series of experimental undersea craft engineered by its creator, John P. Holland, the Gustave Zédé (laid down and launched before the Morse) evolved from a number of experimental undersea boats beginning with the Plongeur, launched in 1863.³ The Plongeur was designed by Captain Siméon Bourgeois and naval constructor Charles Brun in response to a request from the Conseil des Travaux (Construction Board of the Ministry of Marine) for designs for a submarine. She used compressed air stored in tanks to run an air-powered reciprocating engine, making her the first submarine to run on mechanical power instead of manpower.

That compressed air also served to clear out the ballast tanks. Stability issues stemming from her length, according to one authority, limited the depth of her dives to 33 feet.⁴ Pumps were added to provide a counterbalance to the tilt, but they proved too slow to be effective. The Plongeur was displayed at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, where she came to the attention of author Jules Verne, who ended up using her as the conceptual basis for the fictional Captain Nemo’s Nautilus in the classic Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Further testing of the Plongeur after her electrically fired spar torpedo was removed did not improve her performance, and her use as a submarine was discontinued on 2 February 1872.⁵ Sixteen years would pass before the French Navy renewed its interest in submarines.

New Technologies, New Possibilities

In the late 19th century, the French Navy believed it had only one viable adversary, the Royal Navy.⁶ To counter the British fleet, the French established a new school of naval thought known as the jeune école (young school). A key tenet of the jeune école was the principle that the less-powerful opponent should take advantage of new technological advances and the tactical and strategic options they promised. For those who adhered to the theories of the jeune école, the advent of steam and self-propelled torpedoes were regarded as “technological leaps opening new opportunities for an inferior navy.”⁷

In line with these concepts, Admiral Hyacinthe Laurent Théophile Aube, who became Minister of Marine in 1886, initiated sea trials to test the seaworthiness of small torpedo boats, followed by maneuvers pitting torpedo boats against battleships.⁸ Aube also ordered an experimental submarine to be built, designed by Gustave Zédé. Zédé, who had served as the deputy director of marine equipment at the Ministry of Marine, based the new submarine’s design on plans developed by French naval architect and aeronautical inventor Charles Henri Laurent Dupuy de Lôme, who had died the previous year.⁹ In a note from the Académie des Sciences meeting of 5 April 1886, Zédé wrote:

The question of submarine ships is being studied everywhere today, and at the Academy we will certainly learn with interest that my late master and friend Dupuy de Lôme had found a simple and practical solution. He often told me that the issue of aerostats and that of submarine boats were intimately linked and that, the day the first was resolved, the second would be very close to being resolved. Indeed, the capital point seemed to him, in both cases, to imagine a powerful and light engine . . . When he learned of the success of the Meudon balloon thanks to its electric motor, he said to me: “We will now resume the study of the submarine boat.”¹⁰

In October 1887, Zédé submitted plans to Admiral Aube for his approval for the Gymnote, an experimental submarine that was 59 feet long and 6 feet in diameter, with a displacement of 30 tons.¹¹ The boat was built under the supervision of Gaston Romazotti, first-class assistant engineer of marine, at the Mourillon dockyard in Toulon. Her hull, shaped similarly to a Whitehead torpedo, was constructed of steel. The submarine’s buoyancy was adjusted using forward and aft ballast tanks that were filled or emptied by an electrically driven pump or from a compressed air system. She was propelled by a single four-bladed screw 4.8 feet in diameter driven by a 55-horsepower electric motor, powered by an 11-ton battery.¹² A telescopic conning tower was provided for observation on the surface and an optical tube for use below. The Gymnote also was equipped with a rudimentary periscope (of questionable value) that may have been installed after the boat was launched on 15 September 1888.¹³

Testing of the Gymnote, which began at Toulon in November 1888, revealed numerous problems that required extensive modifications, in particular to the diving planes, and the removal or replacement of equipment, including the removal of the telescopic conning tower and the replacement of the electric motor and battery.¹⁴

The Gymnote was attached to the Defense Mobile of Toulon during the spring and summer of 1890 to participate in various military exercises.¹⁵ In August 1890, a test was conducted to see whether the boat could escape from and reenter a harbor clocked by torpedo boats that were on the lookout for her. The boat was submerged for 40 minutes and surfaced two and a half miles beyond the torpedo boats without being detected. On the return trip she passed immediately under one of the torpedo boats, and, although seen for an instant, was not pursued. The French Ministry of Marine considered these tests sufficiently successful to warrant the building of another submarine similar to but larger than the Gymnote—the Sirène, ordered in October 1890. Gaston Romazotti took over to the project after Zédé died on 26 April 1891, from an explosion that occurred while he was testing the propulsion system for a new torpedo.¹⁶ On 1 May 1891, the Sirène was renamed the Gustave Zédé to honor the man who had contributed the design of the first French submarine.¹⁷

Shattered Hopes, Then Great Success

Launched on 1 June 1893, the Gustave Zédé was 159 feet long and 12.4 feet in diameter; she displaced 266 tons when submerged.¹⁸ Her hull was constructed of Roma metal, a malleable bronze alloy adopted by the French Navy for screws, torpedo tubes, plates, and rivets, because of its high strength and resistance to seawater corrosion.¹⁹ She was fitted with a single screw, driven by two 360-horsepower motors, fed by a lead-chloride battery weighing 130 tons furnishing 1,800 amps of electricity under 300 volts.²⁰

Diving and steering were managed on the same principle as that employed in the Gymnote. The Gustave Zédé’s armament consisted of a single bow-mounted torpedo tube and three 18-inch Whitehead torpedoes, one of which was carried in the torpedo tube. The battery, composed of 720 Laurent Cely cells, had so many defects that it had to be replaced before the boat put to sea. When a new battery was installed, the charging current was so strong “that the stern of the submarine was almost blown to pieces,” necessitating the elimination of half of the battery cells and reducing her design speed from 15 to 8 knots.²¹

It took 18 months to correct the foregoing problems before the Gustave Zédé was ready to go to sea to conduct preliminary trials of what was then the largest submarine in the world. “But after her first trip,” as one knowledgeable author wrote, “any remaining faith in her possessed by the French nation was shattered, and it was only by chance that the Gustave Zédé was not on the scrap heap.”²²

Her performance was so bad that the following changes had to be made: The battery elements were removed and replaced, the canvas conning tower was removed and a metal tower substituted, the pumps regulating the water ballast were modified, and a new system of diving rudders was affixed, bringing the total number to six—two forward, two in the center, and two in the stem. Trials began again with the new systems installed.

To everyone’s surprise, the modifications proved highly successful, providing almost perfect stability and increasing the surface speed to 12 knots. Although much improved, not all of problems that had beset the Gustave Zédé had been corrected. The Sautter-Harle periscope that was fitted to the metal conning tower, for example, remained practically useless because of the fuzzy and distorted image it produced, requiring the submarine to surface periodically to verify her position.²³

‘Approaching Us with Lightning Speed’

On 18 November 1898, French Minister of Marine Edouard Etienne Antoine Lockroy charged the commanding officer of the Gustave Zédé, Lieutenant Lucian Mottez, with finding ways to demonstrate the military value of the boat during forthcoming exercises with the Mediterranean Fleet.²⁴ In the first week of December, Mottez sailed unaided from Toulon to the Iles d’Hyères, a distance of 41 miles, to participate in the naval maneuver taking place in the vicinity.

During the exercises that followed, the Gustave Zédé torpedoed the ironclad battleship Magenta twice—the first time when the battleship was at anchor, the second while she was under way. Edouard Lockroy’s description of the event—he was on board the Magenta at the time—appeared in the Paris newspaper Le Matin and was republished around the world:

The eyes of all on board were fixed on the sea. Officers and men stood watching the crest of the waves, and every minute there were exclamations as someone fancied he had seen the submarine boat. We imagined we saw it everywhere, and it was nowhere. . . . Suddenly a precise and exact observation was made. The cupola of the Gustave Zédé had just appeared 400 yards away still abreast of us, notwithstanding the distance we had covered. Immediately orders were issued. The guns were brought to bear upon her and the quick-firers were depressed in her direction. But this submarine boat was no longer there. She had avoided our fire and was hidden from our view. A minute elapsed. Though orders were given to engineers to put on steam, and the Magenta had gone some considerable distance in these 60 seconds, the Admiral and I, leaning over the railing of the bridge, saw approaching us with lightning speed an elongated body shining like gold. It struck the ship about four yards below the water-line, and was smashed on the iron armor; had it been charged the Magenta would have been sunk.²⁵

As naval historian Nicholas Lambert noted: “The significance of this achievement was enormous. The submarine had demonstrated for the first time that it was no longer and engineer’s toy but capable of performing deadly acts of war.”²⁶

More striking proof of the submarine’s danger to the world’s battle fleets took place during the naval maneuvers of 1901. On 2 July, the Gustave Zédé sailed from Toulon, arriving in the vicinity of Ajaccio Harbor, a distance of 175 miles, on 5 July. She entered the harbor and submerged to await the departure of Admiral Edgard de Maigret’s squadron of battleships.²⁷ As the battleships were leaving the harbor, the Gustave Zédé launched a dummy Whitehead torpedo that struck the Charles Martel below the waterline. The submarine surfaced a few minutes afterwards and was saluted by the light guns of the Charles Martel. On 6 July, the French press, aglow with the feat of the Gustave Zédé, declared that France’s submarine boats would make its navy the strongest in the world.²⁸ By then, the French navy had four submarines in service and ten more on order.

The threat to the Royal Navy, then the most powerful in the world, did not go unnoticed. In February 1900, Admiral Sir John Fisher, commander-in-chief of Britain’s Mediterranean Fleet, contacted the Admiralty with an urgent request for advice on how best to protect warships at anchor from the threat of submarine attack.²⁹ By then the Admiralty, after having dismissed the Gustave Zédé as a failure, was being flooded with reports indicating that submarine development was rapidly progressing. It was not until the Admiralty learned of the American decision to purchase John Holland’s submarine, however, that the Royal Navy, which had no experience building submarines, was given permission to buy a Holland torpedo boat.³⁰ Built under license by the Vickers company, the first Royal Navy submarine, the Holland 1, was launched on 2 October 1901.