History Of The Submarine

Where to Start When Researching Submarine History

Most people who come across the History Of The Submarine have no idea where the record actually begins. The early attempts date back to the 1600s, but the first viable design is attributed to Cornelis Drebbel, who built a propelling vessel around 1620 that carried passengers under the Thames. It used a sealed wooden frame and leather-covered oars. That is not the beginning of submarines as we understand them. It is a dead end that took two centuries to revive. When I started cataloging primary sources on submarine development for a personal project, I expected to find clear milestones. The problem was that the historical record is messy, contradictory, and heavily dependent on which navy you are asking about. The French Civil Engineer Isaac de la Periere built a leather-covered cage submarine in 1679. The American inventor David Bushnell designed the Turtle in 1775, which attempted a mine attack on HMS Eagle during the Revolution. These events are well known. The deeper problem is that most general histories skip the engineering failures entirely. I spent about three weeks tracking down the original patents and naval logs for the 19th century. One thing I ran into repeatedly was confusion between the H.L. Hunley and other Confederate experimental boats. The Hunley is the most famous, but it was one of many failed attempts. I had to cross-reference the South Carolina naval records with Union blockade reports to confirm the actual dates. My workaround was to stop treating Wikipedia as a source and go straight to the digitized naval archives at the National Archives and the Library of Congress. Those records are messy, scanned in low resolution, and not always indexed properly, but they are the real thing. It took me about four hours to pull the relevant documents for the Hunley alone. The process is slow, but it prevents you from citing incorrect dates that circulate everywhere online.

What most people miss about this subject is that the transition from hand-cranked boats to mechanical propulsion happened much later than you would guess. The first successful electric submarine was the Narwhal, launched by the US Navy in 1900. But the real shift came from the German U-boat program during World War I, where diesel-electric systems became standard. Before that, every submarine had severe range limitations because human muscle power is not a scalable energy source.

Primary Sources You Should Actually Use

If you are doing real research, skip the popular histories written for general audiences. They repeat the same three or four anecdotes endlessly. Go to the operational logs. The British National Archives at Kew holds the Admiralty submarine files, many of which were declassified in the 1990s. The US Navy Submarine Force Historical Library in Groton has digitized portions of their collection, but the finding aids are outdated and not fully searchable. I learned this the hard way after spending two days looking for a file that turned out to be misfiled under a different vessel name. German U-boat records are another matter entirely. Most of the Kriegsmarine's operational logs survived the war and were captured by Allied intelligence. The Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg holds the originals. Some have been translated, but many have not. If you cannot read German, you are limited to secondary sources, which often contain errors introduced during translation. I had to verify a specific patrol route for a Type VII C boat by checking the English translation against the German original. The translation listed a different coordinates for one leg of the patrol. It was a minor error, but it mattered for accuracy. Japanese submarines receive far less scholarly attention than German or American vessels, which is a gap in the literature. The Japanese I-class submarines conducted some of the longest patrols of the war, including the attack on Pearl Harbor and raids on the US west coast. Their records were partially destroyed at the end of the war, but surviving documents exist in the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives and in captured fleet files held in Washington.

Common Mistakes People Make

One persistent error is treating the first submarine combat event as if it proved the effectiveness of the weapon. The Turtle's attack on HMS Eagle failed. The Hunley sank its target, the USS Housatonic, and then sank itself. Early successes do not equal a reliable weapons system. The technology took another forty years to reach a point where submarines could operate effectively in open ocean conditions rather than coastal waters. Another mistake is assuming that the Cold War represented the peak of submarine design. It was a peak in some ways. Nuclear propulsion solved the range problem permanently. But it introduced new problems. Nuclear submarines require extremely expensive support infrastructure. Maintenance cycles are longer. A Los Angeles-class vessel spends roughly two years in refit every five to six years. The cost per available day is significantly higher than older diesel designs. For certain missions, a modern conventional submarine with air-independent propulsion is actually more practical despite being technically older. Here is a detail that usually gets left out of summaries: the sonar systems used in World War II were so unreliable that many submarine commanders relied almost entirely on visual sightings and periscope depth gauges. The acoustic homing torpedoes that appeared later were primitive by modern standards. A U-boat commander in 1943 could hear an escort vessel at maybe two to three miles in ideal conditions, but noise from the boat itself, the ocean, and weather often made detection nearly impossible. This limitation shaped tactics more than any technological advantage.

A Practical Research Approach

Start with a specific vessel class or campaign rather than trying to cover the entire History Of The Submarine at once. The broader the scope, the more surface-level your work will become. Pick a single boat, a specific operation, or a technological transition and dig into the primary documentation. The gaps in the record are usually where the interesting findings are. Use the Joint Library of Naval History in Washington as a starting point. Their catalog is better organized than most military archive systems. Then branch out to specialized collections like the Imperial War Museum in London, the Swedish Naval Museum in Stockholm, and the Australian War Memorial, which holds materials on Pacific submarine operations that are not easily found elsewhere. When you hit a contradiction between sources, check the date of publication. Older sources tend to repeat unverified claims because the author assumed the information was correct. Newer sources sometimes correct earlier mistakes but introduce their own errors in the process. Cross-referencing at least three independent sources before accepting a fact will save you from propagating mistakes. I have found that roughly 15 percent of commonly cited dates and numbers in popular submarine histories do not hold up when checked against the original logs.

The field does not need another general overview. It needs more careful work on underdocumented programs. The Italian MAS boats, the Soviet Whiskey-class submarines, the Romanian and Romanian-built vessels from the interwar period—these areas have sparse coverage compared to the Atlantic U-boat campaign. If you are starting research in this area, pick one of the neglected topics and work from the original documents rather than from existing secondary literature. That is where the value actually is.