Nordenfelt class Ottoman submarine Abdülhamid (1886) was the first submarine in history to fire a torpedo whilst submerged. Two submarines of this class, Nordenfelt II (Abdülhamid, 1886) and Nordenfelt III (Abdülmecid, 1887) joined the Ottoman fleet. They were built in pieces by Des Vignes (Chertsey) and Vickers (Sheffield) in England, and assembled at the Taşkizak Naval Shipyard in Istanbul, Turkey.
The Jeune École [1] put the torpedo at the center of its tactics and ruthless attacks on enemy shipping at the center of its strategy; in the future, when such campaigns actually were carried out (by Germany in both World Wars, and by the United States against Japan in the Pacific theater of the Second World War), the submarine served the role that Aube and others had envisioned for torpedo boats supporting cruisers. From the late 1870s through the 1880s, the weaknesses of torpedo boats led to a renewed interest in the submarine as a delivery system for torpedoes, but the undersea technology did not develop rapidly enough to replace the torpedo boat as linchpin of the Jeune École. If the evolution of the submarine somehow had been advanced by a quarter-century, the Jeune École would have survived to establish a new paradigm of naval warfare, making cruisers the capital ships of the world’s navies. In such a scenario, the battleship renaissance of the years 1890–1914 would never have occurred.
George Garrett of Liverpool, a clergyman by vocation, began experimenting with submarine designs after a visit to Russia during the Russo-Turkish War. While many observers came away from that war convinced of the striking power of the torpedo boat, Garrett drew the opposite conclusion, having been impressed most of all by the futility of Russian torpedo boat attacks against Ottoman warships deploying antitorpedo netting or surface booms. Whereas early submarines, including Wilhelm Bauer’s Brandtaucher (1851) and the Confederate navy’s H. L. Hunley (1864), had been manually powered, Garrett’s 30-ton Resurgam (1879) had the advantage of being steampowered. After the boat foundered and sank in 1880, Garrett joined forces with the Swedish armaments manufacturer Thorsten Nordenfelt and constructed four more submarines between 1882 and 1891. Their 60-ton Nordenfelt I, built at Stockholm in 1882–85, was the first submarine armed with self-propelled Whitehead torpedoes. A Greco-Turkish war scare during the Bulgarian crisis of 1885–86 provided the context for the sale of this vessel and orders for two more. The great powers of Europe, minus France, cooperated to contain the conflict and, from January to June 1886, used a naval blockade to compel Greece to demobilize. Afterward, the Greek navy purchased the Nordenfelt I for £9,000, despite the fact that it had never run submerged for more than five minutes. The submarine made it to Piraeus, where it remained idle until scrapped fifteen years later. After learning that Greece possessed a submarine, the Ottoman empire promptly ordered two Nordenfelts, which were built in Britain, dismantled, then shipped to Constantinople. Only one of the boats was actually reassembled to undergo trials in Turkish waters, but to operate it the clergyman Garrett received a commission in the Ottoman navy. He soon left for home along with his British crew, before training any Turks to operate the submarine, which became a worthless relic in a Turkish navy yard.
Undeterred by these failures, Garrett and Nordenfelt completed the 245-ton Nordenfelt IV for Russia, but the boat ran aground on the coast of Jutland in November 1888, while en route from Britain to St Petersburg. Nordenfelt built two more submarines without Garrett, both for the German navy, but like their predecessors they were unsuccessful. Meanwhile, in France, the aging Dupuy de Lôme experimented with submarines prior to his death in 1885, after which work continued under the direction of Gustave Zédé. In September 1888 Zédé completed the first truly operational submarine, the 30-ton Gymnôte, a vessel powered by an electric battery and manned by a crew of five. The Gymnôte made around 2,000 dives during a career of almost twenty years in the French navy. Zédé died in 1891, before his breakthrough was fully appreciated, but by the turn of the century his colleagues made their country the early leader in submarine technology.
[1] The era of the Jeune École, the French “Young School” advocating modern unarmored cruisers and torpedo boats over armored battleships, reached its peak in 1886–87, when the school’s founder, Admiral Théophile Aube, served as French navy minister. The ideas of the group were rooted in the technological developments of the mid- 1870s; its members drew further inspiration from Russia’s use of torpedo launches against the Ottoman navy in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. The school had a near-universal impact by the mid-1880s and remained strong in some navies until the mid- 1890s. Aube, whose own service had been largely on colonial stations, rejected ironclads from the start and lamented the evolution of two fleets – one for home waters and one for overseas duties – that had occurred within all navies by the 1870s. The selfpropelled torpedo was his weapon of choice and ruthless commerce raiding his tactic. Aube saw the overall Jeune École strategy as a means for France to chal-lenge British naval power worldwide.
During the 1880s, the building programs of most of the great powers included fewer battleships and many more modern unarmored steel cruisers and torpedo boats. In France, the alternating pro- and anti-Aube factions made a shambles of naval construction. Meanwhile, Germany embraced the new school of thought wholeheartedly and fell from third place to fifth in armored tonnage, while Austria– Hungary seized upon the strategy of the Jeune École as an inexpensive counter to the battleship program of its Adriatic rival, Italy. When the United States finally awoke from its naval slumber in mid-decade, its first program included no battleships.
