The Unproven Weapon
The United States Navy formally entered the undersea age on April 11, 1900. On that day, it purchased a peculiar, 64-ton vessel from the Holland Torpedo Boat Company for $150,000. Designated the USS Holland (SS-1), the boat was the culmination of decades of effort by its inventor, John Philip Holland. The acquisition capped a long, bitter saga of political maneuvering, technical setbacks, and public demonstrations. Holland had battled a skeptical naval establishment, personified by Navy boards dominated by battleship-focused officers who saw little value in his underwater contraption. Only after Holland and his financial backer, Isaac Rice, demonstrated the boat's capabilities to influential figures like Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt did the tide begin to turn. The vessel represented a convergence of critical technologies, namely the dual propulsion system that would define non-nuclear submarines for over half a century. For surface running, the Holland employed a 45-horsepower Otto gasoline engine. This engine allowed it to travel on the surface like a conventional boat while also recharging its 66-cell Exide battery bank. Once submerged, the crew would shut down the volatile gasoline engine and switch to a 50-horsepower electric motor for underwater propulsion.
The design was a functional, if hazardous, solution to the fundamental problem of underwater endurance. The boat was small, just over 53 feet long, with a beam of about 10 feet. It carried a crew of seven men into a cramped and unforgiving environment. Habitability was not a design consideration; survival was. The air inside the sealed tube was a foul mixture of human exhalation, pervasive gasoline fumes from the often-leaky engine, and the acrid smell of sulfuric acid from the lead-acid batteries. A spark from the electric motor or a careless action could turn the hull into a bomb. The batteries themselves vented explosive hydrogen gas during charging, a procedure that demanded constant vigilance. Underwater, the only view to the outside world was through a primitive, non-binnacled periscope that offered a distorted, narrow field of vision. The hull was a claustrophobic steel tube packed with machinery, ballast tanks, and its primary armament: a single 18-inch torpedo tube in the bow with a capacity for three Whitehead torpedoes. An 8-inch pneumatic dynamite gun, a volatile and inaccurate weapon of the era, was also initially fitted to the bow but was soon recognized as impractical and dangerous.
Operational challenges manifested immediately upon the Holland entering service. Its range was severely limited, capable of approximately 200 nautical miles on the surface and a mere 30 nautical miles while submerged at a crawl. Its top speed was a sluggish 6 knots on the surface and 5.5 knots underwater, making it incapable of pursuing or escaping most surface warships of the day. A 166-mile surface transit from Annapolis, Maryland, to the Norfolk Navy Yard in Virginia in January 1901 was treated as a major expedition. The journey, undertaken in rough winter seas, provided invaluable data on the boat’s endurance but also underscored its profound limitations. The crew suffered from extreme fatigue, seasickness, and the constant, deafening noise of the engine. The gasoline engine proved unreliable and a constant fire hazard. Diving and surfacing were delicate, sometimes perilous, operations controlled by a complex system of ballast tanks and diving planes that required a skilled hand to prevent an uncontrolled plunge to crush depth or a sudden, broaching surface. These material realities defined the vessel not as a fleet-ready weapon, but as a deeply flawed, yet foundational, piece of experimental hardware. The lessons learned from its mechanical failures and the sheer difficulty of operating it were perhaps more valuable than any immediate military capability it offered.
A Weapon in Search of a Doctrine
The Holland and its immediate successors, the A-class boats, entered a naval world dominated by the powerful strategic theories of Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan. His work, particularly The Influence of Sea Power upon History, became scripture for the era's naval planners. Mahan argued that national greatness depended on command of the sea, achieved through a decisive fleet action where powerful battleships would destroy an enemy's main force. Within this grand vision of clashing battle lines on the open ocean, the submarine was an anomaly. It was slow, fragile, and could not hope to keep pace with a battle fleet. Navy traditionalists saw it as an un-gentlemanly weapon, a tool for assassins and weak nations, not a component of a first-rate navy. The submarine had no obvious place in an organization whose identity and budget were built around the construction of ever-larger battleships.
Consequently, the Navy’s leadership, steeped in Mahanian thought, relegated the new underwater weapon to a secondary, defensive role. The submarine’s initial purpose was not to contest command of the high seas but to serve as a mobile minefield, a tool of coastal and harbor defense. This doctrine was a product of both the submarine’s technical limitations and the prevailing strategic mindset. The United States, with its long, vulnerable coastlines, had always invested in coastal defense fortifications, a mission traditionally managed by the Army. The submarine was seen as a naval adjunct to this mission, a way to deter enemy ships from approaching key ports like New York, Boston, or the Chesapeake Bay. Its ability to lurk unseen and deliver a torpedo made it a potent threat to any blockading force. Public and political fears of coastal bombardment, stoked during the Spanish-American War, also reinforced the demand for localized defense. The Navy was therefore able to justify the submarine’s existence as a cost-effective deterrent that could free up the main battle fleet to pursue its offensive, Mahanian objectives elsewhere.
Theodore Roosevelt, first as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and later as President, was a key proponent who saw beyond the defensive dogma. He understood the submarine's potential as an asymmetric weapon. In August 1905, Roosevelt undertook a well-publicized two-hour dive aboard the Plunger (A-1), taking the controls himself. The act was a massive boost for the nascent submarine service, lending presidential prestige to the submariners, who were often looked down upon by the rest of the Navy. While the official doctrine remained defensive, Roosevelt's interest ensured continued, if modest, funding and development. The submersible was a tool of asymmetric defense, a way for a weaker force to hold a stronger one at bay in littoral waters, but it was not yet considered a tool of sea power in the way Mahan had defined it.
Forging Tactics in the Littorals
The U.S. Navy’s first submarine crews began the difficult work of turning theory into practice at the Naval Torpedo Station on Goat Island in Newport, Rhode Island. Founded in 1869, the station was the Navy's primary center for developing underwater ordnance. The arrival of the USS Holland, under the command of Lieutenant Harry H. Caldwell, marked a new chapter for the institution. Caldwell, a former aide to Admiral George Dewey, had become an early submarine advocate after witnessing the Holland’s trials and was handpicked to be its first commander. He and his small band of volunteers were pioneers, operating at the absolute edge of naval technology.
Early exercises were rudimentary and fraught with technical challenges. The work was methodical and dangerous. A submerged torpedo attack was a feat of manual calculation and instinct. Peering through the primitive periscope, Caldwell had to estimate the target's course and speed. He then had to mentally compute an intercept course for his own slow-moving vessel and a firing solution for the torpedo. There were no computers, only a stopwatch, grease pencils, and a deep understanding of relative motion. After a brief observation, the periscope would be lowered to avoid detection, forcing the crew to proceed blind on a calculated course for a set time before, hopefully, finding themselves in a firing position. Communication was a significant hurdle. Inside the submarine, orders were passed by voice, often shouted over the din of machinery. Communicating with the outside world while submerged was impossible. These initial drills were less about dynamic combat and more about mastering the basic mechanics of operating the vessel as a weapons platform. The simple act of approaching a target ship, maintaining trim, and firing a practice torpedo was a significant achievement.
Despite the defensive doctrine, these early experiments inevitably revealed the submarine’s offensive potential. During war games off Newport in 1901, Caldwell demonstrated the power of stealth by successfully maneuvering the Holland within torpedo range of the USS Kearsarge, the flagship of the North Atlantic Squadron, without being detected. The sinking of a modern battleship by the tiny submarine was a shock. While some battleship captains dismissed the exercise as a stunt under controlled conditions, others saw the clear and present danger. The submarine was a natural ambush predator. These trials began to stretch the coastal defense concept. An ambush weapon, while useful for defending a harbor, could also be used to deny an enemy transit through a strategic chokepoint or to attack ships at anchor far from home. The training conducted at Newport, and later at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis where the Holland served as a training boat for midshipmen, created the first generation of American submariners. These men, operating in steel tubes filled with gasoline fumes and battery acid, learned the hard lessons of undersea warfare. They contended with unreliable machinery, developed rudimentary fire control solutions, and practiced the core skills of submerged navigation and attack. Their experiences, documented in reports and passed down through training, formed the bedrock of U.S. submarine doctrine. While the official strategy remained tied to coastal defense, the tactical realities uncovered in these early trials planted the seeds for a more aggressive, offensive employment of the submarine that would come to define its role in the wars of the 20th century.