Very Special Ships. Arthur Nicholson
fast minelayers, the terminology is not quite so complicated. The Abdiels laid ‘mines’, as in independent, submarine mines, both of the contact and the influence (magnetic and acoustic) variety and of the moored (contact or magnetic) and ground (magnetic or acoustic) variety.
Whatever it is called, the naval mine is a relatively recent development in naval warfare. Putting aside explosives placed on the surface of the water and pointed in the direction of a ship, which date back to the Dutch in 1585, and concentrating just on those designed to attack a ship below the waterline, the first real pioneer in naval mining was an American, David Bushnell. Bushnell designed a one-man submarine with an explosive charge to be placed against the underwater hull of a warship. On 7 September 1776 Bushnell’s American Turtle, manned by a Sergeant Ezra Lee, attacked the frigate HMS Eagle off New York. The submarine’s drill was unable to penetrate the ship’s copper bottom to attach the explosive and Lee had to give up the attempt, but the explosion of the charge caused some excitement among the British observers. For purposes of contemporary naval mining, Bushnell’s main contribution was to be the first to set off gunpowder underwater.1
The first real moored contact mine was designed by another American, the inventor Robert Fulton, in about 1810, after he had tried to peddle various mine-like devices first to Napoleon and then to the British, both of whom were horrified by the weapons, and then to the Americans. Fulton’s intentions were pure enough – he wanted to make war too horrible to pursue – but he only succeeded in furthering the development of a weapon that just made it worse. He may have coined an early name for the mine – the ‘torpedo’.
Enter yet another American inventor, Colonel Samuel Colt, who was born in 1814 and as early as 1829 conceived an idea for a system of controlled mining called a ‘harbor defense battery’ while he was studying in a laboratory in Massachusetts. After patenting his revolver, Colt returned to his ‘torpedo’ idea, one of his favourites. In spite of the vehement opposition of ex-President John Quincy Adams, Colt eventually obtained US Government funding for a series of mine demonstrations on a series of unfortunate vessels. The first one took place on 4 July 1842 and the fourth and last one, on 13 April 1844, shattered a 500-ton ship under full sail. All of the demonstrations were successful and were well attended by dignitaries. Colonel Colt thus proved his mining idea, but by 1844 the US Government had little need of the weapon and did not adopt it. Colt instead made a fortune from his revolvers and passed away in 1862.2
Other nations, however, began to take some interest in the weapon, notably Imperial Russia. During the Crimean War of 1854–5, the Russians employed mines developed by a Professor Jacobi and by the Nobel family to defend the ports of Kronstadt in the Baltic and Sevastopol in the Black Sea. While nosing around the defences off Kronstadt on 9 June 1855, the British paddle warship Merlin struck first one and then another mine, giving her the dubious distinction of being the first warship damaged by enemy mines. HMS Firefly came to her assistance after the first explosion, only to strike a mine herself. The Merlin’s only leak came from a fractured drainpipe, but eight sheets of copper were blown off her hull and inside she suffered considerable shock damage, with ‘almost everything moveable in the ship displaced’. The Firefly’s hull was undamaged, but inside bulkheads were ‘thrown down’ or displaced and every bit of crockery broken. When HMS Vulcan struck a mine on 20 June, the Royal Navy had had enough, and the next day began carrying out the first minesweeping operation in history, recovering thirty-three ‘infernal machines,’ the standard British term of the day for sea mines.3
It was their use in the American Civil War that provided the real spur to the development of mines as a viable weapon of naval war. The Confederates used mines in great numbers to defend their harbours against the Union blockade. Confederate mines were called ‘torpedoes’ and when Admiral David Farragut shouted, ‘Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!’ during the battle of Mobile Bay, he was referring to Confederate naval mines. In December 1862, Confederate mines accounted for the first warship to be sunk by such weapons, the Union ironclad Cairo. In all, thirty-seven Union and Confederate ships were sunk or disabled by mines during the war.
Colonel Samuel Colt, a pioneer of the naval submarine mine. (Robert Swartz)
An engraving depicting the mining of the Merlin and Firefly off Kronstadt in 1855. (Author’s collection)
The successful use of naval mines by the Russians and the Confederacy led to increased international interest in the weapon, but the United States lost the lead in the field to other nations. Advances in mine design were greatly assisted by the introduction of guncotton in 1870, long after its invention by a Swiss chemist in 1846.4
This new form of warfare was not at first welcomed by the Royal Navy, as it threatened its freedom of movement and its command of the seas. Nevertheless, in 1876 the Royal Navy commissioned its Naval Torpedo School at the old HMS Vernon, where, despite British aversion to the very idea of mines, the Royal Navy began to develop its own mines. In an important innovation, the Royal Navy invented the ‘plummet’ version of the ‘automatic sinker’, which allowed mines to be laid in varying depths of water but to rest at a pre-set distance under the water.
The Royal Navy’s bias against mines changed considerably with the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5, which marked the first use of independent mines as offensive tactical weapons.5 On April 13, 1904, Japanese mines laid near Port Arthur by the 745-ton Koryo Maru6 sank the Russian battleship Petropavlovsk, with 652 dead, including the Russians’ best naval commander Admiral Makarov. Just a month later, on 15 May, mines from the Russian minelayer Amur accounted for two Japanese battleships, the Hatsuse and the Yashima, also off Port Arthur, with the loss of 493 lives in the Hatsuse.7 The 15,000-ton Hatsuse was a serious loss; built by Armstrong in Britain, she was armed with four 12in and sixteen 6in guns and was one of the newest battleships in the Japanese fleet.8 Before the war ended in 1905, enough Russian and Japanese warships had been sunk or damaged by mines to impress every naval power, including Great Britain.
The naval mine had truly arrived, but its success also led to efforts to regulate this abhorrent (to some) weapon. Questions about the employment of this relatively new weapon caused the major maritime powers to attend a Hague Conference on the subject in 1907, but the resulting ‘Convention Relative to the Laying of Automatic Submarine Contact Mines (No. VIII)’9 was not strong enough or well enough observed, to stem the use of the weapon.
The Japanese battleship Hatsuse, sunk by a Russian mine in May 1904. (IWM Q 41327)
The Royal Navy finally began taking steps toward a minelaying capability. Beginning in 1907, it converted to minelayers seven old Apollo class cruisers, two of which were named the Apollo and the Latona. They could make about 20 knots, were armed with 4.7in guns and could carry 100 mines. They constituted the ‘Minelaying Squadron’ commanded by a ‘Captain-in-Charge Minelayers’ and operated directly under the orders of the Admiralty. The Navy also developed a ‘Service’ type mine with a charge of 325lbs.10
At the beginning of the First World War, the Royal Navy was galvanised into action by almost immediate use of offensive minelaying by the Imperial Germany Navy, which had enthusiastically embraced the relatively new form of warfare. Shortly after a state of war broke out between Britain and Germany, the Germans wasted no time and sent the former pleasure steamer Königin Luise across the Channel into waters off the English coast to lay her 200 mines. On the morning of 5 August, she was sighted by HMS Amphion, a scout cruiser of 3440 tons armed with 4in guns,11 and the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla. She hurriedly laid her mines 30 miles off the coast of Suffolk before her pursuers opened fire.
The Königin Luise fled at her maximum