Author: Dan Maloney / Source: Hackaday
By the early 20th century, naval warfare was undergoing drastic technological changes. Ships were getting better and faster engines and were being outfitted with wireless communications, while naval aviation was coming into its own. The most dramatic changes were taking place below the surface of the ocean, though, as brave men stuffed themselves into steel tubes designed to sink and, usually, surface, and to attack by stealth and cunning rather than brute force.
The submarine was becoming a major part of the world’s navies, albeit a feared and hated one.For as much animosity as there was between sailors of surface vessels and those that chose the life of a submariner, and for as vastly different as a battleship or cruiser seems from a submarine, they all had one thing in common: the battle against the sea. Sailors and their ships are always on their own dealing with forces that can swat them out of existence in an instant. As a result, mariners have a long history of doing whatever it takes to get back to shore safely — even if that means turning a submarine into a sailboat.
Pigs of the Sea
The first generation of militarily important submarines were, to modern eyes, terribly primitive affairs. Compared to surface vessels of the day, they were tiny, had little in the way of armor, had a limited range, and were not particularly fast. They also spent comparatively little of their time submerged, mostly operating on the surface until it was time to attack. Before periscopes were introduced, this meant a commander would need to surface his sub enough to pop the conning tower above the water to get a bearing before submerging again. To surface mariners, this looked like the swimming of porpoises, which they called “sea pigs”, so they dubbed submarines “pigboats.”
Despite their image, the submarines of the US Navy were quite sophisticated by the time World War I came around. This was the era of the R-class boats, built for coastal defense and harbor patrol. These boats, like most submarines at the time, had hybrid propulsion: diesel engines turned generators to charge massive battery banks for submerged operation, with electric motors turning the screws. They carried four torpedo tubes and had a deck-mounted 3″ gun for surface attacks, could make 13 knots (25 km/h) on the surface, and carried enough fuel to cover 3,700 nautical miles (6,900 km).
The R-14 (submarines were not given proper names at the time) was one of the 27 boats of the class. Built in 1918 and based out of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the boat was used to train crews in submarine warfare and to conduct search and rescue missions. It was on one such search mission that the R-14 would test the limits of the boat’s theoretical range as well as the seamanship of her crew.
On May 2, 1921, R-14 was dispatched to search…
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