284 Chapter Eight
Torpedo ranges, meanwhile, spurted upward,^40 and improved
torpedo-carrying submarines made them far more of a threat to the
Royal Navy than the torpedo boats of the 1880s had ever been. As
before, the French took the lead when Gustave Zédé designed the
first practicable seagoing submersible in 1887. In 1903, periscopes
gave submarines eyes with which to aim torpedoes at their targets
while remaining submerged. This imparted fresh substance to the
long-standing French dream of finding a new weapon with which to
destroy British sovereignty of the seas. But the Franco-British naval
race, briefly reinvigorated by Fashoda (1898), soon dwindled to insig
nificance. The diplomatic entente of 1904 made nonsense of the
French plan to build submarines for use against Great Britain. Re
sources were concentrated instead on outbuilding France’s Mediterra
nean rivals—Italy, Austria, and Turkey.^41
Anglo-German rivalry, however, which set in seriously only after
1898, concentrated almost exclusively on capital ships because Ad
miral Tirpitz and his colleagues accepted Mahan’s teachings whole
heartedly. Submarines seemed to him no more than minor adjuncts to
the battleships which alone could exercise command of the sea. As a
result of such single-mindedness, in the decade after the Dreadnought
revolution of 1906 battleship design showed signs of approaching a
limit set by the physical characteristics of the alloyed steel used in en
gines, guns and armor.
Any such incipient stabilization was destined to be upset by the rise
of air power, a possibility clearly foreseen before 1914. The Royal
Navy, for instance, conducted successful experiments with torpedo-
carrying airplanes in 1913, though difficulties in making a torpedo
Mass., 1966) has some perceptive things to say about the strains that the first phase of
this revolution in naval gunnery put on older patterns of shipboard relationships.
- A table of guaranteed performance levels supplied by the Whitehead torpedo
factory for its longest-range models in successive years show highlights:
Year Torpedo Range (in yards)
1866 220
1876 600
1905 2,190
1906 6,560
1913 18,590
These figures come from Gray, The Devil’s Device, Appendix.
- I have not found any really satisfactory account of French naval policy between
1884 and 1914, but see Ernest H. Jenkins, A History of the French Navy (London, 1973),
pp. 303 ff.; Bueb, Die “Junge Schule” der franzbsischen Marine; Joannes Tramond and
André Reussner, Elements d’histoire maritime et coloniale contemporaine, 1815–1914, new
ed. (Paris, 1947), pp. 652 ff.; Salaun, La marine française, pp. 1—75.
