Noyal Navy Submarines
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| Royal Navy Submarines Stamps |
Not
for nothing is the Royal Navy Submarine Service known as the Silent
Service. Its boats rely on stealth for their effectiveness. They
quite literally
keep a low profile and lack the charisma of battleships or the
panache of frigates and destroyers.
The
Royal Navy has had over 600 submarines in the past century. Unlike
heir German counterparts, they have been employed mainly in defensive
roles, to patrol and protect the world's sea lanes rather than
destroy enemy shipping; but the men who have engaged in hazardous
operations have earned 14 Victoria Crosses and many other gallantry
awards.
The
popular attitudes towards submarines and the image they have created
has been reflected in their coverage in stamps- precious few from the
world as a whole and none from the UK, until this year when a set of
four stamps was issued on April 10, to celebrate the centenary of the
first sub in the service of the Royal Navy.
The irony of it is that the
submarine was invented by a man who had, shall we say, a decided
antipathy to the British. John Philip Holland was born at Liscannor,
County Clare in 1840, studied in Limerick and qualified as a
schoolmaster. He taught at Limerick until 1873 when he left Ireland
and settled in the United States.
For six years he continued in his
chosen profession, but secretly he yearned to do something to destroy
the hated English. Growing up during the potato famine and the
agrarian troubles left him with a lifelong hostility to the ruling
classes and their colonial administration.
Probably
before he left Ireland he enrolled in the Irish Republican
Brotherhood, a secret society which continued in the footsteps of the
Fenians whose uprising in 1848 had been crushed, just as their
quixotic attempts to invade Canada from the USA in the aftermath of
the American Civil War ended in farce.
Holland
realised that Ireland was too poor and under-resourced to take on the
mighty British Empire on equal terms. Somehow he had to devise a
means of shifting the balance in Ireland's favour.
The
solution seemed to lie in inventing a vessel which could navigate
under water and creep up undetected on British warships, to attach
explosive devices to their hulls.
Ever
since Viking divers had bored holes in 16 Danish warships 900 years
earlier, men had dreamt of undersea boats which could sink a much
larger enemy. A sheet of Millennium stamps from Palau last year
traced the 1000-year history of man's attempts to operate safely
below the surface of the sea.
These include various types of
diving bell and self- contained breathing apparatus but practical
vessels, capable of navigation under water, only go back about 400
years.
Most of the early experiments
were doomed to failure because their inventors failed to understand
the problem of fresh air.
Ingenious devices with leather-
flanged rowlocks were all very well, but the oarsmen had a tendency
to black out through lack of oxygen.
Ironically, in light of the
eventual development of the modern submarine, the first man to crack
the problem was David Bushnell, an American colonist whose underwater
boat of 1775 was certainly capable of attaching a mine to the hull of
a British frigate. The boat had twin hulls, one over the other, and
was operated by one man who had sufficient air for 30 minutes
submersion.
At the beginning of the War of
Independence Bushnell's submarine manoeuvred itself below the hull of
HMS Eagle with a magazine containing 150 lbs of gunpowder.
The ploy only failed because the
submariner lost his nerve and did not tarry long enough to ensure
that the charge was properly fitted.
The magazine was released and
exploded an hour later, but at some distance from the enemy
battleship.
Robert
Fulton of steamboat fame also tried his hand at a submarine,
conducting trials with such a vessel in 1809, but using twin screws
manually operated by a crank. It was not until 1863 that a
mechanically driven submarine was tested.
This
was the Plongeur, built in France and propelled by a compressed air
engine. The following year a hand-operated submarine was employed by
the Confederates against the US Navy.
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Manned
by a crew of nine, this sub successfully attacked the USS Housatonic
and sank her with a spar torpedo.
Unfortunately,
the sub sank in the attempt with the loss of three of the crew, so
the attempt was not repeated in actual combat, although trials with a
second submarine, the Intelligent Whale, showed that it was feasible
to attach a torpedo manually and blow up a ship without endangering
the submariners.
Two years after settling in
America, John Holland produced a blueprint for a mechanically powered
submarine.
In 1878, with funds from the IRB,
he built a small experimental boat which incredibly embodied many of
the features which became standard in the earliest operational
submarines for controlled descent and ascent, balanced navigation and
buoyancy.
Holland and his first practical
submarine are shown on an Irish 25p stamp of 1981. The boat was
propelled by a petrol engine, then in its infancy.
Poor engine performance was for
many years the chief obstacle to perfecting the submarine, but vast
improvements in internal combustion engines in the 1880s and
1890s finally made the fully mechanised submarine a practical
proposition.
The
Swedish armaments manufacturer Nordenfelt built a submarine in 1883
powered by a steam engine. Sufficient steam was generated on the
surface to enable this boat to submerge for short periods and
discharge a Whitehead torpedo mechanically. The steam engine was a
major drawback, and the plume from its smoke-stack was a dead
giveaway.
Nevertheless,
the US Navy took a keen interest in these developments and invited
both Holland and Norden felt to submit designs to the Navy Board in
1887.
Nordenfelt dropped out and in the
end it was Holland whose design was accepted. Holland's largest and
most ambitious boat was the Plunger, commissioned in 1893 but not
completed till 190
It was powered by steam on the
surface, but switched to gas when submerged. She achieved speeds of
15 knots on the surface and 8 knots submerged, and was armed with two
Whitehead torpedoes.
The
USS Holland, a much smaller boat, was begun after the Plunger but
completed before it, and thus had the honour of being the first
submarine in the world to enter naval service.
The
USA released a prestige booklet of stamps last year to celebrate the
centenary. She was 59 feet in length and had a crew of three. She was
followed by the USS Adder which was slightly larger (63 feet), and
this became the prototype for the earliest submarines in the Royal
Navy.
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The
more far-sighted members of the Royal Navy realised the potential of
this weapon and urged the Board of Admiralty to purchase Holland
submarines, but there was considerable hostility towards this among
the more senior admirals who felt that it was un-British.
One
Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, went so far as to advocate that
submariners captured in wartime should be hanged from the nearest
yard-arms as pirates!
In 1900, however, plans to
purchase Holland submarines were finalised and later Holland vessels
were constructed under licence at Barrow in Furness.
The first Holland submarine
entered service on October 2, 1901.
British submariners were mainly
confined to the Mediterranean during World War 1 but saw service in
all theatres of operation in World War II and played a | major role
in the strategy of NATO during the Cold War. Over 5,000 British
submariners have perished in the course of the past century, mostly
in naval engagements, being hunted down by enemy destroyers using
depth charges; but quite a number lost their lives in accidents.
The
set of four stamps honouring the Silent Service was designed by Dick
Davis. The second class stamp shows the latest submarine in service.
HMS Vanguard, launched in 1992, operates as a UN peacekeeping
'sentinel', remaining submerged for long periods and carrying
ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads.
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| Royal Navy Submarines Stamps |
It cruised at periscope depth for
long periods, hence the 'periscope view' graphic featuring an enemy
ship. One submarine of this class, HMS Upholder sank or damaged over
100,000 tons of enemy shipping before it sank with all hands. Pride
of place on the 65ptier airmail rate) goes to HMS Holland of 1901.
With a displacement of only 122
tons, she is a midget compared with the mighty Vanguard of 15,900
tons.
In
addition to the stamps printed in conventional sheets of 100, there
is a self-adhesive retail booklet containing four first class NVI
definitives and two first class Submarine stamps in a self-adhesive
version. The booklet went on sale April 17, a week after the ordinary
stamps.
Dick
Davis also designed a miniature sheet and matching prestige booklet
released on October 22 to mark the actual centenary, containing four
first class stamps featuring flags.
Three
of them are the Union Jack, the White Ensign and the flag of the
Chief of the Defence Staff but the fourth is the Jolly Roger or skull
and crossbones emblem of piracy.
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| Royal Navy Submarines Stamps |
Each
sub has its own unique Jolly Roger and the one shown on the stamp,
with crossed tin-openers, is the flag of HMS Proteus. The Jolly Roger
and White Ensign also appear in self-adhesive versions in a booklet
with four ordinary first class stamps.
The Royal Navy's Submarine
centenary is the subject of a omnibus issue from Liberia, St.Kitts,
Sierra Leone,Uganda and Zambia, each of which has produced sheetlets
of six with matching souvenir sheets depicting subs of the past
century, together with some of the intrepid submariners.
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