Richard Compton-Hall

A great little book on the very first submarines, from the well-known to the most obscure. There is good detail here, not easily found elsewhere, on just how undeveloped these early submarines were and Compton-Hall clearly favours the Fenian Ram as being the first submarine even approaching any sort of usefulness. The contrasting influences of Freemasonry, Protestantism and the more successful Fenian submarines by Holland was an unexpected outcome in this.

As the subtitle says, this is a history of early submarines. The author is British and like many British writers I have enjoyed, his approach is a bit unorthodox. The book starts off with an excellent chapter on the introduction of the early Holland boats into Royal Navy service, then jumps back in time with a few chapters about the earliest submarines like the Revolutionary War era Turtle, the Confederate Hunley and a few other odd ones, before ending up discussing Holland and his show more submarines. He then continues with more about the early service of submarines in the Royal Navy before the first world war.

The book is primarily focused on the Royal Navy, although he does discuss submarines in navies of other nations. There are many photographs, although some are of poor quality, this being due more to the original photo rather than the reproduction in the book. If there is a complaint it is that many of the photos are small, as the book is laid out in two columns per page with some photos only being a column wide. The double column format does mean that for a book of under two hundred pages there is quite a lot of text.

There are quite a number of anecdotes and stories included from actual crews who served on the boats which not only give an excellent insight on what it was like to man these boats, but also give a more human picture of the crews. Many are quite entertaining and remind the reader that no matter how deadly serious the purpose for which these boats were built, they were crewed by humans who could laugh, play pranks and otherwise behave like real people. show less

Very thorough review of the earliest days of submarines. Weight of the book towards the British Navy, but all early developments reviewed. Bits about early Russian (Tsarist), Turkish or other navy's boats unlikely to be easily encountered elsewhere. Enjoyed the pictures, but couldn't always make out what the author was referring to in captions. The copyright is 1983, so the information is not current (thinking of the Hunley, for example), but that is not really a problem. The author was the show more Director of the Submarine Museum at Gosport at the time of publication, a formal RN Commander, so the information is very reliable. I'm sure there was quite a lot of interest in submarine history in Britain particularly at this point because of the (then) recent Falklands War. show less