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By Root 745 0

compare with another recent discovery, the Confederate Civil War submarine H.I. Hunley? Found after years of hard work by Clive Cussler’s National Underwater and Marine Agency team and raised by the State of South Carolina, Hunley is one of the great archeological treasures of the Civil War, on a par with the ironclad USS Monitor, whose engine and turret have also been pulled from the depths. Even as I sit pondering the mysteries of Sub Marine Explorer, a team of archeologists is carefully excavating and dismantling Hunley to reveal its secrets. So for the answers on Sub Marine Explorer, I turn to Hunley project historian Mark Ragan. “There’s no one better,” Clive tells me as he reads Ragan’s number to me over the phone.

Mark answers his phone with a laconic drawl that quickens with excitement as I tell him what I’ve found on a Panamanian beach. I e-mail him a handful of photos, and as he opens them on his computer 3,000 miles away, I hear the subtle but sharp intake of his breath. That’s a good thing, because Clive is right. No one knows Civil War submarines better than Mark Ragan. He literally wrote the book on them, and he now turns his considerable energy and skill to dig deep into the archives to learn more about Sub Marine Explorer and its inventor, a forgotten American engineering genius named Julius H. Kroehl.

PIONEER SUBMARINES

War spurs terrible and magnificent inventions, often taking ideas and concepts developed in peacetime and testing them hurriedly in times of crisis. During the Civil War, technology played a significant role. Among other innovations, the war introduced new guns and more powerful cannon, ironclad warships with rotating turrets, undersea mines—and the submarine. There was nothing new about each of these inventions save their first practical and deadly use in combat. The pioneering naval accomplishments of the war started with the attack on the wooden fleet of the Union Navy at Hampton Roads, Virginia, by the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia, demonstrating that this new type of warship doomed the “wooden walls” that had dominated naval warfare for centuries. The first clash between ironclads took place when the Union’s USS Monitor interceded between Virginia and the Union wooden fleet the following day and fought the Confederate ship to a standstill.

Another innovation was the use of an electrically detonated “torpedo,” or mine, one of which sent the Union’s ironclad Cairo to the bottom of the Yazoo River, giving the ill-fated gunboat the dubious distinction of being the first warship in history to be sunk by a mine. Later, there was the brave but doomed sortie of the Confederate submarine H.I. Hunley into Charleston Harbor to sink the Union warship Housatonic with a spar-mounted “torpedo” projecting from her bow. Shortly after this victory, Hunley sank, taking her crew with her, just a few hundred yards from her victim. No one knows why Hunley sank, but the tiny craft gained fame as the first submarine to destroy an enemy vessel in combat. Quickly buried by silt, Hunley’’s grave remained undiscovered for 150 years.

As for submarines, both sides embraced this new technology. Inventors proposed various underwater craft and built some that operated with various levels of success, killing their builders and crews on more than one occasion. A number of projects were launched, some in secrecy, others more publicly, leaving behind an unfortunately incomplete record of pioneer submarines and submariners. But the rediscovery of Julius Kroehl’s Sub Marine Explorer and a slow unraveling of his wartime career, buried in the National Archives, suggests that at every step of the way, as the Confederates developed both their “torpedoes” and submarines, Kroehl was there to develop something to counter them for the Union side. It may well be one of the last great untold stories of the Civil War.

Julius Kroehl was a German-born immigrant who came to America in 1838. He studied to become an engineer, and in 1845 he won a U.S patent for a flange-bending machine for ironwork. In 1856, he was well enough