White Elephant Technology (eBook)

Chapter 1

Hybrids:
Making a Boat a Plane

I have been branded with folly and madness for attempting what the world calls impossibilities … but should this be all, I shall be satisfied.

Richard Trevithick,
nineteenth-century British inventor

Some WETech inventions take a mode of transportation and make it do something for which it was never intended. Boats by themselves do a great job of floating while planes comfortably navigate the sky. But combine the two and you compromise their original function, making the boat less seaworthy and the plane more likely to crash. These hybrid combos prove more isn’t necessarily better and it’s often less. Take, for example, the swimming tank.

1 The Swimming Tank

Tanks were known for two things during the Second World War: their mobile fire power and heavy armour, which shielded them against attack. What they weren’t known for was swimming. But the Allies needed to get tanks ashore during D-Day to support the invasion. The goal, then, was to create an amphibious tank that could swim to the beachhead by itself rather than be carried by specialised landing craft. Given the M4A1 Sherman tank weighed 33 tons with armour 3in thick, you’d think making one float was a bad idea. However, such considerations have never stopped a WETech inventor.

Nicholas Straussler, a Hungarian engineer working for the British, was charged with finding the solution. Straussler was a specialist in designing amphibious, off-road vehicles for the military. Still, he faced a considerable problem – overcoming a tank’s weight and lack of buoyancy. His answer was to develop a waterproof flotation device – a canvas skirt surrounding the outside of the tank that displaced enough water to enable it to float. The collapsible skirt, which left the tank’s top and bottom open to the elements, was raised using compressed air. Once inflated, metal scaffolding was snapped into place to provide the skirt with additional support.

The D-Day invasion plan included offloading the swimming tanks 2 miles from shore. Since they sat low in the water, the tank part wasn’t visible to the enemy. In fact, the surrounding skirt made it look like a boat. A periscope extending from the tank’s turret enabled the driver to see where they were going, while they used a compass for navigation. Twin, three-bladed propellers underneath the tank’s rear carriage delivered a maximum speed of 4 knots. They could also be swivelled left and right for steering. An automatic bilge kept the inside of the tank dry. As the tank approached shore, the front of its skirt could be collapsed like an accordion, allowing its 3in gun to fire. Once on land, the rest of the skirt was quickly deflated, enabling it to proceed as a conventional tank.

The DD M4A1 Sherman ‘swimming’ tank. (US Army)

The DD M4A1 Sherman tank (DD stood for Duplex Drive – its two means of propulsion) was a hybrid destined to failure. No one was surprised when military wags began calling it the ‘Donald Duck’ tank.

Straussler’s invention faced several non-trivial problems. First, the tanks were so cumbersome they were difficult to steer in the ocean. Additionally, they sat so low in the water that anything higher than a 2ft wave risked swamping them. Unfortunately, the waves off Omaha Beach the morning of 6 June 1944 were 6ft high.

The moment of truth came when the five-man tank crews had to seal themselves inside their steel-plated coffin before being deployed 3 miles off shore in the middle of a storm. They must have known in the pit of their stomachs that things weren’t going as planned, but they got in anyway – an amazing act of courage. It’s a moment many WETech inventors experience, but in this case the swimming tank’s inventor was safe, warm and dry while someone else paid for his mistakes.

A rear view of the DD M4A1 Sherman tank. (US Army)

Of the twenty-nine swimming tanks launched off Omaha Beach, twenty-seven sank like a stone, some with their tank crews trapped inside. Canadian and British tanks did somewhat better due to calmer seas, but of the 120 tanks launched that day at least forty-two (or more than a third) disappeared beneath the waves.

Straussler worked on a variety of projects after the war, most related to off-road or amphibious vehicles. He fell foul of the British authorities in 1957 when he was charged with violating export controls for selling a truck he’d modified to a Soviet-bloc country. In 1961, he sued the United States for patent infringement, claiming that amphibious military vehicles such as the ‘Otter’ and ‘Duck’ were based on his ideas. He lost the case.

Straussler, who had thirty patents to his name, continued working right up until his death in 1964 at age 75. Although he made other contributions to the war effort, he will always be remembered, not altogether fondly, as the father of the swimming tank.

2 Underwater Aircraft Carriers

The idea of an underwater aircraft carrier – a giant submarine that could carry aeroplanes – may seem counter-intuitive but it made sense for certain seafaring countries in the days before radar.

Germany, Great Britain, the United States, Italy, France and Japan all experimented with sub–plane combinations, albeit with mixed results. As crazy as it might sound, there was a strategic reason for a submarine to carry an aeroplane. Subs in the first half of the twentieth century didn’t just sink enemy ships, but were used as scouts to find the enemy fleet. They had a significant drawback, though. They rode so low in the water that their field of vision was limited to 7 miles. But you could dramatically improve a sub’s scouting range if it carried, launched and retrieved its own aircraft. Hence, the underwater aircraft carrier was born.

A captured Japanese I-400 submarine in Sasebo Bay.

Underwater aircraft carriers proved a White Elephant Technology for virtually all the countries that experimented with them. Nevertheless, Japan was determined to make plane-carrying subs a success. The island nation’s experiments began in 1923 when it purchased a floatplane from Germany and began holding sea trials. A crane mounted on a submarine’s deck lowered the seaplane over the side, where it could take off from the water.

As the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) grew in experience, it began adding watertight deck hangars to its subs for storing a collapsible biplane – an important step in integrating the seemingly incompatible. By the autumn of 1928, Japan had progressed far enough that the IJN was satisfied that a sub–plane combination was practical.

When the Second World War broke out, Japan was all in where underwater aircraft carriers were concerned. Eleven plane-carrying subs surrounded the island of Oahu during Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Afterwards, one of the subs stayed behind to launch its plane to survey the damage. Eventually, Japan integrated plane-carrying subs into every combat theatre where its navy fought.

US Navy personnel inspecting the gun of an I-400.

Japan made innovative use of its underwater aircraft carriers. The I-252 twice launched its floatplane in autumn 1942 to drop bombs on Oregon – the first time anyone used a submarine’s aeroplane to attack an enemy’s mainland. By war’s end, Japan had built more than forty-one plane-carrying subs, making it the hands-down expert on this unusual weapon.

The culmination of the underwater aircraft carrier came in the form of Japan’s I-400-class subs. The largest submarines ever built when they began commissioning in 1944, these behemoths were more than a football field long, had a crew of 200 men and could travel one and a half times around the world without refuelling. Additionally, each I-400-class sub carried three attack bombers in a watertight deck hangar, which it launched off its bow using a pneumatic catapult. Originally conceived by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto as a follow-up punch to his attack on Pearl Harbor, a squadron of I-400 subs was on its way to attack US naval forces when the war ended.

The last surviving Aichi M6A1 Seiran was flown by Imperial Japanese Navy Lt Kazuo Akatsuka from Fukuyama to Yokosuka, where he surrendered it to an American occupation contingent. (Transferred from the United States Navy, 1945)

The watertight hanger of an I-400.

Despite Japan’s success, underwater aircraft carriers never caught on as an offensive weapon, in part because technological advancements such as radar and sub-launched missiles made them unnecessary. Still, their legacy endures today in the form of ‘boomers’, ballistic missile subs capable of launching a nuclear attack against an enemy’s mainland. These are the true descendants of the I-400 class of subs, proving that some WETech inventions fail simply because they’re ahead of their time.

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