Skimming atop the waters of the Belgian and Adriatic coasts they came, hunting their targets,
torpedoes at the ready, hoping to move in and out before they were even noticed - the
torpedo boats!
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War special episode about Motor Torpedo Boats
during the First World War.
The development of the torpedo, over the decades leading up to the war, eventually would put
all warships of all navies at risk.
The 1870s saw the development of lightweight high speed steam powered torpedo boats, and
in response, the larger more seaworthy torpedo boat destroyer, which eventually evolved into
the destroyer, with which we are all familiar.
When the internal combustion engine was developed in the late 19th century, it was adopted in
all sorts of means of transportation, cars, motorcycles, planes soon enough, and high
speed boats.
In 1906, the French launched the “Vedette Recopé”, a 16 meter, diesel powered torpedo
boat capable of 16 knots, and this sparked a wave of interest in using internal combustion
engines in ships of war, with their light weight, high power, and ability to start immediately.
Interest in Italy and Britain, though, was on hydroplanes or skimmers, which rode atop
the water instead of through it, and they experimented with military possibilities.
One major British experimenter was John Thorneycroft, owner of Thorneycroft shipyards.
In 1915, he developed a proposal from three young Royal Navy Officers, including one sub
lieutenant Bill Bremner, for adapting racing hydroplanes for an attack on the German High
Seas Fleet.
The idea was to have a boat small and light enough to fit into a warship’s davits instead
of a 30ft cutter, but large enough to carry a torpedo.
Thorneycrofts enlarged the “Miranda 4” to produce a 40ft hull capable of 34 knots,
with a system where the torpedo was launched from the stern but facing forwards.
Bill Bremner was awarded 2,000 pounds from the Admiralty for the idea.
A total of 39 of these Coastal Motor Boats - CMBs - were built, first launched in April
1916.
Meanwhile the Italians had designed the Motoscafo Armato Silurante - or MAS in short.
These were similar in design, but had two stern-mounted torpedoes that were dropped
over the side.
The first two boats were launched at the end of 1915, but they had limitations.
They could only really operate in calm conditions, and the 250hp engine made so much noise that
it was hard to maintain the element of surprise, so they were converted to gun-carrying submarine
chasers.
The British boats were a bit more successful and were based at Dunkirk.
Side note here - their crew included Erskine Childers, who wrote the Riddle of the Sands
a decade before the war, which is about German military build up, and is in many ways the
first modern spy novel.
I read it when I was a teenager; it’s great.
Anyhow, over the winter of 1916-17, these boats made a number of successful attacks
against the German navy.
But both Italy and Britain decided they needed a larger boat.
The Italians ordered 20 larger but slower boats that went into service in the summer
of 1916.
In September, they made two surprise attacks on Austro-Hungarian steamers anchored near
Dubrovnik.
To maintain the element of surprise, two of them were experimentally fitted with an extra
10hp electric motor, and actually, on November 1st, one of them even made it through the
Pola harbor defenses, sinking a harbor defense ship.
The first major success for the Italians came December 9, 1917, when MAS 9 and MAS 13, under
Luigi Rizzo’s command, sank an Austrian battleship.
They were towed as close to position as possible to save fuel, but made good their escape after
the sinking, with the mother ships laying down covering fire.
Unlike the British ships, for which torpedoes were launched at full speed, the Italian ships
had to be stationary for the torpedoes to be launched over the side.
On the strength of this exploit, the Italians ordered more built, and would have over 400
by the war’s end.
They would also experiment with 16m twin torpedo boats powered by a 10hp electric motor.
Only four of these Grillo class boats were built, which were two slow to be effective,
but did have the advantage of electrically driven tank tracks on the sides to climb the
torpedo booms.
The British had a new 55 foot twin screw design, powering up to 900 hp, that carried two torpedoes.
It could even carry depth charges as an alternative.
88 of these were built, and some would even see service in the Second World War.
Many were based on England’s south coast and used for anti-submarine work, though they
were not a success, since they were too low in the water to see very far and only operated
in calm weather.
Others based on the Belgian coast against German patrol boats and destroyers were viewed
by the enemy with great respect, though several were sunk by coastal batteries.
In the first half of 1918, they successfully supported raids on German held Ostende and
Zeebrugge, providing smoke screens and attacking German coastal defense ships.
The CMBs main defense was speed, but this was not much use against things like airplanes.
And it was tough to use the deck mounted Lewis gun with the boat bouncing around.
The hulls were only half an inch thick, and the spray so thick that eyes were reddened
by salt pretty much instantly.
Goggles were useless because of the amount of water spraying, the first compasses fitted
were upset by the vibrations and just went round and round, and radios were no good because
of engine interference.
You couldn’t even communicate by shouting into someone’s ear over the noise of the
engine, and there was no reverse gear, so moving at slow speeds was very tricky.
Well, those are the drawbacks.
The most valuable success story of the boats during the war was for the Italians, again
under Rizzo’s command.
On June 9, 1918, MAS 15 and MAS 21 attacked two Austrian dreadnoughts.
The Szent Istvan was hit, and capsized and sank the following day.
That sinking was actually captured on film.
For the British, the most successful CMB raid occurred after the war, in August 1919.
It’s a bit of a spy tale.
Peter Duke was working for the MI6 in Petrograd as a source of information.
A CMB was sent to dash across from Finland to him as a communications line, but the boat’s
captain - Lieutenant Agar decided to take torpedoes and attack the Bolshevik Cruiser
Oleg, which was shelling a fortress held by White Russians.
MI6 actually refused him permission for this attack, but he did it anyway, and he sank
the Oleg.
Agar was awarded a Victoria Cross for this, but since it was an unofficial operation,
he was not named in the citation.
Because of this, a squadron of 8 boats was put together right away to attack the remaining
Bolshevik warships in the Kronstadt harbor, guarding Petrograd.
Bill Bremner’s was the first one through the harbor entrance.
They destroyed several of their targets, though many of the British were wounded or killed
in the process.
Actually, Lieutenant Agar’s boat, CMB 4, has been restored and is in the Imperial War
Museum at Duxford, displayed together with an audio interview with Agar and pictures
from the Kronstadt raid.
And there I will leave off for today.
This was a brief history of motor torpedo boats and the war, which is quite an interesting
and often overlooked story of technical innovation during an in.
As always, you are encouraged to look it up for yourself to get a deeper understanding
of the subject.
If you’re wondering why the name Bremner sounds familiar, it’s because David Bremner,
Bill Bremner’s descendant, rebuilt the Bristol Scout airplane that was flown by yet another
Bremner in the Mediterranean during the war.
We did a whole special episode with him at Stow Maries Great War Aerodrome and you can
check it out right here.
David also did a lot of the research for this episode.
If you want to see David and that Scout episode, you can click right here for that.
And hey, don’t forget to like us on Facebook; Flo puts cool war stuff up there all the time.
See you next time.