The Karlsruher Tagblatt dated Wednesday 23 April 1924 published on page 6 an article dealing with the submarine cruiser war of the future which were without any doubt to become of the most dangerous weapons in a future naval war. USA, England and France showed signifant interest in building such submarines. An absolute independence of submarine support points excluded the submarine home base or an unlimited range as proposed in Flamms (1) designs was yet not realized. He designed two twin boats namely a submarine cruiser of 7,067 tons and a submarine minelayer of 7,700 tons displacement. Both types had the same speed and diving qualities to able the boats to cooperate closely.
Some of these large minelayers were able to arrive within 24 hours secretly the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal. Their huge range was similar to the circumference of the earth and made it possible to leave their secrete base for a far away destination, do their job and return without the necessity of of a stopover. The submarine minelayer had a construction similar to that of the submarine cruiser. Instead of the guns and torpedo tubes carried shee around 1,000-1 ton or 2,000-500 kg mines with her. In the First World War was the maximum around 20 mines. Her only protection against an enemy attack was diving. The mines could be laid with mathematic accuracy with completely arbitrary intervals and the whole process was the commanding officer informed by automatic signals. Building time around 9 months and costs around 28-30 million mark.
The Australian newspaper Northern Star dated Saturday 10 January 1925 referred to an article recently published in Marine Rundschau dealing with the designs of Flamm. Despite his opinion that battleships and other types of surface warships were still indispensable, he thought that submarines ought to have a higher place in naval warfare in the future. Key word in his research was supreme importance of stability in submarines which he wanted to ssolve by adopting a new hull form. This form supplied a perfect stability while diving “and when running submerged, continues to steadniness of trim, and enables relatively enormous weights to be carried on the upper part of the hull.” As far as he knew other navies depended for the stability of their 4,000+ tons submarine cruisers on ballast or deadweight to carry. If ballast was not used for assuring the staibility they should use his system of construction and which was patented world wide. Since 1919 he was doing intensive research in this matter.
One of his projects was a submarine minelayer of 7,734 tons displacement able to carry with her 1,000 mines each with a weight of 1 ton. He stated that this design would be the most formidable in war. She would be more dangerous than an other project of him namely a submarine cruiser. The wide radius of action and the fact that she could stay for months at sea, high speed and large number of mines made her such dangerous.
Note
1. Oswald Flamm (30 July 1861 Düsseldorf, Germany-12 June 1935 Berling, Germany, Berlin) shipbuilding and -engine engineer. Played an important role in the German shipbuilding and was specialised in screws. stability and submarine building. He was according to Time Magazine (website Time.com) responsible for a “series of revolutionary, non-patent designs for heavily armored, giant submersible dreadnought and u-boat cruisers between 1921 and 1930.”
Sources
Trove website Australian newspapers.
German Digital Newspapers Archive
Delpher.nl
New Zealand Historical Newspapers Papers Past
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