The Submarine

This book is distinctively different from the usual run of books about naval history in general or of the submarine service in particular. From the start it adopts a ‘cultural’ approach to the submarine, rather than an operational one, that is perhaps surprising given the fact that the author is himself a former submariner. The book starts with a review of reviews—naval ones, that is—and especially the fleet reviews of 1897 for Queen Victoria and of 1977 for Queen Elizabeth II. There were no submarines present in the first and lots in the second. Comparing these two reviews with others, the latest being at the time of the Trafalgar bicentenary, Duncan Redford sets the scene for a detailed consideration not so much of the way in which the submarine developed technologically and operationally but more as an element in the public and service imagination. He shows the ways in which different audiences ‘constructed meaning’ (a term frequently used in this book) for the submarine and how that meaning changed as technology developed and the context shifted. His major point is that conceptions of the submarine reflected a slow transition from their being considered ‘underhand, unfair and damned unEnglish’ craft that only the strategically and morally weak would use to their fullest effect, to being accepted, eighty years later, as crucial elements in a fleet that served the highest purposes

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