THE FIRST SUBMARINES and Submarine Minelayers of WORLD WAR ONE

Since reading Jules Verne's TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA as a young man, it has been the authors desire to understand the living conditions aboard the very first submarines. In his research he has found very few personal tales to tell him of those conditions until the time just before the First World War. During that war and just afterward many stories started to emerge from both sides of the Atlantic.Now, after 100 years, it's possible to collect and sort those narratives, photographs, tales and biographies' of those who served aboard the "underwater boats" and what those conditions were in those first few years. THE FIRST SUBMARINES, after 1900, also includes the first torpedoes available for those submarines.Starting with Jules Verne's Nautilus (1870) as inspiration and using Allen Hoar's THE SUBMARINE TORPEDO BOATS (1916) as a platform, I've included excerpts from THE JOURNAL OF SUBMARINE COMMANDER VON FORSTNER, German Commander Otto Weddigen's (U-9) accounts (1914), his second in command Johannes Speiss (1916), E.F. KNIGHT; 1916, author, my own accounts of my few times of being aboard United States submarines and those short comments of others who have served their times underwater.I've tried to duplicate those photos published in Mr. Hoar's book and added more photographs with their information where available to highlight the stories and added historical notes for the same reason.Since assembling these account, I've come to appreciate the conditions under which these first sub-mariners worked, lived and died for their country. They ventured below the surface of the waves into a world not at all like described in TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA.