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    X.1: The Royal Navy's Mystery Submarine
    Unavailable
    X.1: The Royal Navy's Mystery Submarine
    Unavailable
    X.1: The Royal Navy's Mystery Submarine
    Ebook518 pages6 hours

    X.1: The Royal Navy's Mystery Submarine

    By Roger Branfill-Cook

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The ‘X’ stood for experimental, but it might equally have meant extraordinary, exotic or extravagant, as this giant submarine attracted superlatives – the world’s largest, most heavily armed, and deepest diving submersible of the day. X.1 was a controversial project conceived behind the backs of the politicians, and would remain an unwanted stepchild. As British diplomats at the Washington naval conference were trying to outlaw the use of submarines as commerce raiders, the Admiralty was designing and building the world’s most powerful corsair submarine, to destroy single-handed entire convoys of merchant ships.

    This book explores the historical background to submarine cruisers, the personalities involved in X.1’s design and service, the spy drama surrounding her launch, the treason trial of a leading RN submarine commander, the ship’s chequered career, and her political demise. Despite real technical successes, she would finally fall foul of ‘black propaganda’, aimed at persuading foreign naval powers that the cruiser submarine did not work; even today uninformed opinion repeats the myth of her failure. However, it was completely ignored by other navies, who went on building submarine cruisers of their own, some larger than, but none so sophisticated as, X.1. The book analyses in detail the submarine cruisers built by the US Navy, the French and the Japanese, plus the projected German copy of X.1, the Type XI U-Boat, paying belated tribute to the real importance of the mysterious X.1.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPen and Sword
    Release dateJan 21, 2013
    ISBN9781473820951
    Unavailable
    X.1: The Royal Navy's Mystery Submarine
    Author

    Roger Branfill-Cook

    ROGER BRANFILL-COOK is a qualified battlefield guide, a professional translator from French, and also a writer on military subjects and a modemaker. His most recent book was _River Gunboats: An Illustrated Encyclopaedia _ published by Seaforth in 2018.

    Read more from Roger Branfill Cook

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    Reviews for X.1

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    • 4/5
      Very much feeling like an extended article from "Warship," which is understandable as this monograph comes from the same publisher, the author is to be complimented on how he has teased out so much information on a vessel whose purpose and capabilities were kept very much kept in the shadows. As for what those purposes were, first and foremost "X.1" represented an exercise by the Royal Navy to prove to itself that they could build a submarine cruiser that wasn't more of a threat to its crew than to the enemy and, from that perspective, "X.1" was very much a success. As for why there were no follow-on units that comes down to a number of reasons, over and above her bad engines; it turns out that a "straight-eight" is just a bad configuration for a diesel. The issues seem to relate to the RN being unsure that it wanted to ignite a submarine cruiser building race and, it would seem, that the average RN submarine officer was dubious about fighting it out on the surface even with the weaker escort ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy (the intended target of "X.1").