The Boys' Book of Submarines

In 1917, the submarine was the most terrifying weapon in the naval world. This book, written in the heat of the First World War, gave boys a front-row seat to the machinery of underwater warfare and the dream of commanding the deep. A. Frederick Collins and Virgil D. Collins trace the submarine's unlikely evolution from David Bushnell's awkward 1776 turtle to the sleek, deadly submersibles prowling the Atlantic. They explain how these iron vessels hold their breath, how torpedoes find their targets, and why the nations locked in global conflict suddenly understood that the ocean floor had become a battlefield. But this isn't merely a war book. The final chapters offer something rarer: blueprints and instructions for building your own working model submarine, complete with compressed-air propulsion. Here is a portal to another era, when a curious boy with tools and ambition might engineer his own passage beneath the waves. The Boys' Book of Submarines endures not as military history but as a time capsule of youthful wonder trapped in a world at war.