Submarines used during the American Civil War were basically floating metal coffins that killed their own crews much more effectively than they ever harmed the enemy.

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Submarines used during the American Civil War were basically floating metal coffins that killed their own crews much more effectively than they ever harmed the enemy. The infamous Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley managed to successfully sink a Union warship in 1864, but it immediately sank itself right afterward, drowning the entire crew for the third time in its disastrous operational history. The military effectively built an underwater suicide tube out of repurposed boiler iron, gave it a hand-cranked propeller, and somehow kept finding gullible volunteers willing to get inside the cursed machine. It is a stunning testament to the sheer stubbornness of nineteenth-century warfare that military leaders looked at a machine that had already killed two previous crews and decided it was a brilliant idea to try it again. Modern navies pride themselves on stealth and precision, while early submarine combat was just a desperate race to see who could drown themselves first