As soon as the first submarines appeared in the navies, engineers from many countries wondered whether it was possible to create a "ship" that would secretly approach the enemy underground.
The first document that has come down to our time, testifying to such studies, dates back to 1908. It follows from it that the English engineer I. Diver not only developed the idea and created a model of such an underground vessel (which he called the subground), but was also able to build its first prototype. During the test, the underground boat went deeper only 5 meters, and then one of the raking buckets broke. Engineer I. Diver spent three years to create a new, more perfect apparatus, the principle of movement of which was a "spin". The new subgroundine was able to penetrate underground already to a depth of 9 meters. And then a catastrophe occurred: a steam boiler exploded, the engineer died, and further work on the creation of an English underground boat was stopped.
It took a quarter of a century before engineers and the military once again turned to the idea of creating a ship that "floats" underground. It happened in Germany in 1933. The engineer-inventor W. von Bern patented the German version of the subway. The invention was classified and … sent to the archive. 7 years later, Count Klaus Schenkfon Staufenberg, the future leader of the July conspiracy against Hitler in 1944, stumbled upon archival materials. The idea of creating an underground vessel capable of secretly getting close to the enemy interested him. It was at this time that the general headquarters of the Third Oeikh was developing Operation Sea Lion, an invasion of the British Isles. Vessels, capable of first crossing the narrow strait separating France and England, and then underground to reach naval military bases and disable them, could play a decisive role in this operation.
The inventor was found and all conditions were created for him to work. V. von Bern promised to make a device that would accommodate five people, was able to move underground at a speed of 7 km / h and carry a 300 kg warhead.
But, fortunately for the British, work on the creation of the underground boat stopped at the level of laboratory experiments. Hitler was more interested in spent samples of FAU-1 and FAU-2 rockets, already ready for mass production. Work on the creation of the underground boat was discontinued.
True, there is information that Nazi Germany still managed to build small underground boats and even use them in hostilities. In 1943, a group of German engineers under the leadership of Herbert von Strasse developed an improved model of the corkscrew sub-frame, proposed back in 1908 in England. The underground boats he created were used as a covert landing technique.
A military vessel, which had 1-2 sub-borders on board with several paratroopers, approached the enemy coast. Here the vehicles descended into the water, under their own power they reached the areas with a soft pound and bit into it. Thus, it was possible to land a landing several tens of meters from the sea, outside the coastal fortified strip. Quite often, such underground boats were lost along with their landing party. Therefore, after a series of setbacks, Herbert von Strasse was accused of espionage in favor of Estonia and was shot. The use of the underground facility Midgard -Schiange ("Serpent of Midgard") would be of much greater military interest. Its development began in 1939. The "Serpent of Midgard" was supposed to move on the ground, underground and under water at a depth of 100 meters. It consisted of several dozen cells-compartments connected together. Each such compartment was 6 meters long, 6.8 meters wide and 3.5 meters high. Depending on the task at hand, the length of such a kind of underground "train" ranged from 399 to 524 meters. In front of the hull was a large drill head, the same as those used in the mining industry for underground work. It housed four drills with a diameter of 1.5 meters. The "Serpent of Midgard" weighed 60 thousand tons, and its "crew consisted of 30 people. The "Serpent of Midgard" weighed 60 thousand tons, and its "crew consisted of 30 people. The "Serpent of Midgard" weighed 60 thousand tons, and its "crew consisted of 30 people.
The armament of the underground vessel was solid: 1000 mines with 250 kg of explosive in each, 100 small charges of 10 kg of explosives. Just in case, 12 coaxial machine guns were installed on it.
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The power equipment of the vessel included 4 diesel electric generators that generated electric current for 14 electric motors with a total capacity of 19 800 hp. from. The eye allowed the "Midgard Serpent" to move under water at a speed of 30 km / h, pass rocky pounds at a speed of 2 km / h, and soft ground -10 km / h. There are suggestions that at the end of World War II the Germans managed to test their "Midgard Serpent". But he certainly did not take part in hostilities. Recently, in the Russian media, reports began to appear about attempts to develop an underground vessel in the USSR. These developments began in the 1930s. True, at first it was planned to use this ship for peaceful purposes. Inventor A. Trebelev, designers A. Baskin and A. Kirillov created a subway project. This subway was supposed to reach the oil-bearing strata and install an oil pipeline there. The first tests took place in the Urals, in the mines under the Grace Mountain. But the design of the device, the prototype of which was the mole, turned out to be unreliable. Further work on its improvement was deemed untimely, and their initiator A. Trebelev was repressed.
Just before the outbreak of World War II, in January 1940, at a joint meeting of the People's Commissars of Internal Affairs and Armaments, it was decided to create a group of engineers who would start developing the "underground cruiser". They were tasked with restoring the development of engineer Trebelev, repressed in 1937. But the outbreak of the war interrupted this work.
They returned to the idea of creating an underground ship after the defeat of Nazi Germany, when V. von Wern's drawings fell into the hands of Soviet specialists. At the Lubyanka, it was discovered that an outstanding Russian self-taught engineer Rudolf Trebeletsky, who graduated from an external gymnasium and Moscow University, took part in the German project. He significantly improved the invention of W. von Wern. The engineer called the boat "Subterin" and told his classmate, the famous science fiction writer Grigory Adamov, about his ideas. The latter used the ideas of Trebeletsky in his novels The Mystery of Two Oceans "and" Conquerors of the Subsoil. "In the mid-30s, during the massive repressions, Trebeletsky was shot.
But real work on the creation of the Soviet subway began only in the early 60s of the last century, when major Soviet scientists introduced a number of fundamentally new proposals and improvements to the project for its creation. Leningrad professor GI Babat suggested using microwave radiation to supply the subway with energy. Academician AD Sakharov spoke about the possible creation of "underground torpedoes". As a result, taking into account the trophy drawings, domestic developments by A. Trebelev and R. Trebeletsky, as well as the proposals made by scientists, several versions of subways were created.
Only in 1962 in Ukraine, in the town of Gromovka, a strategic plant for the mass production of underground boats "Battle Mole" was built. The boat was powered by an onboard nuclear reactor. The Mole had a titanium case with a diameter of 3.8 meters and a length of 35 meters. The crew is sixteen people and the speed under the ground is up to 7 km / h. The purpose of the new weapon was formulated as "search and destruction of enemy missile silos and bunkers."
Nuclear underground boats were tested in the Urals, in the Rostov region and in the Moscow region of Nakhabino. During the last tests in the Urals, the "Battle Mole" covered more than 15 kilometers in solid ground, destroyed a concrete bunker and for some reason exploded, and the explosion was recorded by American seismographs. After the Ural disaster, further tests of the "Battle Mole" were terminated. And all materials on the project are classified. Only in 1976, at the initiative of the head of the Main Directorate of State Secret Antonov, reports began to appear in the press about the "Battle Mole", the remains of which rusted in the open air until the 90s.
Later in other countries, the Americans attempted to create underground boats. They are rumored to have taken advantage of the development of the underground subground, made in Nazi Germany by a group of German engineers led by Herbert von Strasse. In 1968, G. von Strasse's drawings unexpectedly "surfaced" in Paris. They were discovered in the archives by the French historian François Landuzier. But eight days later, he went missing, crossing the English Channel on the ferry "Santa Dravent". The ferry suddenly exploded and sank. The British tabloid press blamed the CIA for the sinking, but the story was quickly hushed up.
The positive results in US underground navigation were made possible by the development of nuclear power in the country. According to fragmentary information leaked to the press, it became known that several rather successful samples of corkscrew subgroundines had been built and that two successful attempts of manned underground movement and four unsuccessful ones were carried out. According to some researchers, the sediment of certain coastal areas and the occurrence of earthquakes in completely unexpected places testify to the secretive underground navigation.
M. Taranov. “Interesting newspaper. Mysteries of Civilization №21 2008