Submarines & Naval History Trivia

Naval warfare spent centuries changing slowly, wooden hulls, sails, and cannon fire, before compressing a few generations of change into little more than a century: ironclads, torpedoes, submarines, and finally nuclear power. This quiz surfaces some of the biggest leaps.

From Wooden Hulls to Nuclear Power

The 1862 Battle of Hampton Roads, fought between the ironclads USS Monitor and CSS Virginia, made wooden warships obsolete almost overnight. Submarines took longer to mature. The Continental Army's hand-cranked Turtle managed only an attempted attack in 1776, but by 1954 the USS Nautilus was cruising under the polar ice cap on nuclear power, needing no air and barely any refueling for years at a stretch.

• The H.L. Hunley became the first submarine to sink an enemy warship, during the Civil War.
• A submarine's periscope let crews see the surface without exposing the hull.
• "Crush depth" describes the point at which water pressure would collapse a submarine's hull.

Turning Points at Sea

Some naval moments changed the course of entire wars. The sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat in 1915 helped turn American opinion toward World War I, while the Battle of Midway in 1942 broke Japan's naval dominance in the Pacific in a matter of minutes, after American dive bombers caught its carriers mid-refueling.