Underwater Tunnels for Submarines

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

It’s something we see or hear about in movies and pop culture – a long water-filled underwater tunnel through which a submarine can pass to get to another body of water, or an inland lake, or at least large underground cave. It’s so common in fiction that you might think they exist in real life. But they don;t, as far as I can tell. At least not the way they’re usually portrayed.

I’ve been thinking about it because I’ve been reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as an audio book (it’s the awful Mercier Lewis translation, with its annoying errors, but you take what you get), and just got through the part where Captain Nemo takes the Nautilus through his secret passage between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. That such thing could exist seems unlikely. That it could let a submarine go through seems less likely. That any but the coolest head would attempt passage (and, of course, Nemo is) seems pretty unlikely, too. But there it is.

The Disney film with James Mason doesn’t have this episode, but, as if to make up for it there is a submarine tunnel on their base island of Vulcania, connecting the ocean with the central lagoon. (In the book, Nemo no longer maintains a land base – they burned their workshops when they launched the Nautilus), and we get to see the undersea passage.

Similar underwater submarine tunnels appear in other films based on or influenced by Verne:

The Weapon for Destruction (AKA The Fabulous World of Jules Verne)
Harryhausen’s The Mysterious Island
Journey 2 The Mysterious Island (2012, with Dwayne Johnson)

Raiders of the Lost Ark features that Nazi sub base on an Aegean island, with its entrance barely above the water, which is pretty close to this. I know that there have been many submarine bases either built under cover or blasted out of rock, but I doubt that any have been as extensive as the one in RotLA appears to be.

There’s an underwater cave system large enough for scuba divers to negotiate in the James Bond film Thunderball (and its effective remake, Never say Never Again), but that’s a lot smaller – it only admits divers and small powered vehicles.

There certainly are underwater caves that divers can, at some risk, explore, and some can be pretty extensive. But are there any that eventually lead to sizeable air-filled caves, or which come out in another body of water a considerable distance away?

Any other examples from books, movies, or TV shows?

2

The book does include a volcanic island where they replenish their battery chemicals. Sure seems like a “land base” to me.

3

Not sure if this one counts from The Incredibles ?

4

The Balaklave submarine base operated by the Soviet Union on the Crimean peninsula was a real place, and similar to what the OP is describing.

Naval museum complex Balaklava - Wikipedia

To add the mysterious supervillian feel of the place, the Soviets trained dolphins to attach explosives to eneny ships there.

5

The Supermarionation “Stingray” by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson exited out a tunnel.

6

But they burned their original and base. In any event, it’s got no submarine tunnel.

7

Oh, and in Watchmen (the movie, at least, and I assume the original comic books), Nite-Owl’s vehicle Archimedes (which can both fly and submerge) exits his lair through a submerged tunnel and emerges somewhere out to sea, as a way of keeping his lair hidden.

8

This is a real place. They filmed in an old Nazi sub base in La Rochelle, France. I’ve been there; it’s a museum now. And there’s another one, even bigger, in Bordeaux, which has been converted to a light-show art space with multiple galleries. Pretty cool.

9

Was it The Spy Who Loved Me that had the oil tanker running around kidnapping subs and crew?

10

Well, not exactly another body of water, but locally, we have a cave system that can take you a significant distance along the river:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Ottawa-River-Karst-Gervais-Cave-system-Westmeath-area-southeastern-Ontario-based-on_fig3_304540088

11

In Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace the two Jedis somehow manage to take a submarine through various underwater tunnels to to other side of the planet of Naboo (Boss Nass says they have to go through the Planet Core.)

How Naboo couldhave an underground ocean that big and remain liquid seems to defy the law of physics as we know them.

12

Norway has plans for a 1.7-km tunnel big enough to accommodate a cruise ship, which means it would probably be big enough for a sub:

13

That’s not in the graphic novel. Archimedes exits Nite Owl’s workshop through a tunnel, but it’s not submerged. Nite Owl says it’s “a forgotten section of subway I converted”. The tunnel exits though a derelict warehouse and he uses “fog screens” created by dry ice to mask the ship when it exits.

14

The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs takes place on a
volcanic island where the lake filling interior of the volcano can only be
accessed by an underwater tunnel.

I have always wondered how one would navigate through such a tunnel.
Submarines usually don’t have windows so how do you keep from running
into the sides of the tunnel?

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I think there might be some kind of critter that lives in dark caves. Maybe it’s figured out how to navigate without using its eyes, and if it has, we could just do something like that.

16

I knew I’d forget a few.

Actually, circa WWI a lot of submarines DID have “eyeports” that the steersman could use to see around him. I know because I’m currently writing a book about a submarine launched in 1922 that had them. They consisted of 4" thick fused silica discs that were slightly beveled so water pressure forced them tighter against the mount. Even so, they couldn’t dive below about 200 feet or the things would fail. They needed them because the closest thing they had to SONAR at the time (the Fessenden Oscillator) had miserable range and resolution. They stopped using them at the beginning of WWII when a US sub suffered a depth charge attack from the Japanese Navy that blew out one of the eyeports.

They very hurriedly stuck a steel plate against the hole and used a jack to hold it in place against the water pressure. After that they decided that portholes in a submarine were a bad idea. They had already demonstrated piezoelectric SONAR by that point.

17

It was. Some people called it The Spy Who Lived Twice, because they stole the plot from You Only Live Twice.

I’d considered this – but there’s no underwater tunnel involved. Just an oversized tanker-shaped ship swallowing subs.

18

Had they already removed the screen doors by this time?

19

The cast in the 1974 film takes a German u-boat through the tunnel and into the lake. A more modern sub will have very high frequency sonar, usually used to detect mines but would prove useful in such a passageway.

Pretty sure the Seaview navigated such a thung in the series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

20

As it happens, Norway has a Navy base with a subterranean tunnel and docks: Olavsvern

The base has an inside surface of 25,000 square metres (270,000 sq ft) beneath 274 metres (899 ft) of hard rock…The internal dry dock is capable of accommodating 6 submarines simultaneously…The entrance to the facilities consist of a tunnel that is more than 900 metres (3,000 ft) long.