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I've been fascinated by shipwrecks and disasters (and rescues!) for ages and I thought this could be a good place to discuss wrecks, disasters (historical, contemporary and ongoing), treasure/relic hunting, legal issues of dominion and ownership and so on. Marine disasters (and marine safety regulation) and rescues can also be covered. Diving also comes into this but detailed diving discussion probably needs to go in a different thread. We can post news articles, wikipedia links, longform articles, documentary links, book recommendations and anything else you want. I don't have any specialist knowledge but there will be posters who will be able to answer questions. This OP will be a data resource for links, to be updated regularly. (See the thread for polar exploration here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3655083&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1 ) Here are a few to get us started (this will be updated, revised and expanded if you can suggest better documentaries and additional sources): The Kursk disaster (2000)  On 12 August 2000 two explosions caused the partial sinking of nuclear-powered Russian submarine Kursk during operations in the Barents Sea. The submarine sank to the bottom with some of the crew still alive. As Russian authorities dallied, covered their backs and outright lied, the submariners struggled for survival. By the time newly-appointed premier Putin asked for foreign assistance it was too late. Cause: Explosion due to poor maintenance of torpedoes. Death toll: 118 (all) Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kursk_submarine_disaster Youtube documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MByjnus8uCg US Muenchen (1978) On 13 December 1978 a brand new German supertanker sent a distress signal from the North Atlantic. By the time rescuers arrived the ship had sunk with all hands. A recovered lifeboat (empty) suggested a massive force struck the vessel. Cause: Unknown, speculated rogue wave. Death toll: 28 (all) Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_M%C3%BCnchen BBC documentary on rogue waves (in six parts), which discuss the US Muenchen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YVZn46KgTs Wikipedia article on rogue waves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave MS Estonia (1994) (c/o Gibfender) On 28 September 1994 a nine-level car ferry was crossing the Baltic Sea in a storm when its bow door catastrophically failed causing the ship to flodd, capsize and sink in less than 50 minutes. The high death toll was due to poor safety procedures, faulty safety equipment, inclement conditions (storm and cold) and delayed rescue. Cause: catastrophic technical failure. Death toll: 852 (138 rescued, 1 died in hospital) Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Estonia Longform: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea-story/302940/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFDGL_ehpkI Black Sea wrecks/archaeology  Did you know that because of the unique oceanographic conditions of the Black Sea, no bacterial decay occurs? This means that wrecks lost in ancient times are perfectly preserved. Bob Ballard explores the seabed and finds an ancient wreck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIun8FdqCE4 Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Black_Sea_shipwrecks Shipwreck hunting in the Great Lakes (c/o Flaggy): https://www.buzzfeed.com/katieheane...NzXj#.nnvYMXGvy Longforms by William Langewiesche c/o N00ba the Hutt The Shipbreakers (2000) - about the industry of tearing down old ships in Alang, India. http://www.wesjones.com/shipbreakers.htm Anarchy at Sea (2003) - about the utter chaos that is attempting to keep track of what goes on in international waters, covering shoddy corporate practices, terrorism, and piracy. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/09/anarchy-at-sea/376873/ The Pirate Latitudes (2009) - about the piracy off Somalia, using the capture of a French cruise ship as its focus. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/04/somali-pirates200904 Salvage Beast (2014) - about maritime salvage and the joys of the Lloyd's of London Open Form ("no cure, no pay"). http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2014/12/nick-sloane-costa-concordia-salvage Also  me hearties!
Josef K. Sourdust fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Nov 3, 2016 |
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Jun 14, 2016 18:29
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This is extremely my jam. Recently I have been reading the books by John Chatterton. If you have even a passing interest in underwater wrecks read his books. He is the fellow that discovered the German submarine off the coast of New Jersey. https://www.amazon.com/Pirate-Hunte...john+chatterton - His book about finding a pirate ship. https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Divers-Adventure-Americans-Everything/dp/0375760989/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=6G78QE4ESG9QSZ5FPAA4 - His book about the German Sub He works alot with Richie Kohler who dove the Andrea Doria and the Britannica. I can do a big old effort post if needed. I have been reading about shipwrecks since I was a kid. Here we go: A great longform article on the "righting" of the Costa Concordia recently. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2014/12/nick-sloane-costa-concordia-salvage Fantastic longform article on the Cougar Ace and the team that saved it. http://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-seacowboys/ A really fascinating look at the Andrea Doria and how difficult and deadly it is to dive on the wreck. https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Descent...ds=andrea+doria Speaking of the Andrea Doria a recent expedition used a new type of sonar to scan the wreck. They found that it was deteriorating so bad that the bow is breaking in half. https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2016/06/13/1956-shipwreck-andrea-doria-more-deteriorated-than-expected.html Ok I promise last one (I told you this was my jam) here is another long form article on the shipwrecks of the Great Lakes and the treasures they hold. https://www.buzzfeed.com/katieheaney/sea-hunt-finding-sunken-treasure-with-the-great-lakes-legend?utm_term=.cyXW6NzXj#.nnvYMXGvy Flaggy fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Jun 14, 2016 |
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Jun 14, 2016 19:26
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Good thread idea. USS Squalus was a WWII-era submarine, launched in September of 1938. She was overhauled in the yard a year later, and started doing a series of test dives off of New Hampshire. Subs of that era ran on diesel engines on the surface, with the engines fed via the main induction pipe, which leads to the outside of the hull. When diving, the main induction valve closes that pipe, so water doesn't flood into the engine rooms and kill everybody. There are a bunch of other valves as well, but that's a really big one. Anyway, there's a board of lights in the control room, called the Christmas Tree because it has a light for each valve: if the light's green, it's closed and it's safe to dive. If it's red, valve's open. So on the 19th test dive, May 23 1939, they look and check that the christmas tree is all green, and it is, and they dive. 50 feet down and the forward and aft engine rooms are both flooding, because the main induction valve failed. They perform an emergency blow of the ballast tanks, but the engine spaces are the biggest internal spaces in the ship, there's just too much water being taken on board, and at this point the aft torpedo room and the living spaces have also flooded and 26 men have already drowned. The ship settles to the bottom, 240 feet down, with 33 crew still alive. Guy leading the rescue mission is named Swede Momsen, he knows a thing or two about diving and designed the underwater escape devices that all subs carry, it's called the Momsen lung. He also had a big part in the design of the diving bell the Navy uses for the rescue. The USS Falcon makes it to the site on the morning of May 24, and over the next 13 hours all 33 survivors are rescued. The boat was eventually raised and rechristened as the USS Sailfish, served 12 patrols during the war, and sold for scrap in 1948.
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Jun 14, 2016 19:29
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Awesome long-form article on the sinking of the MS Estonia, absolutely pro-read. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea-story/302940/ Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Estonia Youtube doc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFDGL_ehpkI
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Jun 14, 2016 20:13
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Can't link images atm, but https://gcaptain.com/mol-comfort-incident-photos/ has the story of the 2013 sinking of the MOL Comfort, a huge container ship which broke in half. The stern sank, then they towed the bow section a couple of hundred miles before it caught fire and sank. Lots of great photos there.
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Jun 14, 2016 22:06
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A little cliche but here's a 'real time' video of the Titanic sinking, or as close as modern reconstructions can probably get. I'd always thought it was a relatively quick process, had no idea how drawn out it really was. "There are approximately 1500 hundred people still on board." at the 2:39:07 mark, jesus.
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Jun 14, 2016 23:30
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Some great posts already. Thanks, guys.  Can anyone identify this story? It is driving me crazy not knowing exactly what/when/where this was. A large ship is travelling through foggy weather. It is hit by another ship, which slices it in two. Both parts are afloat. Most of the survivors in the split ship are on the bow section. The stern section drifts away. Sometime later they see a shape coming through the fog. They anticipate rescue only to see - with horror - it is the stern section still powered by its engines which are driving it in a giant circle. The stern section hits and holes the bow section, which then sinks. There were at least some survivors. I am convinced that this a Great Lakes disaster, but which one? Can anyone help?
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Jun 14, 2016 23:39
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Phanatic posted:USS Squalus was a WWII-era submarine, launched in September of 1938. She was overhauled in the yard a year later, and started doing a series of test dives off of New Hampshire. Subs of that era ran on diesel engines on the surface, with the engines fed via the main induction pipe, which leads to the outside of the hull. When diving, the main induction valve closes that pipe, so water doesn't flood into the engine rooms and kill everybody. I had a whole loving novella typed up about S-5, which had a similar problem, and then my computer randomly rebooted and it's all gone (I was asking friends to copyedit it, another fifteen seconds and it'd've been safe on Pastebin or Google Docs.  Can I reserve the story of USS S-5 until I feel like writing it all again? I had a pretty good dramatization of it ALL BUT FINISHED (also if you don't know of it, don't look it up, it was basically same as Squalus 20 years earlier.)
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Jun 15, 2016 00:02
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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Delivery McGee posted:I had a whole loving novella typed up about S-5, which had a similar problem, and then my computer randomly rebooted and it's all gone (I was asking friends to copyedit it, another fifteen seconds and it'd've been safe on Pastebin or Google Docs. I won't post about it if nobody else does! The one that freaks me out is the HMS Thetis. Was on initial sea trials in 1939, and they were trying to dive the boat, but it was too buoyant to submerge. One of the things they could do to take on more weight was flood the torpedo tubes. Then, to verify that the tubes had flooded, they opened these little test-port valves that led to the tubes to see if they were already filled or not. No water came out of the test ports, but that's because they'd been covered over by paint. That and some confusing labeling led to the torpedomen opening the inner door to one of the tubes, while the outer door was already open. It sunk bow-first in 150' of water. Since the boat was 275' long, that looked like this:  The stern was still above the water. The boat had been overcrowded with test personnel, with a population well above the standard crew, and they didn't manage to evacuate the crew before they'd all died of CO2 intoxication. Only four guys got out of the escape trunk before a fifth guy panicked and drowned in the trunk, blocking it from further use. 99 guys died. Apparently there was a suggestion to quickly cut an air hole in the stern, but the admirality vetoed it because they didn't want to damage the hull integrity. Later, the Royal Navy raised her, and recommissioned her as the HMS Thunderbolt. She was sunk with all hands by a depth charge attack by an Italian destroyer in 1943. Probably the only ship in history to have to go down with all hands twice. But that's still probably not as unfortunate as U-1206, a German U-boat commanded by Captain Karl-Adolf Schlitt. The boat was equipped with a new and complicated toilet that you could flush at depth, and Schlitt used it and couldn't get it to flush. We've all been there, and Schlitt summoned an engineer to help, who opened the wrong valve at the wrong time, and started the ship flooding. It wasn't catastrophic flooding by itself, but the water flooded the batteries, releasing chlorine gas, which forced them to surface so they wouldn't die from the toxic fumes. On the surface, they were spotted and attacked, so they had to abandon and scuttle ship. The chlorine gas problem could have been avoided with better ventilation systems, but as it was a submarine, Schlitt could not hit the fan.
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Jun 15, 2016 00:33
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Phanatic posted:Probably the only ship in history to have to go down with all hands twice. Spoilers, innit? Also no, that's not a record, CSS Hunley killed her entire crew THREE times over. You thought the Nazi u-boats with their 75% loss rate were bad? The OG submarine had a loss rate of 300%. Not three-quarters, not three dead, the fuckin' thing sank with all hands lost THREE GODDAMN TIMES and was raise and re-crewed TWICE. Two in trials, the last when shaken asunder by the boom of her own torpedo/bomb lance, which did sink a Yankee warship, so in terms of Rebels vs. Yanks killed, it was successful. Ish. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Jun 15, 2016 |
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Jun 15, 2016 00:47
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Delivery McGee posted:Spoilers, innit? Oh I've been assigned to this boat that's already sank twice? AWOL time, bitches!
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Jun 15, 2016 01:42
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Sucker was powered by an eight-man hand-crank, so I'm guessing it was all-volunteer.
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Jun 15, 2016 01:50
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The Windoc: a rare case of a bridge hitting a ship instead of the other way around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=?D2Wn2RDzsvg The bridge toppled the funnel, leading to a diesel tank to fall on an auxiliary boiler (or vice versa); ship was a total loss, company went bankrupt in part because of it.
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Jun 15, 2016 02:09
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Josef K. Sourdust posted:A large ship is travelling through foggy weather. It is hit by another ship, which slices it in two. Both parts are afloat. Most of the survivors in the split ship are on the bow section. The stern section drifts away. Sometime later they see a shape coming through the fog. They anticipate rescue only to see - with horror - it is the stern section still powered by its engines which are driving it in a giant circle. The stern section hits and holes the bow section, which then sinks. There were at least some survivors. I am convinced that this a Great Lakes disaster, but which one? Can anyone help? Found it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Daniel_J._Morrell Turns out I was half right. On 29 November 1966 while crossing Lake Huron the SS Daniel J Morrell broke apart during a storm. The aft section did indeed circle round and strike the bow section. 28 crew died and there was 1 survivor.
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Jun 15, 2016 09:53
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Josef K. Sourdust posted:MS Estonia (1994) (c/o Gibfender)
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Jun 15, 2016 10:40
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Lampsacus posted:I was going to add this one. That long form is incredible - I was just recommending it to a co worker today! Agreed. Every time the link is posted somewhere, I click it and then go, "Oh yea I've read this one before" and then I end up rereading the whole thing because it's loving excellent. That long form was also the one that led me to a survive <catastrophic events> long form and documentary binge. The scary thing for me was/is the way dumb luck, coincidence, and snap decisions (some which even post-event will sound insanely counter-intuitive) is the thing that puts you in the survivor category.
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Jun 15, 2016 13:19
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The Byford Dolphin decompression accident comes up in these type of discussions a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byford_Dolphin#Diving_bell_accident due to the graphic descriptions of what happens to a human body when you got from 9 atmospheres of pressure to 1 in a split second:"Subsequent investigation by forensic pathologists determined Hellevik, being exposed to the highest pressure gradient and in the process of moving to secure the inner door, was forced through the 60 centimetres (24 in) in diameter opening created by the jammed interior trunk door by escaping air and violently dismembered, including bisection of the thoracoabdominal cavity which further resulted in expulsion of all internal organs of the chest and abdomen except the trachea and a section of small intestine and of the thoracic spine and projecting them some distance, one section later being found 10 metres (30 ft) vertically above the exterior pressure door.[5]"
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Jun 15, 2016 13:37
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MikeCrotch posted:The Byford Dolphin decompression accident comes up in these type of discussions a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byford_Dolphin#Diving_bell_accident Don't gently caress with pressure differentials. 
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Jun 15, 2016 16:18
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https://news.vice.com/article/the-soviet-union-dumped-a-bunch-of-nuclear-submarines-reactors-and-containers-into-the-oceanquote:Two years ago, the Russian government provided a tally: two submarines, 14 reactors — five of which contain spent nuclear fuel — 19 other vessels sunk with radioactive waste on board, and about 17,000 containers holding radioactive waste. The last known dumping occurred in 1993. http://bellona.org/news/nuclear-iss...-in-arctic-seas quote:Kudrik said that one of the most critical pieces of information missing from the report released to the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority was the presence of the K-27 nuclear submarine, which was scuttled in 50 meters of water with its two reactors filled with spent nuclear fuel in in Stepovogo Bay in the Kara Sea in 1981.
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Jun 15, 2016 18:49
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Here is another great article about the recent scan of the Andrea Doria. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/shipwreck-astronaut-submersible-andrea-dorea-space-sea-exploration-submersible-spacewalk/ They are hoping to better understand the effects of the ocean on shipwrecks and how it affects marine life.
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Jun 15, 2016 19:03
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The wreck of the S-5 On August 30th, 1920, the shiny new USS S-5 left Boston Navy Yard and headed southwest (on average. I know there’s a bit of a Cape Cod in the way of the direct trip) toward Delaware for her shakedown run. The submarine, hull number SS-110, named, such as it was, by virtue of being the fifth S-class boat (this apparently being a time in history when submarines didn’t quite rate proper names but were seen as more than just a PT boat with a party trick, apparently) had been ordered a month before the US officially entered the Great War, and commissioned almost exactly three years later, S-5 and her fifty sister ships were decidedly interwar boats -- the surviving ones served in the next World War (many in the Royal Navy), but by then the USN had the much larger, faster, longer-ranged, &c. fleet boats (which had actual names) to take all the glory and newspaper headlines. The S-boats were comparable to the Kriegmarine’s Type VII in weaponry -- four tubes fore and one aft -- though with a good bit more displacement, despite being of similar 230-foot-ish length. S-5 was one of ten of the class fitted with MAN diesels, thus having a more direct connection with Donitz’s raiders. Here’s S-44, as a representative of the class (they all looked p much the same on the outside/topside):  Nice-lookin’ boat. On September 1st, S-5 had reached her operational area 55 nautical miles (105km/60 regular miles) off Cape May. The order was given to submerge the boat. Nautical aside: submarines are ALWAYS called “boat”, never “ship”. Because even the most modern SSBN crewmen driving what amounts to a capital ship (the Boomers use the battleship naming scheme, and modern attack boats are named after cities like heavy cruisers were) take pride in their vessel being a PT Boat putting on airs, I guess. Also, as mentioned about, the generation previous to the S-class and kin were really just PT boats that could feign death, the S-class were the first that could do any kind of real operations submerged, and then only briefly -- it wasn’t until the invention of the schnorkel in the mid-1940s (and, to a greater degree, the nuclear reactor in the late ’50s) that they were able to operate mostly in the submerged mode. And so S-5 is rigged for dive, and that brings us to the quote that made me want to write this massive wall of text: Phanatic posted:Subs of that era ran on diesel engines on the surface, with the engines fed via the main induction pipe, which leads to the outside of the hull. When diving, the main induction valve closes that pipe, so water doesn't flood into the engine rooms and kill everybody. To be more specific, the Chief of the Boat pulled a lever to close the Main Valve. Nautical aside: Chief of the Boat, abbrev. COB: The senior enlisted man on board, basically the equivalent of an Army Company SGM because boats; it’s that old Master and Commander thing -- the captain of a submarine, in those days, was usually a Lieutenant Commander (=Army CPT) rather than an actual Navy Captain (=Army Colonel), and their enlisted advisor is similarly stepped down: a submarine COB is a Gunner’s mate (E-7 or 8 -- Soldiers call him “Top”), the equivalent guy on a battleship or carrier is a Master Chief (E-10, basically a demigod). Submariners being cowboys, they trained to squeeze the most life as possible out of the batteries, and look cool doing it. This meant driving the boat into the water on diesel power, and then kill the engines and close the main valve just as the intake hits the waterline. Obviously closing the valve before the diesels stop kicking over is bad; at worst it burns all the oxygen in the boat, at best it pops everybody’s ears like a mofo. Ideally, you get up some momentum, flood the tanks, cut fuel to the diesels so that they stop just as the intake valve gets splashed and smoothly transition to electric drive just as the main intake closes. Y’see, submarines don’t flood/purge the ballast tanks to sink/float. They flood the tanks to get to neutral buoyancy, and then “fly” through the water with the bow and stern planes acting like the elevators and ailerons on an airplane. Penguins fly the same way. Gunner’s Mate Percy Fox got distracted, and missed his cue to close the main valve, causing the second-worst problem a submarine can have: water in the people tube. The worst problem a submarine can have, BTW, is fire -- steals your air, and to put it out you have to let water in the people tube. So, realizing what he’s done, Percy “grabbed the valve lever and jerked hard, causing the valve to jam open.” I’m assuming that’s scholarly speak for “he panicked and pulled so had the lever broke off in a cartoonish way.” The submariners, damage-control specialists to a man, quickly shut off the valves for everything the Main Induction feeds, except they had problems in and had to abandon the forward torpedo room. Also they’ve taken on an additional 80 tons of water in the motor room bilge, because the motor room is at the extreme aft end of the boat, so the guys running out from the central control room got to it last. S-5 does really well at half the job of a submarine, and settles gently onto the bottom on an even keel with a hundred and eighty feet of water overhead. Any vessel can sink; the point of a submarine is to sink and then refloat itself. S-5 has mastered the first part, but the second part is kind of a long shot.  They try to pump the water out of the motor room,which would surface the boat and let then limp back to the nearest port with a distinctly nose-down attitude; but a gasket blows and can’t be repaired. Now the boat is stuck on the bottom, unless somebody comes up with a plan so cunning he could put a tail on it and call it a weasel. The floor is open for suggestions. One seaman suggests blowing the aft ballast and fuel. It’ll make at least some of the boat float. Nautical aside: Back then before the EPA was a thing, they used the fuel tanks as supplemental ballast. As they used up the fuel, they’d lt water in (the fuel pickup was on a float) to keep the weight right. Completely blowing the fuel tanks full of air would make the stern end light as a cork. One small problem: lifting the stern would spill the water out of the motor room into the battery room, and batteries + seawater = chlorine gas. Remember that childhood science experiment demonstrating electrolysis? It does the same thing to the salts dissolved in the water. But it was the only alternative to certain death, so they pumped compressed air into every space that had piping for it in the aft end of the boat. The stern rocketed upward, one guy almost drowned in the battery room but was fished out and the door closed before the poison gas got into the refuge. By tapping on the hull, the crew ascertained that the aft 17 feet of the pressure hull was above water, the 231-foot boat standing on its nose in 180’ of water. They set about chiseling a hole through the hull with what meager tools they had, and 36 hours after S-5 went down, had a 3-inch hole, enough to get a breath of fresh air, in turns. The submarine was basically standing on its nose, the rear end end full of air and the pointy end full of water. A passing wooden steamship, SS Alanthus, outbound to Haiti, saw what looked like a buoy way farther offshore than a buoy should be, and went to investigate. Upon realizing it was a stricken boat, Alanthus’s captain got on the megaphone and hailed the not-buoy in the standard manner of one saying “‘sup?” to an unrecognized vessel:: “What ship?" LTCdr Chuck M. “Savvy” Cooke, Jr., master and commander of S-5, replied: "S-5." "What nationality?" "American." "Where bound?" "Hell, by compass." Yeah, Admiral Cooke (he retired in the ‘70s with four stars on his shoulders) certainly earned his nickname with the British-style understatement there. Alanthus didn't have a Marconi set, but managed to hail the radio-equipped General G. W. Goethals as the latter passed within blinkenlighten range, and Goethals passed the word on to the Navy via wireless and set to making a bigger hole in the stricken sub’s hull, while Alanthus pumped in fresh air and drinking water. At 3am on September 3rd, Cap’n Cooke was the last man to wriggle off the stricken boat, he and all his underlings survived. At dawn, the battleship USS Ohio tied a towline to the stern of the sub, and attempted to drag ‘er homeward. Alas, the rope snapped and the boat sank for a second and final time 15 miles off New Jersey. The immediate salvage effort failed, as did the second attempt the next year. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Jun 17, 2016 |
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Jun 16, 2016 01:34
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Ever heard this song? Ask your parents, kids! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Edmund_Fitzgerald
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Jun 17, 2016 04:21
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ElwoodCuse posted:Ever heard this song? Ask your parents, kids! Hell of a beer too.
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Jun 17, 2016 08:43
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ElwoodCuse posted:Ever heard this song? Ask your parents, kids! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgI8bta-7aw Speaking of big ships meeting bad ends that had songs written about them, I'm working up another effortpost on Bismarck.
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Jun 17, 2016 21:00
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The sinking of the Bismarck In the wee hours of the morning of 19 May 1941, the pride of Hitler’s navy was trying to break out into the North Atlantic to raid convoys. In Hitler’s infinite wisdom, the biggest, best capital ship in the world was sent to do a u-boat’s job. Thing was, u-boats were successful at the time because you didn’t see them coming, as opposed to a 46,000-ton battleship. To be fair, Bismarck was pretty much the first fast battleship, able to do 30 knots, engage the enemy on her own terms, shoot over the horizon, and chase down prey and outrun anybody bringing a fair fight. Trouble was, there were these new things called airplanes that changed naval warfare entirely. There were big-gun engagements later in the war, notably at Leyte Gulf, but Bismark’s sinking was the death knell of the battleship. After a week-long cat-and-mouse game with pretty much all the Royal Navy’s heavies. including Bismarck killing the battlecruiser Hood with a single lucky hit, she escaped into the North Atlantic. But Prinz Eugen, the heavy cruiser escorting Bismarck, was forced to break off to refuel, and Bismarck, heavily bleeding fuel and with her top speed reduced to that of the British battleships, continued on alone. At her current speed, Bismarck could still stay ahead of the Brits and make it to the protection of the u-boats and Luftwaffe operating out of Brest, France, within a day. An American PBY Catalina spotted the wounded giant making its dash for safety on the evening of 26 May, and a squadron of Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers were sent from the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal. The Swordfish was obsolete when it first flew five years before, basically WWI tech. But some of them got through Bismarck’s AA (which included firing the main guns into the water, trying to knock the low-flying torpedo bombers down with the splash), and each one carried a torpedo, and one of those torpedoes went right up Bismarck’s aft end, jamming the rudders. They were able to fix the starboard one, but the portside rudder was stuck at an angle. The mighty German ship was, in modern strategic terms, “mobility killed” – like a tank that’s thrown a track, she could only go in circles. At 9:40pm on May 26, Admiral Lütjens, the boss of the expedition, radioed headquarters: "Ship unmanoeuvrable. We will fight to the last shell. Long live the Führer." An hour later, the British fleet came within range, and Bismarck had a skirmish with the destroyers escorting the British heavies, with no hits on either side, though Bismarck did bracket one destroyer, and the destroyers fired a fuckton of torpedoes. At dawn on the 27th, the British fleet closed in on the biggest pirate ship the RN had ever fought. After Hood had gone down with only three of the 1,418 crewman surviving, the RN was out for blood. King George V and Rodney, proper battleships, closed in and began to tear the German ship apart. Rodney closed to point-blank range and did her best to saw off Bismarck’s upper works in 16-inch increments; King George V stayed at long range to drop plunging fire through the lightly-armored decks. After a little over an hour and a half of brutal pounding from heavy guns, lighter shells from cruisers, and some torpedoes because why the gently caress not, Bismarck’s crew hastened the end and blew her bottom out. Wikipedia says it was to prevent the ship being captured, but given the slap in the face of Hood’s sudden demise, I doubt the Brits intended to capture what was left of the ship, considering that they kept slamming every shell available into Bismark above the waterline for over an hour after the German guns had been silenced – the fire control facilities and gun crews were shot away in the first 30 minutes of the battle – to the point that the British ships’ captains were starting to worry about running out of ammo. Go in for the kill after crippling the enemy ship, that’s fair play, they could jerry-rig something and get back to port for repairs. But what the British battleships were doing was systematic murder to avenge Hood. Rodney, especially, was intentionally aiming high to kill German sailors and avoid sinking the ship. The “mighty German battleship what’s makin’ such a fuss” slipped beneath the waves with colors flying (despite having stopped making a fuss an hour earlier) at 10:39AM, 27 May 1941. 110 survivors were picked up by the British fleet, who quickly departed the scene, leaving hundreds of Germans in the water, because of a report of u-boats in the area. Said submarine rescued five more. 2,200 died with the ship. Bismarck didn’t quite go down swinging, but didn’t tap out. Bit of a cheaty move, isn’t it, scuttling the ship without striking the colors? It’s one thing to nail the flag to the mast and go down to enemy fire despite having no guns left with which to reply, and another to surrender, but on the other hand, Bismarck’s mission was basically piracy, so I guess the few survivors are allowed the third option of going into the water instead of “fighting” honorably to the end or being cowards and surrendering. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Jun 17, 2016 |
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Jun 17, 2016 21:56
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Hey now, pirates lived by a code.
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Jun 18, 2016 02:03
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What is piracy in the context of total war?
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Jun 18, 2016 11:34
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Germany was not under total war at the time.  This is not to say that “that was unsportsmanlike  ”, just that “the Nazis were delusional and rubbish at running an economy”.
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Jun 18, 2016 12:19
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Can someone help me find a ship story I read about years ago? The details are slightly fussy, but here goes: A ship gets in trouble. starts to sink, but somehow stays afloat but as a ridiculously steep angle, something like 45 degrees. The ship is evacuated, but the captain, or at least one of the officers refuse to leave. Something about the cargo being too valuable. So he stays on his slanted ship for something like three weeks. The story had a happy ending, but a lot of details were classified. Officially the valuable cargo was nothing but pig iron. The captain may have been Danish? He had a name ending with -sen. Ring any bells for anyone?
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Jun 19, 2016 11:58
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You’re thinking of Captain Henrik Kurt Carlsen, of Flying Enterprise, hit by a storm Christmas Day, 1951.
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Jun 19, 2016 12:27
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Platystemon posted:You’re thinking of Captain Henrik Kurt Carlsen, of Flying Enterprise, hit by a storm Christmas Day, 1951. Yes, that's it, thank you!
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Jun 19, 2016 12:49
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Some great posts! Anyone fancy tackling the rather grim Wilhelm Gustloff story? Hard to make that one entertaining though....
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Jun 19, 2016 18:35
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I'll do a proper write up of the Costa Concordia next time I'm at a computer that I can access the forum on.
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Jun 19, 2016 21:31
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In early December of 1926 the Ryouei Maru (often called 'Ryo Yei' in contemporary sources), a small fishing boat with a crew of 12 under Captain Toshizou Miki, leaves western Japan to hunt for tuna in a fishing ground around 100 kilometers of the coast of Tokyo. A week later, as they return to port, a crankshaft in the engine breaks and the ship loses all power. The engine proves to be broken beyond repair, and the ship is left drifting eastwards, out into the Pacific. There is no radio on board, no way to tell anyone what has happened. The crew rig their auxiliary sail to try and get home, but the wind is against them and blows them further and further east. Attempts to contact ships seen in the distance prove fruitless. By Christmas, they're 1,600km from Japan. Captain Miki calculates that their supplies, carefully rationed, can last 3 months or more, and the crew decides that the best course left to them is to go with the winds and try to make it to America while hoping to meet encounter a ship that can rescue them along the way. No such ship is seen, and at the beginning of March the food runs out, a long way short of land. The first death, that of the chief engineer, comes on March 9th, with the rest of the crew gradually following. Captain Miki and one crewman, slowly starving, survive until the middle of May. The Ryouei Maru continues to float westward for several more months until it's finally discovered drifting off the entrance to the Straight of Juan de Fuca by the American cargo ship Margaret Dollar in October of 1927. A boat from the Darrar boards the Ryouei Maru and finds the bodies of the crew and the ship's log in which Captain Miki detailed their terrible journey until shortly before his death. Ryouei Maru is towed to Seattle. The crew are cremated and their ashes and personal effects are sent back to Japan, and the ship is broken up. Apart from a detailed Japanese Wikipedia page there's practically nothing on the internet, either in Japanese or English, about this story; some contemporary articles in the archives for the NYT and Post-Intelligencer, a few references in out of print books on Seattle history, someone's labor of love website on the Margaret Dollar, a couple of Japanese blogs debunking an urban legend that grew up around the story in the 1960s. Otherwise, there's nothing - "Ryouei Maru" mostly turns up links to modern-day ships with the same name, or 'The Ship of Mummies', the urban legend-y retelling of the story that sprang up in the 1960s that throws in cannibalism and a made-up ship's log with a bunch of supernatural happenings. When I first read the wiki page I had to look up the 1927 newspaper articles before I was sure it was a real story. It's stayed with me since, mostly because of the captain's letter. Among the personal effects sent home from Seattle was a letter that Captain Miki, around the time of his last log entry, when he knew there was no hope of being rescued, wrote to his family. He tells his wife to make sure that their son goes to school, and gives her the names of people who'll help the family now he's gone. He tells his daughter that he's sorry he won't see her graduate, but he knows she's a good, strong girl, and she has to be the one to help her mother now. The message to his son is one line long and reads: 'Son, I'm your daddy so you have to listen to me. When you grow up, you can't ever be a fisherman. Promise me this, you have to promise me. Do as your mom tells you from now on.'
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Jun 20, 2016 00:15
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Josef K. Sourdust posted:
Oh man, the Kursk. I remember when that happened seeing a news report that it sank and there were no presumed survivors. When I heard that, I got this horrible feeling, like I just knew those men were alive and trapped and nothing could save them. I could not get it off my mind. Then later I saw another news clip about when they got to them and confirmed that some had indeed been trapped alive in there for a time I got chills. Never had that happen before or since with any other news of ship sinkings. I think wrecks are really cool but other than that I'm not a naval buff or follow news about ships in any way. It was weird.
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Jun 20, 2016 17:39
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Let's talk about and stare in amazement at the Hughes Glomar Explorer. A Deep Sea Mining vessel that was actually designed to pick up half a Soviet Submarine off of the ocean floor in the 1970s. Target sub K-129, destroyed by possible missile detonation due to water reacting with the fuel:  Vessel: Hughes Glomar Explorer  Unclassified Technical Specs and Overview of Glomar Explorer systems and operation: http://www.maritime.org/doc/glomarexplorer/index.htm The Glomar Explorer had a massive sliding moon pool that opened into the bottom of the ship via two floating interlocking doors.  The recovery device, known to Lockheed as the 'Capture Vehicle' but known to the crew as Clementine, was a spider looking rig lowered down on interlocking pipes that carried hydraulic fluid down the core to the capture vehicle to power the vehicle and provide actuation and thrust via hydraulic motors:    The Capture Vehicle was built separately from the Glomar Explorer in a covered barge that could be sunk and raised. When the Glomar Explorer was ready, it was piloted over the now-sunken barge, the doors on the barge and the Explorer opened, and the Capture Vehicle lifted into the moon pool. This was done at night to avoid attracting suspicion of the local vacationers. In the end, it was a Successful-Failure. The strengthened steel that Lockheed used for the capture arms was too brittle and failed half way up to the surface. A plan was made to try a second go, but the story was blown open. However, they still managed to recover a portion of the sub, nuclear torpedoes, some crypto, and at least 6 bodies. The bodies were re-buried at sea in a sealed container (radiation) and with the Soviet flag and naval hymn. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Jun 20, 2016 |
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Jun 20, 2016 18:34
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Delivery McGee posted:The sinking of the Bismarck Came for the posts, stayed for the Johnny Horton reference. CommieGIR posted:
The Hughes Mining Barge (the cover story for this operation was that they were doing an R&D program to mine manganese nodules from the seafloor) was later used as the drydock for the Sea Shadow, an experimental stealth ship, and eventually placed up for auction. I don't know what's happened in the meantime; unfortunately since the terms of the auction dictate that the buyer has to scrap everything there's not much fun to be had there. Speaking of boats and radiation: The largest nuclear device the USA ever detonated was a bit of a fuckup. The first hydrogen bomb ever was wayyy too large and heavy to actually be dropped from a plane. The thing weighed over 80 tons, mainly because it had to have a big cryogenic tank filled with liquid deuterium. Rough idea being that you have a conventional plutonium fission bomb outside the tank, and a plutonium cylinder running through the middle of the tank, and when you set it off all that deuterium is compressed between two nuclear explosions (again: rough idea), some of the deuterium absorbs the neutrons flying out of the fission reaction and transmutes to tritium, and then the deuterium and the tritium fuse and make a bigger boom. Even turned into an actual weapon, the hydrogen bomb was still gently caress-off large, weighing 20 tons, only the B-36 could carry it. Because again, you had that cryogenic stage. Castle Bravo was the program to develop a dry-fuel bomb. So-called because instead of a big insulated tank of liquid hydrogen, the fusion fuel was in the form of nice, solid, light, lithium deuteride. It's less dense than table salt (which it's fairly similar to, as an ionic compound). Now, naturally occurring lithium is a mix of two isotopes: lithium-6 (7.5%) and lithium-7 (all the rest). The fuel used in Castle Bravo was enriched in lithium-6, about 40%. Idea was the lithium-6 will absorb a neutron, and them break apart into an alpha particle and a tritium nuclear, the tritium fuses with the deuterium, boom. It was expected that the lithium-7 would also absorb a neutron and turn into lithium-8, which would then decay into two alpha particles, which for the purposes of a bomb is not something you give a poo poo about. But unfortunately, they missed the fact that there's a side-reaction where the lithium decays into an alpha, a neutron, and a tritium. So basically 100% of the fuel was capable of breeding tritium, not just 40% of it. Which meant that there was a lot more fusion than anticipated, a lot more excess neutron activity, and therefore a lot more fissioning of the surrounding U-238 tamper. The bomb was expected to generate a yield of around 5 megatons. Instead, it yielded around *15*. Cut to the Japanese fishing boat the SS Lucky Dragon 5, with 23 crew on board. They're fishing outside the US's declared danger zone for the test. But that danger zone was based on a much lower expected yield, and didn't count on most of the coral atoll being turned into radioactive ash and blasted into the atmosphere. The crew saw the blast and decided hey, let's go the other way, but in the time it took to retrieve their fishing gear they'd been exposed to the fallout which covered the ship like snow for several hours. Cleanup was using their bare hands to pick it up and put it in bags. One crewmember even tasted it. They started feeling sick on the following day, March 2 and turned for home. They got home on the 14th, and the radio operator was the first death, succumbing to acute radiation sickness about 7 months later. Most of the other crew have died since then, most of them dying of liver cancer; it's probable that they were also infected with hepatitis in the course of the blood transfusions used to treat their acute radiation sickness. Hundreds of other fishing boats were outside the declared danger zone, but inside the effective danger zone, and were contaminated to varying degrees. Not to mention many Marshall islanders. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Jun 20, 2016 |
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Jun 20, 2016 19:38
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Pyrotoad posted:A little cliche but here's a 'real time' video of the Titanic sinking, or as close as modern reconstructions can probably get. I'd always thought it was a relatively quick process, had no idea how drawn out it really was. No, the fast one was the Lusitania. From cruising along at a steady clip one lovely May afternoon to fully submerged in 18 minutes.
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Jun 20, 2016 20:53
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Glomar Explorer was laid up in Suisun before being sold to what is now Transocean. It's scrap by now.
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Jun 20, 2016 23:40
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lightpole posted:Glomar Explorer was laid up in Suisun before being sold to what is now Transocean. It's scrap by now. It was a disgusting waste to scrap that ship. Should've been made a museum.
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Jun 20, 2016 23:46
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