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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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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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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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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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Phanatic posted:The chlorine gas problem could have been avoided with better ventilation systems, but as it was a submarine, Schlitt could not hit the fan. Or, y'know, by putting the bog somewhere in the 2/3 or the boat that didn't drain into the battery compartment. But, as I mentioned in my writeup of the incident for the "PYF dangerous chemicals" thread (was going to crosspost here but you already posted it),: Delivery McGee posted:But this is ~*Fine Teutonic Engineering*~ we're talking about, the same people who design cars with cooling systems that have to be replaced every 50k miles and alternators under the intake manifold. Of course the most logical place for the shitter on a diesel-electric boat is right above the battery compartment. To even suggest one of the fine Übermenschen of the Kriegsmarine would ever gently caress it up is akin to treason! Also, it had great comedic timing, hitting the "he died less than a month from retirement" cliche -- U-1206 went down 24 days before V-E Day.
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Jul 29, 2016 02:38
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Yvonmukluk posted:I think the USS William D. Porter is perhaps the only example of a comedic maritime disaster. Nah, there was that time that a submarine went down permanently because somebody hosed up flushing the toilet, which was posted about near the top of page 1.
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Nov 3, 2016 23:32
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