Winston Churchill must be spinning at about 3500 rpms at this point. HMs submarine forces are tied in third place (hull-wise) with France and Greece.

Image via Navy Graphics:

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday Dec.2, 2015: The Brass Tiger Fish of the Lifeguard Service

Photo via Navsource. Courtesy of John Hummel.

Here we see the Tench-class diesel-electric submarine USS Tigrone (SS-419/SSR-419/AGSS-419), at the Philadelphia Navy Yard sometime circa 1964 as she is preparing for her next role in the fleet after her first two had proved remarkably different.

With the brilliant success of the Gato-class fleet boats in the first part of the war in the Pacific, the Navy soon ordered 84 follow-on Tench-class boats to an improved design starting in 1944. The same 311-feet long overall as the Gatos, the Tenches were slightly heavier and had longer legs, being able to cover 16,000 nautical miles over their predecessor’s paltry 11,000. This meant they could roam further and stay away longer if needed.

While the Gatos were finished in time to bloody the Japanese fleet, few craft worthy of a torpedo were still around when the Tench class began to reach the Pacific. In fact, just 10 of the class were completed during the war and a further 55 canceled just after.

Of the 10 that made it to the fight, one is the hero of our little tale.

Named after a species of tiger shark, USS Tigrone (SS-419) was laid down at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Kittery, Maine just a month before D-Day. Her crew nicknamed her the Tiger Fish and she is the only ship on the Naval List to have carried the moniker.

Commissioned 25 October 1944, she got her first combat patrol underway from Guam on March 21, 1945 with three other U.S. fleet boats in a Yankee wolf pack. Although they spent the better part of two months in Japanese waters, they found few targets and her only brush with combat was to bombard a reef with her rear 5″/25 deck gun (she had a 40mm Bofors single forward).

Her second patrol was more exciting.

On May 25, she took up lifeguard station off coast of Honshu, Japan and by end of the week had a full house, picking up the crews of two B-29s that had ditched as well as three fighter pilots.

“TIGRONE has saved the Air Force and is now returning to Iwo Jima with 28 rescued zoomies,” radioed her skipper, CDR. Hiram Cassedy, USN.

Back on station by June 26 and then soon had to set course for Guam, arriving on 3 July to disembark another 23 waterlogged aircrew plucked from the water. These 52 airmen Tigrone returned to land over the course of the patrol constituted a new submarine-force record.

The Commander Submarine Force, Pacific Fleet extended his congratulations to, “the commanding officer, officers, and crew for this outstanding patrol” and commended them for “the excellent judgment, splendid navigation, and determination displayed by the TIGRONE in effecting these rescues….”

The Tigrone‘s lifeguard service patrol was so inspiring that she received her own episode of the 1950’s documentary series The Silent Service (season 1, episode 8) “Tigrone Sets a Record” which aired 06 May 1957 and is below in its entirety.

On her third patrol, she came within sight of the Japanese home islands on lifeguard duty and saved an aviator as well as breaking out her big gun again on Aug. 13 when she bombarded Mikomoto Island (Pearl Island), scoring 11 hits on a radio station and lighthouse tower in one of the last exchanges of hate in the war as the Empire sued for peace on the 15th.

When peace came, she was part of the massive armada in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945 and received two battle stars for her service.

There she is, all the way at the end…

Soon after, she found herself in red lead row in Philadelphia.

Dusted off in 1948, Tigrone was designated SSR-419 (radar picket submarine) and given the MIGRAINE I conversion that included an AN/BPS-2 search radar sprouting from the after portion of the sail, and the height finder mounted on a freestanding tower just abaft it.

Tigrone, left, after refit as SSR. Her sistership USS Thornback has been GUPPY’d. Thornback would later serve 28 years in the Turkish Navy and is preserved there as a museum ship today.

This put the 15-foot search antenna some 40 feet above the water, with the height finder only a little below. Also came a below deck CIC for the radar, an extra generator to help push the volts needed to run it all, and guidance equipment for mid-course control of Regulus cruise missiles. In exchange, the boat sacrificed her stern tubes and surface armament.

Tigrone (SSR-419), underway in Grand Harbour, Valetta, Malta, c1952.

Between 1948-56 no less than 13 SSRs– including several Tench-class boats– were put into service, roughly split between Atlantic and Pacific with Tigrone spending her time as a picket boat with the Second Fleet in the Caribbean and North Atlantic, with regular participation in NATO exercises and periodic deployments to the Mediterranean as part of the Sixth Fleet.

By 1 November 1957, decade as a radar boat had ended, replaced by more modern vessels, and Tigrone again found herself a member of the Atlantic Reserve Fleet, Philadelphia.

However, the Navy wasn’t through with her by a long shot.

The Tigrone (AGSS-419) underway in a channel, between conversions

Recommissioned 10 March 1962 and reclassified Auxiliary Research Submarine (AGSS-419), for the next decade Tigrone operated in conjunction with the Navy Underwater Sound Laboratory (part of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center at Newport), conducting underwater systems tests, and evaluating new equipment. The information provided by these tests, utilizing experimental transducers, would prove invaluable in sonar development.

In late 1963, the Bottom Reflected Active Sonar System (BRASS) II Transducer and system were installed on Tigrone and, after 1965, the much-upgraded BRASS III system was installed.

Note the unique side-facing rear sonar rack near the sail that came with the BRASS III conversion

While conducting her tests, she was often trailed by Soviet intelligence collection ships, which on at least one occasion felt the full force of the BRASS rig.

From a bubblehead who served on her during these tests

I cannot tell you how many watts the BRASS was capable of transmitting into the water, but suffice it to say it far exceeded anything else in anybody’s Navy at that time and maybe even today’s Navies for all I know. To give you an idea of the sound level it produced, all hands forward of the engine rooms were required to wear enginemen’s hearing protection when it was operating!

The overhead of that boat was festooned with enginemen’s earmuffs, hanging from every possible location to be readily available when the word was passed: “Now rig for BRASS Ops!” There were no torpedo tubes on the Tigrone at that time.

The after room had been turned into a bunkroom and held tier after tier of racks for the crew. The forward room was dedicated to the sonar system including its very own MG set to power that monster. The sonar men stood their watches on standard AN/BQR-2B passive sonar set which was in a little corner up forward where the tubes used to be. The Port half of the forward room was all the equipment the civilian USN/USL personnel used to operate the BRASS. It was a very sophisticated system, capable of varying both the amplitude and duration of the pulses it generated and if I can attach the picture, you will note a huge “shit can” mounted where the bow should be. Inside that huge and cumbersome protrusion was a transducer which looked like a huge log lying on it’s side atop a round table. The round table could be rotated, thereby presenting the horizontal length of the “log” in whatever direction was desired. In addition to the horizontal training, this transducer “log” was constructed in staves (like a barrel) and the operators could select which staves were to be used, giving them the ability to direct the transmitted beam in whatever direction they would like it to go.

We would go to test depth off the Azores and transmit a pulse in a South Westerly direction so that it could be received by the USS Baya [SS/AGSS-318, a Balao-class submarine modified in 1958 to accomidate LORAD, an experimental long-range sonar and 12 scientists] who would be operating off the Tongue of the Ocean in the Bahamas!!!!

Like I said, BRASS put a LOT of power into the water. Needless to say our activities drew the attention of the Russians and one of those ‘fishing boats’ brisling with antenna, would follow us around, undoubtedly listening to and recording every transmission we made. Well one day we were pounding away with the BRASS when one of the civilians asked me where the Russian fishing boat was. I was standing a regular passive sonar watch and I need to explain that whenever the BRASS transmitted a relay in my sonar set would cut out my audio for the duration of the pulse and then cut back in. When the audio returned, I could hear the reverberations from the transmission bouncing off the bottom, off waves, off thermoclines and maybe off the Azores themselves for several minutes, it was deafening!

I reported that the ‘fishing boat’ was dead astern making 80 RPM’s, just enough to keep up with our three knot submerged speed. “Keep us posted if anything changes.” I was told and I sat up to pay closer attention. Pretty soon I noticed a decrease in the amplitude (power) of the transmitted pulses from the BRASS. The same was true of the pulses following that and so on, until the BRASS was barely making a ‘b-e-e-p’ for each transmission. “He’s picking up speed and closing,” I announced to the civilians who were twisting the dials on the BRASS equipment and watching me to see if their efforts were producing the desired results. “Tell us when he’s directly overhead,” was the request as the pulses became weaker still. Evidently, the Russian figured that we had sped up and were leaving him behind; as the very loud transmissions we had been making were now so weak, he could hardly hear them. “He’s making 220 turns and coming right up our stern,” I reported. The USN/USL boys made some more adjustments to their equipment, “Is he overhead yet?” they asked, “Almost”, I said, wondering what in hell they were going to do. Just then, he came out of our baffles and I could hear his diesel engine roaring above the sound of his cavitating propeller blades, as he picked up speed.

“HE’S OVERHEAD NOW NOW NOW!!” I shouted and just then, the relay in my audio circuit cut my sound. It didn’t matter, I could hear the prolonged blast of a BRASS transmission coming right through our hull, it seemed that it would never end. I didn’t realize they could extend the pulse length so long! The operators had turned the transducer table until the ‘log’ was crosswise to the length of our hull, then they had selected just the top staves so that all that transmitted energy went straight up to the Russian Trawler who listening equipment was undoubtedly turned up has far as it would go in an effort to hear our previously weaken signals over their own ships noise. You guys know what test depth was in those old boats, so you know just how far away his receiver was from probably a million or more watts being aimed directly at him. We fried his sonar system . . . cooked it . .. blew every transistor . . . toasted every tube . . . Probably rendered the operator deaf for life. You’ve heard the old saying, “That noise was ten dB above the threshold of pain” well can you imagine what sound level BRASS could produce at that short a distance? It was a wonder we didn’t blow a hole in his hull and sink him.

For the next week, the only time that ‘Fishing Trawler’ caught up with us was when we surfaced after a day’s work. He could still pick us up when we were on the surface with his radar, but he couldn’t find us when we were submerged and BRASS was transmitting. After about six or seven days, a second trawler showed up and relieved him. They would follow us, but never got real close to us. Once burned, twice shy….

USS Tigrone (AGSS-419) with experimental bow sonar, off Ponta Delgada, Azores, 1967

April, 1970 USS Tigrone (419) leaving Halifax after Exercise Steel Ring

Tigrone continued her quiet Cold War service until 27 June 1975 when she was decommissioned after more than 30 years with the fleet– all but about six of those in active service.

She was the last active submarine in the Navy that had served in WWII, which is something of a record in and of its own right.

USS Tigrone by William H. RaVell III

While she was expended as a torpedo test target on 25 October 1976 in deep water off the North Carolina coast at 36deg. 05.2′ N x 71deg. 15.3′ w, she is remembered at Submarine Force Museum and the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum as well as by an active veterans group.

Of her sisters, 14 were transferred to 9 foreign navies and one, ex-USS Cutlass (SS-478) remains semi-active in Taiwan’s Republic of China Navy as Hai Shih (meaning “sea lion”) at age 70.

Three are maintained as museum ships:

USS Requin as a museum ship is about as close as you can get to Tigrone. Image via Wiki.

-USS Requin (SS-481) at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, PA. This ship was also converted to an SSR in the late 1940s and served with Tigrone in the Second and Sixth fleets during the 1950s.

-USS Torsk (SS-423), moored at Pier Three, Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, (alongside the National Aquarium in Baltimore) in Maryland.

-TCG Uluçalireis (S 338) (ex-USS Thornback (SS-418)), on display at Rahmi M. Koç Museum, Golden Horn in Istanbul. She is shown above in the comparison shot next to sister Tigrone.

Specs:

Tench class, WWII configuration, via shipbucket

Displacement:
1,570 tons (1,595 t) surfaced
2,414 tons (2,453 t) submerged
Length: 311 ft. 8 in (95.00 m)
Beam: 27 ft. 4 in (8.33 m)
Draft: 17 ft. (5.2 m) maximum
Propulsion:
4 × Fairbanks-Morse Model 38D8-⅛ 10-cylinder opposed piston diesel engines driving electrical generators
2 × 126-cell Sargo batteries
2 × low-speed direct-drive Elliott electric motors
two propellers
5,400 shp (4.0 MW) surfaced
2,740 shp (2.0 MW) submerged
Speed:
20.25 knots (38 km/h) surfaced
8.75 knots (16 km/h) submerged
Range: 16,000 nautical miles (20,000 km) surfaced at 10 knots (19 km/h)
Endurance:
48 hours at 2 knots (3.7 km/h) submerged
75 days on patrol
Test depth: 400 ft. (120 m)
Complement: 6 officers, 60 enlisted as designed. Up to 90 when used for SSR/AGSS duties
Armament:
(1945)
10 x21-inch (533 mm) torpedo tubes, 6 forward, 4 aft, 24 torpedoes
1 x 5-inch (127 mm) / 25 caliber deck gun
1 x Bofors 40 mm
1 x Oerlikon 20 mm cannon
2 x .50 cal M2 (detachable)
(1948)
6 x 21-inch (533 mm) torpedo tubes, forward, 12 torpedoes
2 x .50 cal M2 (detachable)
(1963)
Soundwaves, baby, yeah

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

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Text from All Hands magazine, May 1952 edition, courtesy of Stan Svec & .
Official USN photo # NH 97019, from the collections of the Naval Historical Center. Image via Navsource

Here we see the Tench-class diesel-electric hunter killer submarine USS Pickerel (SS-524), surfacing at a 48 degree up angle, from a depth of 150 feet, during tests off the coast of Oahu, Hawaii, 1 March 1952.

“The purpose of this operation was to enable the Navy’s submarine experts to evaluate the sub’s capabilities and characteristics of the GUPPY-snorkel type sub.

This picture was taken from Sabalo (SS-302). Her sonarmen kept Pickerel under observation while she was submerged and preparing to surface. During Pickerel’s maneuvering the sonar gear delivered the constantly changing relative bearing which enabled the photographers to make this shot as she broke the surface.”

Note: The official record of the “surfacing” pictured above is that it started at 150 feet and reached a 48 degree up-angle. From a crew-member manning the helm during this evolution:

“We started at 250 feet, flank speed. The surfacing order included ‘use 60 degrees’ (the highest reading on the -bubble-type’ angle indicator).

“We overshot, and lost the bubble at 65 degrees. The maximum angle (72 degrees) was calculated later by the highwater marks in the Pump Room bilges. Thinking back, even with the bow sticking above water up to the bridge fairwater, the screws wouldn’t have been much above where we started, still pushing us upward.

“First message from the Queenfish (SS-393) which was accompanying us: ‘What is the specific gravity of your Torpedo Room bilges?’

“As you may imagine, the C.O. was something of a competitive wildman, pushing to find out what the limits were for these new GUPPY boats, after putting up with the older WW2 boats. And, we had to beat the Amberjack’s (SS-522) record of 43 degrees.”

Decommissioned 18 August 1972 after 23 years in the fleet which included wartime service in both Korean and Vietnamese waters and a circumnavigation of South America. She was transferred to Italy the same day as Primo Longobardo (S-501) who retained her in NATO service in the Med for another decade, though likely did not surface with such gusto as her 1952 crew.

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday Dec.23, 2015: The lost jewel from Bizerte

960×633

Here we see the French Émeraude-class diesel-electric submarine (Sous-Marin) Turquoise (Q46), captured by the Turks, in dry dock undergoing repairs in Constantinople, 1916.

The French got into the submarine business about the same time as the Americans, launching Admiral Simeon Bourgois’s Plongeur in April 1863.

Before the turn of the century the Republic had flirted with a half dozen one-off boats before they ordered the four boats of the Sirene-class in 1901 followed quickly by another four of the Farfadet-class, the two Algerien-class boats, 20 Naiade-class craft in 1904, Submarines X, Y and Z (not making it up), the two ship Aigrette-class and the submarine Omega.

All told, between 1900-1905, the French coughed up 36 submersibles spread across nine very different classes.

After all that quick learning curve, they proceeded with the Emeraude (Emerald) class in 1903. These ships were an improvement of the Faradet (Sprite) class designed by Gabriel-Émile-Marie Maugas. The 135-foot long/200-ton Faradet quartet had everything a 20th Century smoke boat needed: it was a steel-hulled hybrid submersible that used diesel engines on the surface and electric below, had 4 torpedo tubes, could dive to 100~ feet, and could make a stately 6-knots.

Farfadet-class boat Lutin (Q10), leaving port in 1903.

While they weren’t successful (two sank, killing 30 men between them) Maugas learned from early mistakes and they were significantly improved in the Emeraudes. These later boats used two-shaft propulsion– rare in early submarines–, and were 147-feet long with a 425-ton full load. Capable of making right at 12-knots for brief periods, they carried a half dozen torpedo tubes (four in the bow and two in the stern). They also had the capability to mount  a machine gun and light deck gun if needed.

Again, improvements!

Profile of the Emeralds surfaced.

Class leader Emeraude was laid down at Arsenal de Cherbourg in 1903 followed by sisters Opale and Rubis at the same yard and another three, Saphir, Topase, and the hero of our story, Turquoise, at Arsenal de Toulon in the Med.

Launching 1908

Turquoise was commissioned 10 December 1910 and, with her two Toulon-built sisters, served with the French Mediterranean Fleet from the Submarine Station at Bizerte.

She repeated the bad luck of the Farfadet-class predecessors and in 1913 lost an officer and several crew swept off her deck in rough seas.

When war erupted in 1914, the jewel boats soon found they had operational problems staying submerged due to issues with buoyancy and were plagued by troublesome diesels (hey, the manufacturer, Sautter-Harlé, was out of business by 1918 so what does that tell you).

To help with surface ops, Topase and Turquoise were fitted with a smallish deck gun in 1915.

Saphir probably would have been too, but she caught a Turkish mine in the Sea of Marma on 15 January trying to sneak through the straits and went down.

Topase and Turquoise continued to operate against the Turks, with the latter running into trouble on 30 October 1915. Around the village of Orhaniye in the Dardanelles near Nagara there were six Ottoman Army artillerymen led by Corporal G Boaz Deepa who spotted a periscope moving past a nearby water tower.

Becoming tangled in a net, the submarine became a sitting duck. With their field piece they were able to get a lucky shot on the mast and, with the submarine filling with water, she made an emergency surface. There, the six cannoners took 28 French submariners captive and impounded the sub, sunk in shallow water.

Turquoise’s skipper, Lt. Leon Marie Ravenel, was in 1918 awarded the Knight of the Legion of Honour as was his XO. These sailors suffered a great deal in Turkish captivity, with five dying.

German propaganda postcard, note the Ottoman crew and markings

The Turks later raised the batter French boat and, naming her Mustadieh Ombashi (or Müstecip Ombasi), planned to use her in the Ottoman fleet.

Ottoman Uniforms reports her conning tower was painted with a large rectangle (likely to be red), with large white script during this time.

Via Ottoman Uniforms

However as submariners were rare in WWI Constantinople, she never took to sea in an operational sense again and in 1919 the victorious French reclaimed their submarine, which they later scrapped in 1920.

Her wartime service for the Turks seems to have been limited to taking a few pictures for propaganda purposes and in being used as a fixed battery charging station for German U-boats operating in the Black Sea.

As for the last Bizerte boat, Topase, she finished the war intact and was stricken 12 November 1919 along with the three Emeraudes who served quietly in the Atlantic.

Turquoise/Mustadieh Ombashi has been preserved as a model however.

If you have a further interest in the submarines of Gallipoli, go here.

Specs:

1884×1543

Displacement 392 tons (surfaced) / 427 (submerged)
Length, 147 feet
Bean 12 feet
Draft 12 feet
No of shafts 2
Machinery
2 Sautter-Harlé diesels, 600hp / electric motors (440kW)
Max speed, kts 11.5 surfaced / 9.2 submerged
Endurance, nm 2000 at 7.3kts surfaced / 100nm at 5kts submerged
Armament:
6×450 TT (4 bow, 2 stern) for 450mm torpedoes with no reloads
1x M1902 Model 37mm deck gun, 1x8mm light Hotchkiss machine gun (fitted in 1915)
Complement 21-28
Diving depth operational, 130 feet.

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

Nearing their 50th Anniversary, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!

Germany has spent something like 120~ years making top-notch submarines. In fact, other than the 80 or so Romeo/Ming class diesels operated by the Chinese and the Norks, the most numerous modern submersible operated in the world are the 61 German-made Type 209 class submarines built and commissioned between 1971 and 2008.

However, if it wasn’t for the earlier Type 206 design, there never would have been a 209.

Designed in 1964 by Ingenieur Kontor Lübeck (IKL), these cute little 159-foot diesel-electric boats weighed but 500-tons at full load when submerged. However, they could stay at sea, floating in as little as 16 feet of water when surfaced and hiding in 10 fathoms when submerged if needed, for over a month.

Further, they carried 8 modern 533mm torpedoes which could be delivered all at once, allowing them the capability to sink virtually any warship found at sea–to include a Soviet battlecruiser– with a single salvo.

Some 18 were built for the Bundesmarine (West German Navy), numbered U13-U30, commissioning between April 1973 and March 1975, just under two years, which isn’t bad. Had the balloon ever gone up in the Cold War, these hardy craft would likely have given the Soviets, East Germans and Poles a lot of hell in the Baltic.

They were so nice, in fact, that the Israelis ordered three slightly modded variants they termed the Gal-class as a follow-on, which were delivered in 1976-77.

Further, another 15 very similar (535-ton/155-foot) Type 207s were built as the Kobben class for the Royal Norwegian Navy by 1966 and have gone on to serve not only that fleet but the Danes and Poles as well (the latter of which still have five of these in service) proving the design still holds water after a half-century.

The Germans kept their 18 Type 206’s in service for over 30 years in some cases, decommissioning the last four in 2011 while the Israelis did more or less the same.

In all, the 36 boats of the Type 206/207/Gal design did what they were intended to for their respective users and have gone on to live a second life to a degree. Indonesia looked to pick up as many as five, but then backpedaled, while the Germans shopped both the Type 206s and the surplus Gal-class vessels for a while.

Gal herself is now on display at the Israeli Naval museum in Haifa while two (the recently retired U15 and U17) are laid up in Germany and four have gone on to Columbia. Two, ex-U16 and ex-U18, were sold as spare parts hulks while another pair, U23 and U24 were given length (2012-2015) refits in Germany and shipped to Colombia as the ARC Intrepido and ARC Indomable respectively to begin their new careers.

Two German Type-206 submarines outbound from Kiel to Columbia, 2015.

After all, even at age 40, they are still effective.

151218-N-QK571-984 VENTURA COUNTY, Calif. (Jan. 12, 2016) The last two U.S. Navy S-3B Viking aircraft soar over Laguna Peak at Naval Base Ventura County, California. In January, one aircraft left Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 30 and retired to the boneyard; the other went to start a new life with NASA. (U.S. Navy photo by Scott Dworkin/Released)

After over 40 years in service to the Navy, the humble and often unloved S-3 Viking has passed on. This neat little ASW bird was cooked up in the 1970s to replace the aging S-2 Tracker prop plane to give the Navy’s carriers persistent sub-busting and surface control capabilities without having to task a P-3 squadron to each flattop from shore.

While the S-3 never had to actually drop it hot on a Russki sub, they tracked hundreds of them and would have been one of the vital keys to keeping the Atlantic open if the Cold War ever went hot. Post-1989, they were increasingly used (as the P-3 was/is) in supporting overland operations, providing vital eyes and ears in EW recon roles as well as helping the fleet with light COD and aerial refueling (buddy stores).

During the Gulf War, Vikings nailed a number of Saddam’s small fast attack craft as well, proving their teeth worked just fine.

Now, retired from the main fleet in 2009, a number of S-3 aircraft joined Air Test and Evaluation Squadron (VX) 30 and continued to be used for range control duties out of Point Magu where they were appreciated.

From the Navy’s presser

“It’s got legs,” Capt. John Rousseau, who led the charge to bring the retired aircraft to VX-30. “It can go fast and long. The radar, even though it’s old, there’s not many better. We still spot schools of dolphins and patches of seaweed” when patrolling the range.

In November, VX-30 retired the first of its three Vikings, flying it to the military aircraft boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. The other two, each with 40 years of service on the airframe, were not far behind.

“They still have life in them,” Rousseau said, “but it was time for another depot-level maintenance period, and you have to weigh that cost against the little time you could still get out of them.”

And with that, the last two were pulled off line this month and are headed to the desert.

And maybe Taiwan who could use them to replace (wait for it) 1950s vintage S-2 Trackers.

Other ideas to re-purpose the old “turkey bird” is as a dedicated COD aircraft or even an unmanned carrier-based drone.

When SMS U-31 of the Kaiserliche Marine‘s IV Flotilla sailed from Wilhelmshaven on 13 January 1915, and disappeared shortly thereafter, it was assumed, she had struck a mine and sunk with all hands, somewhere in the North Sea.

Well, it turned out they were right.

Now, 101 years after her disappearance, her final resting place is known. In 2012 an engineering team plotting the site of a new offshore wind farm about 55 nautical miles off the coast of East Anglia found a wreck on the ocean floor.

Digital scan of the sunken U boat, which has been found off the East Anglian coast.  The wreckage of a First World War German submarine has been found by divers 90km off the East Anglian coast. Video footage shows the sunken U-boat, which went missing 1915, on the sea bed under about 100 feet of water.  The 58 metre long wreck was found by a survey team from energy companies Scottish Power Renewables and Vattenfall, who are currently drawing up plans for the new East Anglia ONE wind farm.

Initial investigation thought it to be a lost Dutch sub from the WWII-era, so the Dutch Lamlash wreck-diving team was called in last year and they have identified the vessel as U-31.

She was on her first patrol and, under the command of 28-year-old Oblt.z.S. Siegfried Wachendorff, she carried 33 souls.

More here

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday: Feb. 3, 2016, HMs Unlucky Killer No. 13

Click to very much bigup

Here we see the Royal Navy’s K-class steam-powered (not a misprint) submarine HMS K22, bottom, compared to a smaller and more typical example of HMs submarine fleet during World War I, the HMS E37. As you can tell, the two boats are very different and, by comparing specs of the 800-ton/2,000shp E27 with the 2630-ton/10,000shp K22, you can see just how different.

A brainchild that sprang from the pipe-dream by Jellicoe and Beatty of creating submarines fast enough to operate with the Grand Fleet, these massive 339-foot submarines were designed on the cusp of World War I and a full 21 were to be built. Whereas other subs around the world were gasoline-electric or diesel-electric, the K-class would be steam-electric with a pair of Yarrow oil-fired boilers (! on a submarine!) for use with turbines on the surface, giving them an impressive 24-knot speed.

HMS K7, showing a good profile of these interesting subs. And yes, those are stacks on her amidships

When you keep in mind that the standard British battleship of the time, the brand new Queen Elizabeth-class “fast” battleships had a max speed of 24-knots, you understand the correlation.

The K-class would use their speed to their advantage and, with a heavy armament of eight torpedo tubes and three 3-4-inch deck guns, press their attacks with ease. For all this surface action, they had a proper bridge (with windows!) and even stacks for the boilers.

HMS K2, note the gun deck with her large 4 inchers interspersed between her stacks. Click to big up

In short, they were really large destroyers that happened to be able to submerge. When using one boiler they could creep along at 10 knots for 12,500 nautical miles– enabling them to cross the Atlantic and back and still have oil left.

When submerged, they could poke around on electric motors. With all this in mind, what could go wrong?

Well, about that…

The K-class soon developed a bad habit of having accidents while underway. This was largely because for such gargantuan ships, they had small and ineffective surface controls, which, when coupled with a very low crush depth and buoyancy issues meant the ships would often hog and be poor to respond under control, along with having issues with dive angles like you can’t believe.

In short, they were all the bad things of a 300 foot long carnival fun house, afloat.

Further, since the boilers had to be halted to dive (who wants burnt oil exhaust inside a sealed steel tube?) if these submersibles could dive in under five minutes it was due to a well-trained crew. Then, due to all the vents and stacks that had to seal, there were inevitable leaks and failures, which on occasion sent seawater cascading into the vessel once she slipped below the waves.

Of the 21 ordered, only 17 were eventually completed and these ships soon earned a reputation as the Kalamity-class due to the fact that ships sank at their moorings, suffered uncontrolled descents to the bottom of the sea, ran aground, and disappeared without a trace. This led to improvements such as a large bulbous bow (note the difference in the bow form from early images of these subs to later), though it didn’t really help things all that much.

K4 ran aground on Walney Island in January 1917 and remained stranded there for some time. There are several images in circulation of this curious sight

With all of this, we should double back around to the K22 mentioned above in the very first image. You see, she was completed as HMS K13 at Fairfield Shipbuilders, Glasgow, Scotland.

Launched 11 November 1916, K13 was sailing through Gareloch on 29 January 1917 during her sea trials when Kalimity raised its head.

On board that day were 80 souls– 53 crew, 14 employees of a Govan ship builder, five Admiralty officials, a pilot and the captain and engineer of sister submarine K14. While attempting to bring the decks awash, icy Scottish seawater poured into the engine room of the submarine, killing those stokers, enginemen and water tenders working the compartment. A subsequent investigation found that four ventilator tubes for the boilers had not closed properly.

Fifty men were left alive on the stricken ship, which by that time was powerless at the bottom of the loch. The two seniormost present, K13‘s skipper Lieutenant Commander Godfrey Herbert and his K14 counterpart, Commander Francis Goodhart, tasked themselves to make a suicidal break for the surface on a bubble of air released from the otherwise sealed off conning tower to get help– though only Herbert made it alive.

Once topside and picked up by another waiting submarine, Herbert helped pull off a what is noted by many as the first true Submarine Rescue which involved dropping air lines to the submarine while the 48 remaining men trapped inside endured a freezing, dark hell for 57 hours until they were able to be brought to the surface as the buoyant end of the submarine, pumped full of air pressure, broached the surface and a hole was cut to remove the survivors while the ship was held by a hawser.

From the Submarine Museum’s dry record of the event:

The crew of E50 witnessing K13’s rapid dive closed in on the area discovering traces of oil and escaping air breaking the surface. The first rescue vessel arrived around midnight. Divers were sent down to inspect the submarine and just after daybreak on the 30th morse signals were exchanged between the divers and the trapped crew. At 1700 an airline was successfully connected, empty air bottles recharged and ballast tanks blown. With the aid of a hawser slung under her bows K13 was brought to within 8 feet of the surface. By midday of the 31st K13’s bow had been raised ten feet above the water. By 2100 the pressure hull had been breached using oxy-acetylene cutting equipment the survivors being transferred to safety

However, K13 slipped below the surface once more, taking her dead back to the bottom with her. Raised two months later, she was repaired, the bodies of 29 lost in her engine room removed as was the fallen skipper of K14 (while one body other was recovered from the loch, the remaining men were never found), and she was recommissioned as K22.

British submarine HMS K22 (ex HMS K13) under way at speed during trial in the Firth of Forth after repair and refit Note the change to her bow.

Seeing some war service with the 13th Submarine Flotilla (again with that number!) K13/22 was involved in a collision at night with sistership K14 in a chain reaction event that left two other sisters, K6 and K17, sunk. In all 105 of HMs submariners were killed in one night in 1918 aboard K-boats without a single German shot fired.

By this time, the “K” had changed from Kalamity to Killer and volunteers assigned to these boats called themselves the “Suicide Club.”

Alongside captured coastal U-boat S.M.S. UB 28 in 1918, note the huge size difference.

Soon after the war, the RN divested themselves of the K-class though they were still relatively new, scrapping most of them in the early 1920s.

K13 as K23 late in her brief second life, 1923

K13/K22 survived until she was sold for scrap in December 1926 in Sunderland.

A memorial to her 32 war dead is at Faslane Cemetery while one to her six civilians killed among her crew is at Glasgow.

A third, erected in 1961, is in Carlingford, New South Wales, Australia, and was paid for by the widow of Charles Freestone, a leading telegraphist on K13 who survived the accident and emigrated down under.

The Submarines Association Australia (SAA) visits and pays their respect to the marker in Oz every January 29 while Sailors from HM Naval Base Clyde and the RN Veteran Submarine Association pay theirs at the markers in Scotland.

“Although technology has revolutionized submarine safety over the past century, the special bravery, ethos and comradeship of Submariners and the Submarine Service endures,” said Command Warrant Officer of the UK Submarine Service Stefano Mannucci on the 99th Anniversary service last week.

K13/22 is also remembered in maritime art.

HMS K13 under construction

As for her skipper on that cold January day a century ago, Capt. Godfrey Herbert, DSO with Bar, having served in the Royal Navy through both World Wars, died on dry land in Rhodesia at the ripe old age of 77.

Specs:

Via shipbucket

Displacement: 1,980 tons surfaced, 2,566 tons dived
Length: 339 ft. (103 m)
Beam: 26 ft. 6 in (8.08 m)
Draught: 20 ft. 11 in (6.38 m)
Propulsion:
Twin 10,500 shp (7,800 kW) oil-fired Yarrow boilers each powering a Brown-Curtis or Parsons geared steam turbines, Twin 3 blade 7 ft 6 in (2.29 m) screws
Four 1,440 hp (1,070 kW) electric motors.
One 800 hp (600 kW) Vickers diesel generator for charging batteries on the surface.
Speed:
24 knots (44 km/h; 28 mph) surfaced
8 knots (15 km/h; 9.2 mph) submerged
Range:
Surface: 800 nautical miles (1,500 km; 920 mi) at maximum speed
12,500 nmi (23,200 km; 14,400 mi) at 10 kn (19 km/h; 12 mph)
Submerged: 8 nmi (15 km; 9.2 mi) at 8 kn (15 km/h; 9.2 mph)
Complement: 59 (6 officers and 53 ratings)
Armament:
4 × 18-inch (460 mm) torpedo tubes (beam), four 18-inch (450-mm) bow tubes, plus 8 spare torpedoes
2 × BL 4-inch (101.6 mm) Mk XI guns
1 × 3 in (76 mm) gun
Twin 18-inch deck tubes originally fitted but later removed.

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

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Elbit Systems has a new 40-foot unmanned surface vehicle, the Seagull, which is designed to operate in pairs for either mine sweeping or sub busting. The idea is the first vehicle will have surveillance gear to find the sub or mine, while the second will carry either clearance gear (an ROV) or a anti-submarine torpedo to shove right up the sneaky U-boat’s kisser.

From Elbit’s presser:

Drawing on world class know -how derived from generations of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) design, development and operation and its naval capabilities, Elbit Systems’ newest offering in the unmanned platform field is Seagull -an organic, modular, highly autonomous, multi-mission Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) system.

Seagull is a 12-meter USV with replaceable mission modules, with two vessels capable of being operated and controlled in concert using a single Mission Control System (MCS), from manned ships or from the shore.

The system provides unmanned end-to-end mine hunting operation taking the man out of the mine field. It provides mission planning, and on-line operation in known and unknown areas,including area survey, search, detection, classification, identification, neutralization and verification. It is equipped to search the entire water volume and operate underwater vehicles to identify and neutralize mines.

The idea is the two-boat pair can operate within 50-100 miles of the control station and remain at sea for 96 hours, covering a pretty large swath of littoral in the process while their operators sip coffee back in a trailer somewhere. A second set of boats can be kept ready to rotate out the first, making a persistent sea station a very possible endeavor.

This obviously has uses in a MIUWU or PSU augmentation or replacement.

Speaking of which, DARPA’s Sea Hunter–the Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel, or ACTUV is the U.S.’s version of this, and is mucho larger at some 132-feet long and is getting some love on social media as of late.

We all live in a yellow submarine…

Boeing’s massive 51-foot Echo Voyager, debuted yesterday, is an outgrowth of their 18-foot Echo Ranger and 32-foot Echo Seeker prototype testbed UUV’s– which were capable of 2-3 day operations– only Voyager would be capable of missions lasting months in theory.

Equipped with a hybrid rechargeable power system and modular payload bay, the midget sub sans crew, according to the video below, can do everything in theory from being a weapons platform, to launching and operating UAVs, to protecting infrastructure (read= smoking frogmen operating near sensitive bases), to submarine decoy, mine countermeasures, ASW search and barrier ops, and battlespace prep– though the video spends a lot of time talking about how it can help with oceanography and oil spills as well.

“Echo Voyager is a new approach to how UUVs will operate and be used in the future,” said Darryl Davis, president, Boeing Phantom Works. “Our investments in innovative technologies such as autonomous systems are helping our customers affordably meet mission requirements now and in the years to come.”

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday: March 16, 2016, the Tale of the Photogenic Tyrant

All photos except where mentioned are from the IWM collection

Here we see the forward view from the conning tower of the British T (Triton)-class diesel electric submarine HMS Tribune (N76) of HMs Royal Navy running along the surface in Scottish waters, 1942. Though modern and relatively low mileage, this 275-foot fleet boat only served for a decade, but she will live on for eternity.

With the World War I era boats getting long in the tooth, the Admiralty commissioned twelve 275-foot Odin-class, six 289-foot Parthian-class, six 287-foot Rainbow-class, 62 much smaller 202-foot S-class, three huge and rather experimental 345-foot River-class and six 289-foot Grampus-class submarines in the 1920s and 30s. With lessons learned from these 95~ diesel boats, it seemed the brass liked the 275-foot range as a sweet spot for general sub size and pushed ahead with 53 new T-class boats to replace the 1920s era O, P and R class submersibles mentioned above.

HMS TRIBUNE in Scottish waters, possibly at Campbeltown

These sea monsters, designed in 1935, had an impressive armament of 10 torpedo tubes (6 bow, 4 aft) which was considered devastating at the time, room for 16 torpedoes, and mounted a QF 4-incher on deck. A crew of 48 manned the 1,500-ton smoke boat and twin diesel/electric engines/motors could drive them at nearly 16 knots on the surface and 9 when submerged. They weren’t flashy compared to the German, U.S. and Japanese fleet boats of the day, but they could sail 8,000 nautical miles and could operate at a 300 foot depth with no problem.

The hero of our tale, HMS Tribune, was the sixth and thus far last ship of the fleet to carry that name since 1796. Laid down 3 March 1937 at Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company in Greenock on the River Clyde in Scotland, she was commissioned into the fleet on 17 October 1939– just six weeks after the start of World War II.

While still working up Tribune may have brushed into U-21 thought neither ship exchanged fire.

Over the next three and a half years she would complete an impressive 18 war patrols, though cranky engines proved her undoing. Many of Tribune’s patrols were quiet, with nothing but neutral ships spotted. Covered in great detail over at Uboat.net (go read it!), she had a series of 15 skippers over this period, typically reserve lieutenants. She spent extensive time off the coast of Norway and in the Kattegat while operating from Rosyth but just couldn’t make the hits when needed.

Tribune made unsuccessful torpedo attacks on the German armed merchant cruiser Schiff 33 / Pinguin off Standlandet, Norway; U-56 in the Hebrides; U-138 with 5 torpedoes about 10 nautical miles South-West of Ile de Groix; the German tanker Karibisches Meer in the Bay of Biscay; and finally sighted the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper and light cruiser Köln leaving the Gimsostrommen and steering towards Hval Fjord in Sept. 1942 but was unable to attack.

During 1942, Admiralty photographers who captured a number of images that endure in the IWM today toured her at Scapa Flow.

HMS TRIBUNE lying alongside the submarine depot ship HMS FORTH at Holy Loch, Scotland at dawn

Second Coxswain of HMS TRIBUNE, Petty Officer Hedley Charles Woodley, at his diving station on the forward hydroplanes

A signaller with an Aldis lamp on board HMS TRIBUNE.

Lieutenant Commander G D A Gregory at the periscope of HMS TRIBUNE

Stokers playing cards on board HMS TRIBUNE.

Asdic rating, Leading Seaman Walker, on the bridge of HMS TRIBUNE keeping a watch out with a torpedo nightsight

Lt Bulkeley in the wardroom

Then came the Crown Film Unit who, with a barebones cast and director Jack Lee, cameraman Bill Chaston and cinematographer Jonah Jones with a few WRENs in-tow, filmed the Ministry of Information film “Close Quarters” aboard the vessel.

In the 75-minute film, she was referred to as HMS Tyrant and, while most of the scenes were fleshed out by a full production crew at Pinewood Studio in a superb full-sized model of the submarine, footage of the boat underway and her spaces were retained.

Actor operating a high pressure valve on board HMS TRIBUNE during the making of the film ‘Close Quarters

Note the greatly enhanced Jolly Roger of HMS Tyrant!

Transferring to Gibraltar in November 1942, Tribune began patrols in the Med with about the same success she had off Norway. Although she caught some depth charges from a RAF Wellington by mistake, and more from an Italian patrol boat, she did come in handy by landing SOE agents in Corsica in January 1943 and carried out close recon of the Copaiba Bay shoreline from just 1,000 yards or so offshore.

On 10 Jan 1943, Tribune finally drew blood by pumping torpedoes into the Nazi-flagged French merchant Dalny (6672 GRT, built 1914) 15 nautical miles from San Remo, Italy, which had to be beached in order to prevent sinking.

She followed this up later with damaging the German tanker Präsident Herrenschmidt (9103 GRT, built 1932) about five nautical miles South-West of San Lucido, Italy, in March.

Crew of the TRIBUNE pose around their Jolly Roger 6 June 1943 Portsmouth note the dagger for the Corsican commando landings

With her engines untrustworthy, Tribune was sent back to Portsmouth in April 1943 and spent the rest of the war as a training boat. Placed in reserve in June 1945 even before the war ended in the Pacific, she was transferred to Falmouth in November 1945 then sold to be broken up for scrap July 1947.

As such, Tribune was luckier than many of her sisterships, of whom 16 were destroyed, largely by mines and in scraps with Italian and German subs in the Med. After the war, some were modernized similar to the same program as the USN did with the GUPPY boats, but the last of these, HMS Tabard (P342), was discarded by 1974.

The stills and movie reels taken of Tribune will continue as a tribute to the class and HMs submarines as a whole during the war.

Specs:

Image via Shipbucket

Displacement:
1,290 tons surfaced
1,560 tons submerged
Length: 276 ft. 6 in (84.28 m)
Beam: 25 ft. 6 in (7.77 m)
Draught:
12 ft. 9 in (3.89 m) forward
14 ft. 7 in (4.45 m) aft
Propulsion:
Two shafts
Twin diesel engines, 2,500 hp (1.86 MW) each
Twin electric motors 1,450 hp (1.08 MW) each
Speed:
15.5 kn (28.7 km/h; 17.8 mph) surfaced
9 kn (17 km/h; 10 mph) submerged
Range: 8,000 nmi (9,200 mi; 15,000 km) at 10 kn (19 km/h; 12 mph) surfaced with 131 tons of fuel[1]
Complement: 48
Armament:
6 bow torpedo tubes
4 external torpedo tubes
16 torpedoes
QF 4 inch (100 mm) deck gun

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

Nearing their 50th Anniversary, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has it place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!

P-3s are still out there busting subs everyday…just in a different livery and with no Mk46s

A Customs and Border Patrol Air and Marine Office P-3 Orion Long Range Tracker found a self-propelled semi-submersible vessel (SPSS/dope sub) in the Eastern Pacific Ocean that led to the arrest of four smugglers and the boat being lost at sea with 6 tons of blow on board. Street value was $193 milly.

As noted by CBP in their presser:

The crew aboard a P-3 Long Range Tracker detected a self-propelled semi-submersible vessel Mar. 2, while conducting counter-narcotics operations with Joint Interagency Task Force (JIATF) South.

The task force coordinated an interdiction of the semi-submersible with a U.S. Coast Guard vessel in the area while the AMO crew maintained constant visual surveillance. Upon interdiction, the U.S. Coast Guard arrested four individuals operating the vessel.  The semi-submersible became unstable and sank.

“This type of cooperation and teamwork produces these kinds of results where suspects are arrested and narcotics prevented from reaching U.S. shores,” said Director John Wassong at the National Air Security Operations Center – Corpus Christi. “Our crews will continue to take every opportunity to disrupt this type of transnational criminal activity.”

CBP operates two types of P-3s: 11 P-3 Airborne Early Warning, or AEW, and 3 P-3 Long Range Tracker, or LRT, aircraft flying from Corpus Christi, Texas, and Jacksonville, Florida.

CBP’s LRTs, called “slicks” by the service to differentiate them from the AN/APS 145 radar-equipped AEWs, are former USN P-3As that have landed most of their ASW and ASuW suite, replacing them with an electro-optic ball with night vision and FLIR capabilities, APG 66 air search and SeaVue marine search radars used for detecting and tracking targets of interest.

Over 40 years old, the 14 Orions flown by CBP have been extensively reworked in recent years and are expected to remain in service for another two decades.

DARPA just released some neat but brief 360-view footage of their Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) including some of it underway at a good clip (27 knots). The 132-foot USV is meant to be the expendable subchaser of the 21st century, and actually looks pretty sweet.

If they can get past concept and put 50-100 of these cheaply in the Western Pac, networked all sweet to a central ASW War Room, it could really negate all the skrilla the Norks and PLAN are dropping on subs.

Throwback Thursday: The German Bundeswehr posted this groovy six-minute film about the Type 206A coastal diesel boats filmed in 1984. Entitled Stahlfisch (Steelfish) its chock full of really neat operational scenes filmed aboard S176, a handy little 159-foot/450-ton boat which was in commission for 30 years, only being scrapped in 2005.

Of course it’s in German, but all good U-boat films are, right?

I’ve talked a lot about the Navy’s Sea Hunter program and others, but how about this news ICYMI from the Pitcairn Islands– you know, that windswept group of four volcanic atolls in the Pacific inhabited mostly by descendants of the Bounty mutineers and the Tahitians who accompanied them. Sparsely populated, the British Territory sees the occasional USCG/USN or RN ship pass through the area, but there is no enduring presence.

It seems they have hit on the idea of protecting their huge EEZ (322,000 sq. mile, or about the size of Texas and Montana combined!) by unmanned submersible operated by Satellite Applications Catapult and the Pew Charitable Trusts at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Harwell, Oxfordshire.

Apparently the preserve is home to at least 1,249 species of marine mammals, seabirds and fish, as well as some of the most near-pristine ocean habitat on Earth, and the 54 inhabitants of the Pitcairnians– who depend on the sea for survival– can’t stop trans-global poachers all by themselves.

From the BBC:

The drone, made by US firm Liquid Robotics, will be directed by staff at the satellite watch room which is monitoring fishing vessels. The craft is equipped with a camera that can take snaps of fishing vessels that are in restricted areas, and satellite technology that can pinpoint their location. The unmanned craft starting patrolling late last month.

The Liquid Robotics drone, called a Wave Glider, is a two-part craft made up of an instrument-bearing boat that floats on the ocean surface that is tethered to a submersible. The craft uses the differential motion between the sea surface and the region the submersible traverses to propel itself.

The self-propelling propulsion system means the Wave Glider can stay at sea for months at a time.

Smile, you’re on camera…

Starboard bow view, July 24, 1961. (Official U.S. Navy Photograph)

USS Thresher (SSN-593), commissioned in August 1961, was the lead ship of a new class of nuclear-powered, fast-attack submarines and was the most technically advanced ship in the world.

On April 10, 1963, she sank approximately 200 miles off the coast of Massachusetts. All souls aboard were lost that day; 129 U.S. Navy Sailors and civilian workers. Thresher was the first nuclear-powered submarine lost at sea, and the largest loss of life in the submarine force’s history.

As a result of this, the Navy immediately restricted all submarines in depth until the causes of this tragic loss could be fully understood, leading to SUBSAFE.

This week, 53 years on, she is still remembered. This week the U.S. Naval Undersea Museum added to their permanent Thresher display the ceremonial dress sword of LCDR Pat Garner, Thresher‘s Executive Officer when she sank. This is the first time the sword, on special loan to the museum, has ever been exhibited.

“It’s been 53 years since we lost Thresher and out of the loss came the SUBSAFE program,” said Rear Adm. Moises DelToro, deputy commander, Undersea Warfare in a statement. “Our challenge today, 53 years after the loss of Thresher, is to maintain our vigilance, intensity and integrity in all matters involving the SUBSAFE program and to avoid ignorance, arrogance and complacency.”

In the ever-continuing West Pac arms race, Australian officials announced this week that France’s DCNS has won the $38.5 billion Project SEA 1000 Future Submarine program to replace six Collins-class submarines currently in service with the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) with a dozen Shortfin Barracuda Block 1A boats.

The Barracudas (Suffren-class in French Naval use) are a sexy batch of nuclear-powered attack subs that are currently building. They are 5,300-ton ships that include advanced features like a pump-jet propeller and X-shaped stern planes. While smaller than the U.S. Virginia-class, they are comparable in size to the old school Sturgeon-class SSNs of the 1970s and 80s and the Los Angeles-class which are still bumping along. They will, naturally, be larger and more advanced that the Collins.

The difference between the Aussie subs and the Sufferns will be that their dozen boats– to be built in Australia– will be diesel boats. They will be able to force-project as needed.

Further, Australia could become the first foreign nation to buy the radar-guided Raytheon AIM-120D air-to-air missile under a $1.2 billion foreign military sales package approved by the U.S. government this week. The Delta has a 50% greater range (than the already-extended range AIM-120C-7) and better guidance over its entire flight envelope yielding an improved kill probability (Pk) and the U.S. military itself is wanting a bunch but they are tied up in sequestration.

Included with that deal is:

Up to 450 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AIM-120D)
Up to 34 AIM-120D Air Vehicles Instrumented (AAVI)
Up to 6 Instrumented Test Vehicles (ITVs)
Up to 10 spare AIM-120 Guidance Sections (GSs)

450 Fox Threes and a dozen of the world’s most advanced SSKs sure make a potent pill against a future enemy looking to roll hard over Canberra.

A-10s in the PI

In other news, the Air Force is rotating composite units of A-10s and HH-60s through the PI and, they are reportedly flying maritime patrols over Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. 

“Our job is to ensure air and sea domains remain open in accordance with international law,” said Air Force Col. Larry Card, the commander of the new air contingent in the Philippines. “That is extremely important, international economics depends on it — free trade depends on our ability to move goods. There’s no nation right now whose economy does not depend on the well-being of the economy of other nations.”

A U.S. Air Force A-10C Thunderbolt II touches down at Clark Air Base in the Philippines on April 19 after returning from an operational mission. A-10 attack planes have been flying maritime patrols over a coral reef chain known as Scarborough Shoal as the situation in the South China Sea grows more complex. Photo: Staff Sgt. Benjamin W. Stratton, U.S. Air Force.

And no, this is no sandwich.

The Russkis Schuka (Pike) class diesel subs of the 1930s were designed to be one massive class of boats, envisioned by the Revvoensoviet design bureau, to work effectively in all of the Red Banner Fleets (White, Pacific, Baltic, Black) and as such were smallish sized (187-feet oal, 700-tons max) to be able to get around in the confines of some of those near-landlocked waters.

Capable of carrying a dozen torpedoes and a couple of deck guns, there was supposed to be upwards of 200 of these Stalin U-boats. However, just 87 were completed by 1945 and those in the Baltic and Black Seas saw horrible losses at the hands of Axis sub-busters.

When we say horrible losses, try 34 out of 87.

While most had lackluster and un-noteworthy service save their commissioning and subsequent loss, there was one that stood out.

ShCh-408 (Щ-408) was built in Leningrad and commissioned 10 Sep 1941, just weeks after Hitler broke his non-aggression pact with Uncle Joe and invaded the Motherland with a few million of his buddies.

Kuzmin, left, with the swagger

Her claim to fame was in May 1943 when, under the command of LCDR Pavel Semenovich Kuzmin, she tried to thread her way through German/Finnish minefields sewn off Estonia to break out into the Baltic proper and harass shipping between Sweden and Germany.

We say try…

In a running battle that evolved over a four-day period, she engaged the Finnish minelayers Riilahti and Routsinsalmi along with a host of German armed trawlers in surface actions, dodged land based aircraft (downing several of them with her deck guns) and just basically put up one heck of a fight before she joined Davy Jones, taking all of her crew with her.

Kuzmin and his crew became something a hero in the dark times in the Soviet Union. A street in Leningrad was named in his honor as were several schools. The boat was posthumously named a “Guards Submarine” and her lost sailors Heroes of the Soviet Union.  Her skipper was even awarded the Order of the British Empire by her Allies.

The story of the boat and her stand, which included enduing hundreds of depth charges while submerged, became the stuff of Soviet Naval mythos.

Now, apparently, she has been found in (Russian article but has a neat video) 236 feet of water off the Estonian island of Vaindlo.

All of her hatches are dogged down, her conning tower is riddled with shell fire and a PPSh-41 was reportedly observed on the ocean floor, which would seem to indicate a lot of the story is more than myth.

HI Sutton, who has been kinda enough to mirror some of our posts from LSOZI before at his excellent Covert Shores blog (and I do recommend going over there and checking it out regularly) penned a piece for Foreign Brief on the evolution of Narco Subs, which included this dope (no pun intended) info graphic (click to very much big up!)

2400-x1152

From the article:

2016 looks set to be a bumper year for narco-sub incidents.

Just last month, Colombian security forces discovered a 15-metre narco-sub in the jungle near the Pacific coast. A few weeks earlier, the U.S. Coast Guard published footage of a narco-sub intercepted off the Panamanian coast with 5.5 tonnes of cocaine on board, valued at $200 million. In March, an abandoned narco-sub was found stranded on a reef off the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, its load of narcotics already unloaded by drug smugglers.

More here.

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday May 25, 2016: The Kaiser’s Pirate of Nauset Beach

Here we see one of the few images remaining of the Deutschland-class handels type unterseeboot SM U-156 of the Kaiserliche Marine. Built to schlep cargo, she was converted to a U-Kreuzer and went on to wreak havoc off the coast of New England.

In 1915, with the Great War dragging into its second horrific year, Imperial Germany was cut off from overseas trade by the might of the combined British, French, Italian, Russian, and Japanese fleets, who certainly had a warship in every harbor from Seattle to Montevideo. That’s when an idea was hatched to cough up a fleet of large commercial submarines for shipping vital cargo to and from locations otherwise verboten to German freighters.

These handels-U-boots (merchant submarines) were helmed by 28-man civilian crews employed by the Deutsche Ozean-Reederei company, unarmed except for five pistols or revolvers and a flare gun, sailed under a merchant flag, and could carry as much as 700-tons in their holds.

A staggering 213-feet overall and some 2,300-tons, while small by today’s standards, these were the largest operational submarines of World War I.

You get the idea…

The first of the class, Deutschland, was launched 28 March 1916 and in June voyaged across the Atlantic as a blockade runner carrying highly sought-after chemical dyes, carried medical drugs, gemstones, and mail to Baltimore where her crew were welcomed as celebrities before returning to Bremerhaven with 341 tons of nickel, 93 tons of tin, and 348 tons of crude rubber– worth seven times her 2.75 million Reichsmark cost. Her second trip to New London with gems and securities, returning to Germany in November was her last as a commercial venture.

You see Deutschland was taken up into the service of the German Navy in early 1917 and rechristened SM U-155, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Between 1916-17, a further six freighter u-boats were built to the same design as Deutschland in four yards, numbered in military service U-151 through U-157. These ships, however, were built to fight rather than make money (one other boat, Bremen, was completed for commercial work and she vanished in Sept. 1916 on her maiden voyage to New York–she was never part of the German Navy).

The subject of our particular tale is U-156, the only one of her class built at Atlas Werke, Bremen as Werke #382.

In war service these ships were completed with torpedo tubes and a torpedo and mine magazine rather than cargo holds and given a pair of large 150mm deck guns with a healthy supply of 1688 shells to feed them. Gone was the civilian crew, replaced by a 7 officer/69-man military crew that could spare up to 20 for prize crews.

Prize crews?

Yes, these huge subs would act as submersible cruisers (U-Kreuzer), hence the large battery and stock of shells.

Those are some serious popguns

U-156 was commissioned 22 Aug 1917 under the command of Kptlt. Konrad Gansser. Under Gansser’s command and that later of Kptlt. Richard Feldt, over the next 13 months the huge submarine successfully attacked 47 ships of which she sunk 45 (for a total of 64,151 tons) and damaged two.

A list of her kills over at U-boat.net shows that most of her “victories” were small craft, with only one merchant ship over 5,000 tons, the Italian flagged steamer Atlantide (5,431t) sunk off Madeira on 1 Feb 1918.

In fact, some 32 of her kills were against trawlers and small coasters under 950-tons, making her the scourge of the American and Canadian coasts.

Speaking of which, U-156‘s most important victory at sea came not from her guns or torpedoes, but from a mine.

The 13,680-ton USS San Diego (Armored Cruiser No. 6), formerly the USS California, hit a mine sown by U-156 southeast of Fire Island on 19 July and sank in just 28 minutes, taking six bluejackets with her to the bottom. She would be the only major warship lost by the U.S. in the Great War. Her skipper at the time, Capt. Harley H. Christy, was a Spanish–American War vet who went on to command the battlewagon Wyoming with the British Grand Fleet in 1918 and become a Vice Admiral on the retired list.

USS San Diego (Armored Cruiser No. 6) Painting by Francis Muller, 1920. It depicts the ship sinking off Fire Island, New York, after mined by the German submarine U-156, 19 July 1918. Courtesy of the Navy Art Collection, Washington, D.C. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 55012-KN

It was after this strike on the San Diego that the good Kptlt. Feldt sailed to the coast of Cape Cod and got into a little gunplay in shallow water and spread “schrecklichkeit” (fear) along the coast.

At about 10:30 a.m. on the morning of 21 July 1918, the Lehigh Valley RR. Company’s hearty little 120-foot/435-ton steel-hulled tugboat Perth Amboy was hauling a series of wooden barges some three miles off Orleans, Mass when she came under artillery fire from U-156‘s big guns. While the barges were sunk and the tug damaged, no casualties were suffered.

Via Attack on Orleans

This led to a frantic call to the newly-built Chatam Naval Air Station who dispatched two Curtiss HS-1L seaplanes (Bu.No 1695 and 1693, the latter of which suffered engine problems and couldn’t sortie) and two R-9s (Bu.No. 991 and another) that arrived on scene about a half hour later. The freshly minted naval pilots dropped a few small bombs, which did not damage the submarine, who dutifully submerged and motored off.

Curtiss HS-1L seaplane (Bu. no. 1735) of the type flown against U-156, here shown at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida Caption: On the ramp at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, circa 1918. Note insignia (patriotic, “Uncle Sam” hat), presumably of Training Squadron Five. Description: Catalog #: NH 44224

In all, the attack lasted about 90 minutes from the first shot to the last bomb, and caused little practical damage.

The submarine ticked off some 147 shells, some of which landed on shore and the subsequent impact zone became a tourist attraction into the 1930s.

However, it was the first attack on the U.S. mainland by a uniformed European enemy since 1815 and the first time enemy shells landed on her soil since the failed siege of Fort Texas near Brownsville by General Pedro de Ampudia’s light artillery in 1846.

Damage suffered by Perth Amboy– she would later go on to be sunk by a mine in WWII while in British service

U-156 then headed north to the Nova Scotia coast and captured the 265-ton trawler Triumph, which she used for three days in August as the first (and only) German surface raider to operate in Canadian waters. Using at times Canadian and at others a Danish flag, Triumph and U-156 worked in tandem, with the trawler creeping up on small craft, Germans taking said small boat over, rigging demo charges and allowing the Canuk mariners to row away in their dingy while the craft sank.

From an excellent article at WWI Canada:

One of Triumph’s first victim was the Gloucester schooner A. Piatt Andrew, which was fishing in Canadian waters. The schooner’s skipper told the U.S. Navy that when Triumph hailed him to heave to, he thought it was joke until “… four shots were fired across our bow from rifles. We brought our vessel up in the wind and the beam trawler came up alongside of us and I then saw that she was manned [by] German crew.’’

The Lunenburg schooner Uda A. Saunders was another score for Feldt. The vessel’s captain gave the U.S. Navy this description of the encounter: “The Huns hailed us and ordered a dory alongside. I sent two men out to her in a dory and three of the raider’s crew came aboard. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ said the one who appeared to be in command. ‘We are going to sink your vessel. I will give you 10 minutes to gather up food and water enough to last you until you get ashore.’”

However, U-156‘s days as a pirate were numbered.

On her way back to Germany, the U-Boat failed to report in that she had cleared the North Sea passage and it is surmised that around 25 Sep 1918 she struck an Allied mine and disappeared with all hands, leaving 77 dead.

With the exception of U-154, torpedoed in the Atlantic 11 May 1918 by HM Sub E35, U-156s sisters largely survived the war, but not by much.

SM U-151 was surrendered to France at Cherbourg and sunk as target ship at Cherbourg, 7 June 1921.

U-152 and U-153 went to Harwich, England, where they were surrendered to the British and sunk by the Royal Navy in July 1921 (image below).

Note how large the U-153 is compared to other common German submarines (IWM photo)

U-157 was interned at Trondheim, Norway at the end of the war but later taken over by the French and broken up at Brest.

Deutschland/U-155, was surrendered on 24 November 1918 with other submarines as part of the terms of the Armistice and exhibited in London and elsewhere before being sold for scrap in 1921.

A British Jack secures the the Control Room of U155 (The Deutschland) Moored in St Katherine’s Docks, London, December 1918 (iwm)

German U-Boat U-155 surrendered to the British, lying alongside the British Q-boat mystery ship HMS SUFFOLK COAST at St. Katherine’s Docks in London, 4 December 1918 (iwm)

German submarine U-155 on display in St. Katherine docks, London, England, December 1918

With that being said, U-156 is better remembered than most of her class, at least in New England.

Today a historical sign on a private Nauset Beach in Orleans, Massachusetts marks the occasion in which the Kaiser reached out and touched the sand there.

For more information on the Attack on Orleans, here is an hour-long lecture by Jake Klim done in 2015 for the Tales of Cape Cod historical society.

Klim runs the most excellent “Attack on Orleans” website and social media page from which I borrowed the map above and recommend his book of the same title.

For more on these blockade breaking U-boats overall, check out this site in German.

Specs:

Displacement:
1,512 tonnes (1,488 long tons) (surfaced)
1,875 tonnes (1,845 long tons) (submerged)
2,272 tonnes (2,236 long tons) (total)
Length:
65.00 m (213 ft 3 in) (o/a)
57.00 m (187 ft) (pressure hull)
Beam:
8.90 m (29 ft 2 in) (o/a)
5.80 m (19 ft) (pressure hull)
Height: 9.25 m (30 ft 4 in)
Draught: 5.30 m (17 ft 5 in)
Installed power:
800 PS (590 kW; 790 bhp) (surfaced)
800 PS (590 kW; 790 bhp) (submerged)
Propulsion:
2 × shafts
2 × 1.60 m (5 ft 3 in) propellers
Fuel oil supply merchant submarine: 200 t
Fuel oil supply cruiser submarine: 285 t
Surfaced speed as merchant submarine: about 12 kn
Underwater speed as merchant submarine: about 6.7 kn
Surfaced speed as U-Kreuzer: about 11 kn
Underwater speed as U-Kreuzer: ca 5,3 kn
Dive time: 50-80 seconds depending on crew training
Compression depth: 50m
Range:
25,000 nmi (46,000 km; 29,000 mi) at 5.5 knots (10.2 km/h; 6.3 mph) surfaced
65 nmi (120 km; 75 mi) at 3 knots (5.6 km/h; 3.5 mph) submerged
Test depth: 50 metres (160 ft)
Complement, commercial service: 28
Complement, military service: 6 / 50 Mannschaft
1 / 19 Prisenkommando
Armament:
2 50 cm (20 in) bow torpedo tubes
18 torpedoes
2 × 15 cm (5.9 in) deck guns with 1688 rounds

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