May 4, 2011 • 34 mins
In this all-listener-suggested episode, Deblina and Sarah take a look at why four different warships from around the world went down, and why they were built In the first place. Tune in to learn if your suggestion made it on the airwaves.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast
I'm to blame a chuck reboarding and I'm Scared. And
today we are continuing our series mini series I guess
(00:20):
little mini series of shipwrecks stories, and we focused a
little bit on shipwrecks and our previous podcasts, the podcast
that was called five Shipwrecks Stories, and we chose those
mainly for their historical value, just because we liked them
to yeah, tyrant ships, tutorships, that kind of thing. Yeah,
we just chose them completely at random, will not completely
(00:41):
at random. They were suggested by fans on our Facebook page,
but we sort of picked and chose ones from there
according to whatever we found to be cool. And this
time we wanted to focus a little bit more on
military shipwrecks. Somatic with it. Yeah, absolutely. We noticed that
a lot of the ones that were on the list
that we're requested were warships, navy ships, and so we
(01:04):
wanted to look into him a little bit. But we
really didn't expect to be as fascinated by them as
we were, right, Sarah, Yeah, it definitely turned out to
be a lot more interesting than I thought, and partly
I was thinking there wouldn't be quite as many personal
stories behind it. That was definitely a misjudgment of of
how it turned out. But one of the things I
thought was most interesting was to look at the technical
(01:25):
aspects of the design for these ships to learn a
little bit about not just why they sank ultimately, because
these are all shipwrecks, or why they went down, but
why they were built in the first place, and why
they were built in these unique ways that they were,
Because we're going to talk about some really unique ship
ships that were the biggest at the time, ships that
(01:46):
were revolutionary in other ways, and I liked that part
learning about just why these ships were created in the
first place. Yeah, a lot of first on this list,
I think, so that should be interesting for sure. But
we're gonna go ahead and get started with one the
oldest one on the list, which is the Vassa. And
the story of the Vasa all started when Sweden's king
(02:09):
Gustavus Adolphus decided that it was time to beef up
his navy a little bit. Sweden had been embroiled in
war throughout the king's reign with Poland, Russia Denmark several
wars here, and so he needed more warships so that
Sweden would be considered a world power. So he signs
a contract in sixty five to build several ships, including
the Vassa, which was the first of those to be built. Yeah,
(02:31):
and it took two years to build a Vassa, and
the goal, and the King's goal, was to make it
the biggest, most heavily armed ship ever. It's going to
be a goal for for a few of these ships.
And it ends up being more than two hundred and
twenty ft long, about a hundred and seventy feet high,
and built to hold four hundred and fifty sailors and
soldiers and sixty four cannon, so really heavily armed. The
(02:54):
King supposedly had a lot of input in the designs
with his pet project. He wanted it to be massive
and to have two gun decks, and the story behind
that is kind of interesting. He's just heard that there's
a friendship out there that has two gun decks and
he's hoping to to emulate that in his own construction project. Yeah,
so definitely going for some intimidation factor and he doesn't
(03:16):
want to be outdone. By any other countries here. He
wants Sweden to be at the forefront, so he puts
a master shipbuilder, Heinrich Hybridson, on the project. Unfortunately, though,
Heinrich dies in seven in the middle of the process
and his assistant Heinrich kind Jacobson has to finish up
for him. Now, the really sort of key point in
the story here, I think is that shipbuilders at the
(03:37):
time they really didn't know how to calculate stability and
Dutch ships they weren't really built from drawings, So the
master ship builder was basically given some dimensions and then
he figured out the proportions based on the measurements of
other ships he'd worked on, so based on past experience
kind of and since the Vassa was pretty much an experiment,
there really wasn't a model for the master shipbuilder to
(03:59):
follow here. That sounds terrifying to me right off the bat.
But once they did construct the ship, they did some
stability tests before setting sail, and the tests were ordered
by Fleet Admiral cost Fleming. The test, though, was essentially
thirty sailors lining up on one side of the ship
and then running all at the same time to the
other side. And then going back and forth a few
(04:21):
times like that, raying back and forth. What is it
running suicides? Yeah, definitely, and it's bobbing back and forth. Yeah.
And so after they did that, the ship was bobbing
a little bit too much, it seemed, and the test
was even stopped. Fleming supposedly says had they run more time,
she would have keeled over. So, yeah, it doesn't bode well.
(04:44):
But since the seat is awfully rocky sometimes right, But
nobody steps up at this point. Nobody puts the break
on the project, especially since the king wants a ship.
He's away at war already, and he tells them, hey,
let's get this thing going. So the maiden voy age
takes place August tenth, with the public proudly watching. There's people, yeah,
(05:06):
everybody's there to see what happens. And within minutes of
being launched, the ship's sales catch a gust of wind
that cause it to heal, basically turn on its side.
And then it heals a second time, even further this time,
and the gun ports start filling up with water, which
at that point it's done that. The water coming into
(05:26):
the ship causes it to sink before it's even gone. Yeah,
and unfortunately there's not just crew on board, but some
wise than kids too, and about thirty of the hundred
and fifty or so people on board die and it's
obviously a huge embarrassment for the king. He launched an
investigation to try to figure out what happened and who
he should blame. But ultimately that investigation found that the
(05:49):
proportions were the problem. Those two big gun decks had
made the ship too top heavy, and no one person
was found guilty. And the reason behind that, I'd have
been partly because the king himself had so much to
do with the design. If you were going to find
somebody guilty, he was partly to blame too. Yeah, it
seems like there were a lot of people to blame
(06:09):
in this case, the King, the admiral, the captain, who
would watched the stability test. I mean, you could have
penned it just about on anyone. But suffice to say,
the damage was done, and in the decades after the
Vassa sank, people used diving bells to recover most of
its cannons. Most of the ship's cannons, but then nobody
really did anything about it until nineteen fifty six or so,
(06:32):
and that's when amateur shipwreck hunter ANDREWS Fronsen came into
the picture. He located the Vassa after several years search
and basically did this by using a rowboat and a
homemade sounding device. So the Swedish Navy helped to raise
the structure. And the really cool thing about it is
that the three thirty year old ship was really in
really good shape. It was largely intact and um conservators
(06:56):
spent about seventeen years preserving it and it was finally
unveiled with great fanfare in nineteen nine. And today the
Vassa Museum is one of Stockholm's biggest tourist tractions, and
it's got a lot of artifacts there too, because, according
to the Christian Science Monitor, in the first five months
after the ship was raised, archaeologists found about fourteen thousand
(07:19):
items on board, including some cool things. I mean there
are coins and clothes, the sort of stuff you'd expect,
but also a bat game and like board games. So
they were planning on having a good time I guess
before the ship. Yeah, well they needed a way to
while away all those hours at sea, definitely. Yeah, So
the Vassa is kind of a museum in itself too,
(07:39):
and it's amazing that they found all this stuff intact,
But unfortunately now researchers are having to work to rescue
the Vassa once again. In about the year two thousand,
museum staff began noticing these little white deposits on the
ship's surface, and so they launched this investigation to find out, Okay,
what is it? Yeah, what's happening? And they owned out
(08:00):
that sulfuric acid was eating away at the cellulose at
the wood, kind of from the inside out. So they
thought this might have something to do with the preservation
agent that was used when they were conserving the ship,
and maybe the iron that was also used in that
process is sort of used as a catalyst or is
a catalyst to this. So they've been trying to kind
of figure out ways to extract the iron from the
(08:22):
wood and otherwise save the ship prevent the chemical reaction
from happening. Yeah, I mean, you have to imagine that
something so old is gonna degrade somehow or another over time.
But it has become such an educational tool and and
and neat attraction to come see. They want to save
it as long as possible. As we have it up here,
I mean, might as well let us stick around. So
(08:43):
our next shipwreck has a little bit of a Swedish
connection to which I think is pretty cool in planet
that way. But that's um. It is the USS Monitor.
Of course, it went down long after the Vasea did,
and it was the invention of ace Whedish American named
John Ericsson, and it was the first ironclad commissioned by
(09:05):
the U. S. Navy. It's dimensions don't seem that impressive
if you just we look at that alone. It's a
hundred and seventy two feet long, not too big, but
it's really unusual looking, and I definitely urge you to
go google a picture of it or something, because it's
it's hard to describe it without seeing the picture, but
(09:26):
I'll do my best. Almost everything is below the water line,
including the steam engine, which was a really useful development
because obviously it could be armored down there. Uh. The
only stuff that was above the water line was the
pilot house, which had these little slits for the commander
to see from and a revolving gun turret so that
(09:47):
the guns could turn without having to maneuver. The whole ship.
Apparently the guys inside the turret would get a little
bit dizzy though, and it started wheeling around. I can
imagine seems very submarine like to me in my limited
its ships knowledge, it kind of looks like one with
some strange boxes sticking up. Yeah, but fans saw this
as the Navy's kind of great hope, right. Yeah, it
(10:10):
was a new technology. It seemed like it could really
blow the wooden ships out of the water. Skeptics though,
called it an iron coffin because it does look kind
of like a scary submarine. So regardless of what people thought,
it got tested really quickly. It's maiden voyage was from
New York to Virginia to meet the Confederate counterpart, the
(10:32):
CSS Virginia, which was another ironclad that had been constructed
from the former U. S. S. Merrimac, which was a frigate.
And this battle they're rushing off to is the Battle
of Hampton Roads. And after a rough journey, they approached
the mouth of Chesapeake Bay on March eighth, eighteen sixty
two to find Confederate destruction, complete destruction. The Virginia had
(10:57):
sunk the USS Cumberland. The U. S. S. Congres Us
was on fire, the USS Minnesota had run aground, so
clearly the older wooden ships were no match for the
Iron Cloud. That was the lesson here, But that's not
really saying that the Iron Cloud Monitor looked that tough
at all. No, it was kind of tiny and it
was kind of ridiculous looking. Yeah, sightings from the Virginia
(11:18):
report actually say, quote a shingle floating in the water,
that's how they describe it, with a gigantic cheese box
rising from its center. So it looks like nothing they
had ever seen before. And I don't know if they
were terribly impressed right away, but the two ships engaged
the following day and they had four hours back and forth,
and the Monitor was hit by both the Virginia and
(11:42):
the friendly Minnesota. So managed to survive hits from both
sides there and after noon a shot hit the monitor's
pilot house, and this was sort of the key point
in this battle because the shot temporarily blinded the commander
and so he was the one who's trying to steer
the ship. He's got to stop and take a break
(12:02):
for a minute. So he had the ship veer over
toward a shoal to recover a minute to get a
replacement in, and the Virginia sees this and they think
it's a retreat. They think the Monitors finally given up,
and so the Virginia turned away just as the Monitor
swings back around, and so the Monitor thinks it's a retreat.
(12:22):
So it's this really weird battle where both sides think
they've won. I guess it's a draw. There is one
clear winner, though, and that is ironclad ships, because as
we saw from the US of Cumberland the Congress to Minnesota,
it wasn't they were no match, no competition. But the
Monitor's celebrity really didn't last long. It did gain some
(12:43):
recognition um the crew I think became quite famous. But
by December of that same year, the ship was ordered
from Hampton Roads to Beaufort and North Carolina, and the
plan was to tow it along the steamer the Rhode Islands.
Since its battle ready design made the Unitor very unseaworthy. Yeah,
it was made for fighting other ships, not for heading
(13:05):
out into the ocean. So bad weather delayed the trip
until December twenty nine, and the crew was expecting pretty
rough water around Cape Hatteras it's called the Graveyard of
the Atlantic. I think you would expect that to be
a little rough, and they secured everything they could. They
calked the pilot house slits, and they knew that the
most dangerous thing was going to be possible waves breaking
(13:29):
over the deck since it wasn't particularly watertight and there's
a crew of sixty two men on board. So here's
how it goes. The ship was towed out of Hampton
Roads past Cape Henry out to the Atlantic. Sharks were
following along, which was kind of an ominous sign. By
December thirty there were really high winds and seas and
(13:51):
by six thirty pm, a huge storm breaks. Waves were
pounding that huge turret in the center of the monitor
and crashing over the deck. And the ship works out
a plan with the Rhode Island, and that's if the
monitor is in trouble, they'll hoist their red signal lantern
on the turret math and the Rhode Island will know
(14:13):
they need to go help them or syst them in
some way. So trouble does set in around seven pm
when a tow line breaks. At that point, water starts
to pour in and so a chain of men to
kind of counteract that. They start passing buckets of water
out of the turret that's the only escape hatch that
they have. Water also starts coming in the coal shoots,
(14:33):
which leads to a pressure drop. So the red lantern
of course goes up at ten pm because they are
in fact in serious trouble at this point. But then
the remaining tow lines start to sag. Of the three
men who volunteer to cut the lines, two are swept overboard,
and then the last guy only cuts one line. Yeah,
so meanwhile the Rhode Island is is coming over to
(14:55):
start rescue operations as the Monitor shuts down her engines
and drops and her and everybody is evacuating through that turret.
Some guys are being swept overboard because the seas are
still so rough, but the rescue effort really seems like
it couldn't have gone any worse than it did. The
Rhode Island and Monitor almost collided, then the two ships
(15:15):
almost crushed the little rescue launch that had been set
off to to get a few guys, and then the
loose toe lines even get caught up in Rhode Island's
paddle wheels. So just everything going wrong, But somehow sixteen
men managed to make it aboard the rescue cutter, and
then it really does get worse, I guess, because they're
(15:36):
almost hit by a freaking whale ship that's also come
to help, and this sort of I guess I'm thinking
of movies or cartoons when you're in a little rowboat
or something and suddenly a giant Titanic size ship comes along.
But the they know that if the ship hits them
head on, the cutter will just break in two and
(15:57):
they'll all drown. So the monitor surgeon who's on board
this little rescue cutter, stands up and manually pushes the
ship aside, or pushes the smaller ship aside so it's
not just hit head on. He crushes some of his
fingers in the process and loses them, But pretty wild story.
I think it does start to get a little bit
(16:18):
better after that, though. By about twelve fifteen, the Rhode
Islands paddle wheel is finally freed and the men on
the launch make it safely aboard. A second cutter goes
out and gets everyone they can who is left behind.
Some men actually refuse to leave the turret, though they're
clinging to the turret, and by one thirty there's a
third launch set out, but by that point nobody has left.
(16:40):
The red lantern is gone, and the commander has survived,
but four officers and twelve crewmen from the Monitor have died.
Five guys from the USS Rhode Island are actually awarded
Naval Congressional Medals of Honor to for helping with this
rescue effort. But that red lantern sort of has an
interesting role in the later his Street of the Monitor,
(17:01):
because it's the first artifact that was recovered in nineteen
seventy seven. Speaking of interesting shipwreck finds, though, our next
shipwreck involves also a signal, a light signal, a colored
light signal in fact, that is found after the fact,
many years later. It's the H. L. Hounley, and its
claim to fame is that it was the first submarine
(17:22):
in naval history to sink an enemy ship. This was
a Civil War era Confederate submarine named for Horace L. Hunley,
a New Orleans lawyer and businessman who financed its construction.
So we made sure we had a Union civil warship
and a Confederate Civil War submarine balanced coverage here, Yeah, definitely.
So Hunley, along with James McClintock, and Baxter Watson designed
(17:45):
the submarine. The thing was powered manually. There was a guy,
actually several guys who would turn a crankshaft that set
a propeller into motion, and that's how the submarine would
actually move. And the whole thing was lit on the
inside by this one small candle and so that provided
a light source, but it also provided kind of an
(18:07):
oxygen level indicator and the men would watch it for
when it flickered out. Yes, so when the candle flickered out,
and some sources say that that only took about twenty
five minutes or so, that was when they knew it
was time to come up for air. Some of the
sources say that they may have had as long as
two hours down there, but regardless, it wasn't a very
long time, right, Well, I think, well, I think Hunley
dot org, which is the Friends of Hunley organization, so
(18:29):
that you have about two hours, or they would have
about two hours down there. I kind of hate the
idea of watching a candle to see when my ears
kind of Yeah, it's pretty stressful. I think everything about
the Honley sort of stresses me out, including the interior dimensions. Yeah,
it was very small, with hatchways measuring fourteen inches by
(18:49):
fifteen and three quarter inches, so it was a tight
squeeze just to get into it. I think one source
I saw likened it to uh, crawling in the middle
of a tire, so if you can imagine that as
your entrance and exit, so not a whole lot of
room to move around on the inside either. Sounds pretty primitive,
but the Hunley was actually way ahead of its time.
(19:10):
Present day submarines have some design similarities, including adjustable diving
planes and a few other things that that the Hunley had,
so it seems basic, but it was really advanced. Yeah.
So it was constructed in Mobile, Alabama, and it's there
where a few successful test runs took place in eighteen
sixty three before it was put on to put on
(19:31):
a train to Charleston in August eighteen sixty three, and
the plan was to try to break the Union Army's
blockade on all Southern ports, which Charleston was, of course
the focal point there. So the Confederate hope was that
the Hunley could sneak in. It would be their secret
weapon and they'd helped break through that blockade. It didn't
(19:52):
get off to a great start, though. Yeah, before the
Hunley was ultimately wrecked, there were two failed initial runs too,
in which the sub sunk, killing most are all of
the crews. The first run or kind of attack attempt
was on August sixty three, and Honley himself was part
of the second crew, and he died October eighteen sixty
(20:13):
three when the sub sanct during a routine diving exercise.
So yeah, but the amazing thing is both times the
Hunley thinks people are able to recover the Hunley from
the ocean floor and bring it back up and put
it into service again, although surprisingly not everyone is that
enthusiastic about this, perhaps not too surprisingly since it does
seem to be a bit of a death trap already.
(20:34):
General p G. T. Beauregard, who was in charge of
Charleston's defense, really wasn't eager for a third go round.
He said, quote, I can have nothing more to do
with that submarine boat. It's more dangerous to those who
use it than the enemy. Yeah. So he wasn't for it,
but others eventually talked him into it, so he finally
agreed to a third try, with one condition that those
(20:57):
who volunteered for the crew must be warned of the
quote desperately hazardous nature of the service required case you
hadn't already gotten work, in case you hadn't already gotten
the picture. But he did get volunteers. He managed to
recruit a crew. They assembled a crew of nine and
got ready for the Hunley's third mission, which happened the
night of February sev eighteen sixty four, and their target
(21:18):
was the Union Navy's largest ship, the USS WHO Satanic,
and that was located outside Charleston Harbor, approximately four miles
off Breach Inlet and Sullivan's Island. So if you can
imagine this, imagine you're the lookout aboard the U S
S Who Satanic. He looks down and sees a moonlit
object in the water approaching the ship at a speed
(21:38):
of three knots, and he thinks it's a porpoise? What
else is it going to be? What else is it
going to be? As it gets closer, he realizes it
must be the Confederate submarine that his admiral had told
him about. There had been kind of rumors of this
floating around, of this contraption that the Confederate Army was
going to have, and so he sounded the alarm. There
wasn't much they could do at that point though. The
(22:00):
ships cannons weren't any use against something that was so
low in the water like that. So Union soldiers just
started shooting at the submarine with their revolvers and their rifles,
and the Hunley continued to advance and managed to dislodge
its weapon, which was a spar torpedo, a hundred and
thirty five pound torpedo that was fastened to the end
(22:21):
of the spar and then fitted with a barb on
its end. And it's really weird the way it works. Yeah,
So basically, the submarine had to ram the torpedo into
the Housatanic and then back away. As the Hunley backed away,
aligned from the torpedo to the submarine would spool out,
and once the submarine was at a safe distance and
the rope finished unspooling, the tightening of the rope triggered
(22:44):
the torpedoes detonation. So it's basically like a rope detonate
ever if you think about it. So the Union ship burned,
the torpedo went off, and the Union ship burned for
three minutes after the explosion before it sank to the
bottom of the Atlantic still though all x for five
of the five man crew survived, so it wasn't a
(23:04):
huge loss of life, not for the Union side, definitely.
It said that the rebels then open the hatch and
wave their blue light that they had, which was to
be their mission accomplished signal to their fellow confederates on
the South Carolina shore. But at some point after that
it vanished and theories of what could have happened very
Some people think that maybe the submarine was too close
(23:27):
to the Hausatanic when the torpedo exploded, or it may
have taken in too much water when the hatch was
lifted to wave the blue light. Some people think that
the wakes of the Union ships rushing to assist the
Hausatanic swamp the Honey or one of the ships may
have actually struck the sub Yeah. And then another possibility
is that the soldiers when they were shooting at the submarine,
(23:49):
managed to somehow shoot out the glass on the sub's
conning tower which was sticking slightly above the water, and
that allowed the water to Russia. Yeah. So regardless, though,
the Huntley went down and people looked for it for
years and years and years. P T. Barnum, our old friend.
He's appearing in all these podcasts lately. Once even offered
(24:09):
a one hundred thousand dollar reward to whomever could find it,
and it wasn't until nine though, when a diving team
that was led by the novelist Clive Cussler found the
Hunley on the ocean floor under thirty feet of water
and several feet of silt and sand, just outside of
the Charleston Harbor. Other people claimed that they found at first,
(24:31):
but Cussler gets the credit and the Hunley was finally
raised in two thousand and Since then, researchers have been
exploring it really carefully, trying to solve the mystery of
why it never came back home, why it never got
where it was supposed to go. A recent theories that
the submarine wasn't actually flooded, but rather that the crew
died of suffocation or some other cause instead. Um and
they think this because the remains that they found in
(24:53):
the submarine actually suggests that that people were still at
their assigned battle stations when they died. So mystery we
might hear more about in the years to come, I
think definitely. So the next and final ship on this
warship list is the Japanese battleship the Umato, And we
got a lot of requests for the ships that were
lost at Pearl Harbor. They were really popular suggestions for
(25:15):
this list, but so was Themato in in in a
sort of strange way, it's a bookend to Pearl Harbor,
and you you'll see why in a minute, air power
takes out battleships, except in this case the players are reversed.
But when the Imperial Japanese Navy commissioned Themato in the
mid nineties, battleships were really at their height. They were
(25:37):
key to fighting a war, and it was the heaviest
and most powerful battleship that was ever built, and a
complete secret to they didn't want anybody to know. There
were miles of fishing net that were stretched around the
dry dock where it was being built, and no one
ever even had a full set of plans, so people
didn't know what exactly they were even working on. Now
(26:00):
we know the base expects. Though it was eight hundred
and sixty three ft long and seventy thousand tons, no
Japanese shipyard at the time could accommodate these planned dimensions
that they had because they were just so massive. There
were also three main turrets that held nine guns that
fired eighteen inch shells at a range of twenty five miles,
so pretty far, because these were meant for other battleships.
(26:22):
Of course, the irony here though, is that the MTTO
never fought another battleship. But we'll find out more about
that in a minute. Yeah, the other guns on board
could shoot more rounds per minute still at really great distances,
and the turrets, the turrets for the main guns were
protected by twenty five in thick armor plates, so they
seemed pretty invincible, and the sides were also really well protected.
(26:44):
But the bow and the stern were sort of the
most vulnerable spots. That the ship is going to have
a vulnerable spot, it's that, yeah. But the ship was
quick for its size, twenty eight knots and four steam
turbine engines. It also had one thousand, one hundred and
fifty watertight compartments and these could stop the flooding or
flood on purpose to stop listing. And an added bonus
(27:06):
to this was that it was really comfy too, had
more room than average and better food on board as well,
I think is an interesting detail. I saw noted a
few times that the sailors were served white rice instead
of barley, so big difference. There another really comfortable thing.
It had a c not everywhere in the ship, but
still you have to imagine that a lot of these
(27:28):
boats would be really, really hot. I think apparently the
monitor was supposed to just be almost intolerable the ironclad ship,
but consequently the Japanese Imato was the pride of the fleet,
and it featured this six ft wide golden chrysanthemum shield
that decorated the bow of the ship. And even the
(27:48):
name Yamato had poetic connotations. So it was a real
pride for the Japanese Imperial Navy. But the ship wasn't
so well prepared for fighting aircraft, which we'll see. It
was refit in April nine with machine guns, but was
still quite vulnerable. There were no fighter planes on board,
that was one thing. They only had reconnaissance planes which
(28:08):
would fly towards targets to help gunsight these long twenty
five mile distances. That was kind of their purpose, right, yeah,
because the they wouldn't be able to see the other
ship that was twenty five miles away without this plane
sort of helping them spot it. Again, these are all
things that are designed for fighting other battleships, not fighting planes,
which is what's going to happen. But despite these shortcomings,
(28:31):
the Yamato was just almost too good to use. It
was so expensive and so impressive, and sailors joked that
being stationed there was like staying in a hotel. I
guess you got your white rice rations and you're saki,
and yeah, I mean it was kind of nice, and
it seemed almost like the Navy didn't want to risk
(28:51):
her in any way. But by nineteen forty five, with
the Americans moving in despite Kamikaze's it was really time
to commit the Yamato. She couldn't just sit around anymore.
If you have Kamikazees out there or troops, you've got
to commit your navy, Yeah, even if it meant a
suicide mission to protect the Home islands. So most of
(29:13):
the men don't know where they're going, but they assume
it's Okinawa, where the American fleet was headed. The plan
was to meet the American fleet fight ships, and failing that,
ram ships, and failing that fight hand to hand with them.
So the Japanese figured that the Yamato would ultimately fall
against the American fleet, but it would probably be able
(29:34):
to get in some pretty serious damage before that happened.
So they get three days at home to sort things out,
and then they sail with destroyers to protect them from submarines. Yeah,
so April seventh, ninety the Yamato sets out. She has
three thousand men on board just alone, plus the convoy,
their eight destroyers. There's one cruiser and the officers who
(29:56):
have a better idea of what's really gonna what's about
to happened. Then many of the men do break out
the sake for the men just trying to create like
a party atmosphere, so nobody gets too gloomy. That same day,
the Yamato was spotted by US reconnaissance planes in the
East China Sea and she was still pretty far away
(30:17):
from her intended target, which is of course the American
fleet when dive bombers started to strike from nearby aircraft
carriers and cloud cover. This is the case where the
weather proved to be really important, but cloud cover really
helped to conceal them and this first round of um
dive bombers really reeks havoc on the deck and it
makes it easier for the next round of attacks from
(30:40):
the Americans and the fighter planes and low altitude bombers
start launching torpedoes, and these guys concentrate torpedoes on the
Yamato's weaker bow and stern and all on one side too,
and all under the waterline. Yeah, so really going for
the weak spots. Yeah. At this point things are getting bad.
Even the Yamato's watertight comp artments can't handle the repeated
(31:01):
torpedo hits. It starts to flood. Some men are shut
inside these watertight compartments, which sounds terrifying, and eventually there's
a huge series of explosions and it breaks the ship
in half. People have tried to figure out by looking
at the wreckage since then what really happened. It's likely
that a fire ignited in the magazine and blasted the
(31:24):
ship in two, but it might have been the largest
blast ever at sea. And if you look at some
of the survivor accounts, it's really I mean, a lot
of them don't even remember falling into the water just
because this blast is so big. They're just launched into
the water, but two thousand, seven hundred and forty seven
(31:44):
men go down with the ship. The surrounding ships lost
one thousand, one hundred sixty seven men and only two
hundred and sixty nine are rescued and picked up by
a Japanese destroyer. And a strange thing about this, since
the Navy didn't want word of the disaster to get out,
the men were sort of taken on board the destroyer,
(32:05):
cleaned off there, coated in oil and really cold and
exhausted and taken to land and then just hidden away
for about a month and their families I think they're
dead and finally they are allowed to go home again
once word is definitely out. Just so fairly a strange
end to to such a huge disaster. Yeah, and one
(32:28):
of the worst I think that we've covered. And our
shipwreck lists are very shipwreck coverage. And as far as
life loss of life goes, yeah, definitely. Well, we have
one more battleship that we're going to cover in its
own episode just because there are two ships involved. So
I mean, how many ownus can you have on one life?
(32:50):
I guess that'll bring us to eleven total for this
little mini series. Yeah, and there's still so many more
to go. It's not like this is the last time
we're ever going to cover shipwrecks. But it's been fun
to kind of do a bunch of them at once. Yeah,
and just seeing all the all the wrecks that you
guys suggested to it's it's really interesting. I guess a
lot of y'all have favorite ship wrecks. It's been fun
to learn about them. Yeah, definitely, we're going to hang
(33:12):
onto that list and um, maybe pursue some of them
a little further in the future. Yeah. And so for
those of you who didn't get your ship wreck recommendations
into us yet, please write in with those. You can
write us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com,
or you can hit us up on Facebook or on
Twitter at Myston History. And if you want to learn
a little bit more about diving bells, which we mentioned
(33:34):
in this episode, you can look it up on our
home page by searching for diving bells at www dot
how stuff works dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com
to learn more about the podcast. Clock on the podcast
icon in the upper right corner of our home page,
(33:56):
the how stuff works. iPhone up has a ride. Download
it today on It is e
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast
I'm to blame a chuck reboarding and I'm Scared. And
today we are continuing our series mini series I guess
(00:20):
little mini series of shipwrecks stories, and we focused a
little bit on shipwrecks and our previous podcasts, the podcast
that was called five Shipwrecks Stories, and we chose those
mainly for their historical value, just because we liked them
to yeah, tyrant ships, tutorships, that kind of thing. Yeah,
we just chose them completely at random, will not completely
(00:41):
at random. They were suggested by fans on our Facebook page,
but we sort of picked and chose ones from there
according to whatever we found to be cool. And this
time we wanted to focus a little bit more on
military shipwrecks. Somatic with it. Yeah, absolutely. We noticed that
a lot of the ones that were on the list
that we're requested were warships, navy ships, and so we
(01:04):
wanted to look into him a little bit. But we
really didn't expect to be as fascinated by them as
we were, right, Sarah, Yeah, it definitely turned out to
be a lot more interesting than I thought, and partly
I was thinking there wouldn't be quite as many personal
stories behind it. That was definitely a misjudgment of of
how it turned out. But one of the things I
thought was most interesting was to look at the technical
(01:25):
aspects of the design for these ships to learn a
little bit about not just why they sank ultimately, because
these are all shipwrecks, or why they went down, but
why they were built in the first place, and why
they were built in these unique ways that they were,
Because we're going to talk about some really unique ship
ships that were the biggest at the time, ships that
(01:46):
were revolutionary in other ways, and I liked that part
learning about just why these ships were created in the
first place. Yeah, a lot of first on this list,
I think, so that should be interesting for sure. But
we're gonna go ahead and get started with one the
oldest one on the list, which is the Vassa. And
the story of the Vasa all started when Sweden's king
(02:09):
Gustavus Adolphus decided that it was time to beef up
his navy a little bit. Sweden had been embroiled in
war throughout the king's reign with Poland, Russia Denmark several
wars here, and so he needed more warships so that
Sweden would be considered a world power. So he signs
a contract in sixty five to build several ships, including
the Vassa, which was the first of those to be built. Yeah,
(02:31):
and it took two years to build a Vassa, and
the goal, and the King's goal, was to make it
the biggest, most heavily armed ship ever. It's going to
be a goal for for a few of these ships.
And it ends up being more than two hundred and
twenty ft long, about a hundred and seventy feet high,
and built to hold four hundred and fifty sailors and
soldiers and sixty four cannon, so really heavily armed. The
(02:54):
King supposedly had a lot of input in the designs
with his pet project. He wanted it to be massive
and to have two gun decks, and the story behind
that is kind of interesting. He's just heard that there's
a friendship out there that has two gun decks and
he's hoping to to emulate that in his own construction project. Yeah,
so definitely going for some intimidation factor and he doesn't
(03:16):
want to be outdone. By any other countries here. He
wants Sweden to be at the forefront, so he puts
a master shipbuilder, Heinrich Hybridson, on the project. Unfortunately, though,
Heinrich dies in seven in the middle of the process
and his assistant Heinrich kind Jacobson has to finish up
for him. Now, the really sort of key point in
the story here, I think is that shipbuilders at the
(03:37):
time they really didn't know how to calculate stability and
Dutch ships they weren't really built from drawings, So the
master ship builder was basically given some dimensions and then
he figured out the proportions based on the measurements of
other ships he'd worked on, so based on past experience
kind of and since the Vassa was pretty much an experiment,
there really wasn't a model for the master shipbuilder to
(03:59):
follow here. That sounds terrifying to me right off the bat.
But once they did construct the ship, they did some
stability tests before setting sail, and the tests were ordered
by Fleet Admiral cost Fleming. The test, though, was essentially
thirty sailors lining up on one side of the ship
and then running all at the same time to the
other side. And then going back and forth a few
(04:21):
times like that, raying back and forth. What is it
running suicides? Yeah, definitely, and it's bobbing back and forth. Yeah.
And so after they did that, the ship was bobbing
a little bit too much, it seemed, and the test
was even stopped. Fleming supposedly says had they run more time,
she would have keeled over. So, yeah, it doesn't bode well.
(04:44):
But since the seat is awfully rocky sometimes right, But
nobody steps up at this point. Nobody puts the break
on the project, especially since the king wants a ship.
He's away at war already, and he tells them, hey,
let's get this thing going. So the maiden voy age
takes place August tenth, with the public proudly watching. There's people, yeah,
(05:06):
everybody's there to see what happens. And within minutes of
being launched, the ship's sales catch a gust of wind
that cause it to heal, basically turn on its side.
And then it heals a second time, even further this time,
and the gun ports start filling up with water, which
at that point it's done that. The water coming into
(05:26):
the ship causes it to sink before it's even gone. Yeah,
and unfortunately there's not just crew on board, but some
wise than kids too, and about thirty of the hundred
and fifty or so people on board die and it's
obviously a huge embarrassment for the king. He launched an
investigation to try to figure out what happened and who
he should blame. But ultimately that investigation found that the
(05:49):
proportions were the problem. Those two big gun decks had
made the ship too top heavy, and no one person
was found guilty. And the reason behind that, I'd have
been partly because the king himself had so much to
do with the design. If you were going to find
somebody guilty, he was partly to blame too. Yeah, it
seems like there were a lot of people to blame
(06:09):
in this case, the King, the admiral, the captain, who
would watched the stability test. I mean, you could have
penned it just about on anyone. But suffice to say,
the damage was done, and in the decades after the
Vassa sank, people used diving bells to recover most of
its cannons. Most of the ship's cannons, but then nobody
really did anything about it until nineteen fifty six or so,
(06:32):
and that's when amateur shipwreck hunter ANDREWS Fronsen came into
the picture. He located the Vassa after several years search
and basically did this by using a rowboat and a
homemade sounding device. So the Swedish Navy helped to raise
the structure. And the really cool thing about it is
that the three thirty year old ship was really in
really good shape. It was largely intact and um conservators
(06:56):
spent about seventeen years preserving it and it was finally
unveiled with great fanfare in nineteen nine. And today the
Vassa Museum is one of Stockholm's biggest tourist tractions, and
it's got a lot of artifacts there too, because, according
to the Christian Science Monitor, in the first five months
after the ship was raised, archaeologists found about fourteen thousand
(07:19):
items on board, including some cool things. I mean there
are coins and clothes, the sort of stuff you'd expect,
but also a bat game and like board games. So
they were planning on having a good time I guess
before the ship. Yeah, well they needed a way to
while away all those hours at sea, definitely. Yeah, So
the Vassa is kind of a museum in itself too,
(07:39):
and it's amazing that they found all this stuff intact,
But unfortunately now researchers are having to work to rescue
the Vassa once again. In about the year two thousand,
museum staff began noticing these little white deposits on the
ship's surface, and so they launched this investigation to find out, Okay,
what is it? Yeah, what's happening? And they owned out
(08:00):
that sulfuric acid was eating away at the cellulose at
the wood, kind of from the inside out. So they
thought this might have something to do with the preservation
agent that was used when they were conserving the ship,
and maybe the iron that was also used in that
process is sort of used as a catalyst or is
a catalyst to this. So they've been trying to kind
of figure out ways to extract the iron from the
(08:22):
wood and otherwise save the ship prevent the chemical reaction
from happening. Yeah, I mean, you have to imagine that
something so old is gonna degrade somehow or another over time.
But it has become such an educational tool and and
and neat attraction to come see. They want to save
it as long as possible. As we have it up here,
I mean, might as well let us stick around. So
(08:43):
our next shipwreck has a little bit of a Swedish
connection to which I think is pretty cool in planet
that way. But that's um. It is the USS Monitor.
Of course, it went down long after the Vasea did,
and it was the invention of ace Whedish American named
John Ericsson, and it was the first ironclad commissioned by
(09:05):
the U. S. Navy. It's dimensions don't seem that impressive
if you just we look at that alone. It's a
hundred and seventy two feet long, not too big, but
it's really unusual looking, and I definitely urge you to
go google a picture of it or something, because it's
it's hard to describe it without seeing the picture, but
(09:26):
I'll do my best. Almost everything is below the water line,
including the steam engine, which was a really useful development
because obviously it could be armored down there. Uh. The
only stuff that was above the water line was the
pilot house, which had these little slits for the commander
to see from and a revolving gun turret so that
(09:47):
the guns could turn without having to maneuver. The whole ship.
Apparently the guys inside the turret would get a little
bit dizzy though, and it started wheeling around. I can
imagine seems very submarine like to me in my limited
its ships knowledge, it kind of looks like one with
some strange boxes sticking up. Yeah, but fans saw this
as the Navy's kind of great hope, right. Yeah, it
(10:10):
was a new technology. It seemed like it could really
blow the wooden ships out of the water. Skeptics though,
called it an iron coffin because it does look kind
of like a scary submarine. So regardless of what people thought,
it got tested really quickly. It's maiden voyage was from
New York to Virginia to meet the Confederate counterpart, the
(10:32):
CSS Virginia, which was another ironclad that had been constructed
from the former U. S. S. Merrimac, which was a frigate.
And this battle they're rushing off to is the Battle
of Hampton Roads. And after a rough journey, they approached
the mouth of Chesapeake Bay on March eighth, eighteen sixty
two to find Confederate destruction, complete destruction. The Virginia had
(10:57):
sunk the USS Cumberland. The U. S. S. Congres Us
was on fire, the USS Minnesota had run aground, so
clearly the older wooden ships were no match for the
Iron Cloud. That was the lesson here, But that's not
really saying that the Iron Cloud Monitor looked that tough
at all. No, it was kind of tiny and it
was kind of ridiculous looking. Yeah, sightings from the Virginia
(11:18):
report actually say, quote a shingle floating in the water,
that's how they describe it, with a gigantic cheese box
rising from its center. So it looks like nothing they
had ever seen before. And I don't know if they
were terribly impressed right away, but the two ships engaged
the following day and they had four hours back and forth,
and the Monitor was hit by both the Virginia and
(11:42):
the friendly Minnesota. So managed to survive hits from both
sides there and after noon a shot hit the monitor's
pilot house, and this was sort of the key point
in this battle because the shot temporarily blinded the commander
and so he was the one who's trying to steer
the ship. He's got to stop and take a break
(12:02):
for a minute. So he had the ship veer over
toward a shoal to recover a minute to get a
replacement in, and the Virginia sees this and they think
it's a retreat. They think the Monitors finally given up,
and so the Virginia turned away just as the Monitor
swings back around, and so the Monitor thinks it's a retreat.
(12:22):
So it's this really weird battle where both sides think
they've won. I guess it's a draw. There is one
clear winner, though, and that is ironclad ships, because as
we saw from the US of Cumberland the Congress to Minnesota,
it wasn't they were no match, no competition. But the
Monitor's celebrity really didn't last long. It did gain some
(12:43):
recognition um the crew I think became quite famous. But
by December of that same year, the ship was ordered
from Hampton Roads to Beaufort and North Carolina, and the
plan was to tow it along the steamer the Rhode Islands.
Since its battle ready design made the Unitor very unseaworthy. Yeah,
it was made for fighting other ships, not for heading
(13:05):
out into the ocean. So bad weather delayed the trip
until December twenty nine, and the crew was expecting pretty
rough water around Cape Hatteras it's called the Graveyard of
the Atlantic. I think you would expect that to be
a little rough, and they secured everything they could. They
calked the pilot house slits, and they knew that the
most dangerous thing was going to be possible waves breaking
(13:29):
over the deck since it wasn't particularly watertight and there's
a crew of sixty two men on board. So here's
how it goes. The ship was towed out of Hampton
Roads past Cape Henry out to the Atlantic. Sharks were
following along, which was kind of an ominous sign. By
December thirty there were really high winds and seas and
(13:51):
by six thirty pm, a huge storm breaks. Waves were
pounding that huge turret in the center of the monitor
and crashing over the deck. And the ship works out
a plan with the Rhode Island, and that's if the
monitor is in trouble, they'll hoist their red signal lantern
on the turret math and the Rhode Island will know
(14:13):
they need to go help them or syst them in
some way. So trouble does set in around seven pm
when a tow line breaks. At that point, water starts
to pour in and so a chain of men to
kind of counteract that. They start passing buckets of water
out of the turret that's the only escape hatch that
they have. Water also starts coming in the coal shoots,
(14:33):
which leads to a pressure drop. So the red lantern
of course goes up at ten pm because they are
in fact in serious trouble at this point. But then
the remaining tow lines start to sag. Of the three
men who volunteer to cut the lines, two are swept overboard,
and then the last guy only cuts one line. Yeah,
so meanwhile the Rhode Island is is coming over to
(14:55):
start rescue operations as the Monitor shuts down her engines
and drops and her and everybody is evacuating through that turret.
Some guys are being swept overboard because the seas are
still so rough, but the rescue effort really seems like
it couldn't have gone any worse than it did. The
Rhode Island and Monitor almost collided, then the two ships
(15:15):
almost crushed the little rescue launch that had been set
off to to get a few guys, and then the
loose toe lines even get caught up in Rhode Island's
paddle wheels. So just everything going wrong, But somehow sixteen
men managed to make it aboard the rescue cutter, and
then it really does get worse, I guess, because they're
(15:36):
almost hit by a freaking whale ship that's also come
to help, and this sort of I guess I'm thinking
of movies or cartoons when you're in a little rowboat
or something and suddenly a giant Titanic size ship comes along.
But the they know that if the ship hits them
head on, the cutter will just break in two and
(15:57):
they'll all drown. So the monitor surgeon who's on board
this little rescue cutter, stands up and manually pushes the
ship aside, or pushes the smaller ship aside so it's
not just hit head on. He crushes some of his
fingers in the process and loses them, But pretty wild story.
I think it does start to get a little bit
(16:18):
better after that, though. By about twelve fifteen, the Rhode
Islands paddle wheel is finally freed and the men on
the launch make it safely aboard. A second cutter goes
out and gets everyone they can who is left behind.
Some men actually refuse to leave the turret, though they're
clinging to the turret, and by one thirty there's a
third launch set out, but by that point nobody has left.
(16:40):
The red lantern is gone, and the commander has survived,
but four officers and twelve crewmen from the Monitor have died.
Five guys from the USS Rhode Island are actually awarded
Naval Congressional Medals of Honor to for helping with this
rescue effort. But that red lantern sort of has an
interesting role in the later his Street of the Monitor,
(17:01):
because it's the first artifact that was recovered in nineteen
seventy seven. Speaking of interesting shipwreck finds, though, our next
shipwreck involves also a signal, a light signal, a colored
light signal in fact, that is found after the fact,
many years later. It's the H. L. Hounley, and its
claim to fame is that it was the first submarine
(17:22):
in naval history to sink an enemy ship. This was
a Civil War era Confederate submarine named for Horace L. Hunley,
a New Orleans lawyer and businessman who financed its construction.
So we made sure we had a Union civil warship
and a Confederate Civil War submarine balanced coverage here, Yeah, definitely.
So Hunley, along with James McClintock, and Baxter Watson designed
(17:45):
the submarine. The thing was powered manually. There was a guy,
actually several guys who would turn a crankshaft that set
a propeller into motion, and that's how the submarine would
actually move. And the whole thing was lit on the
inside by this one small candle and so that provided
a light source, but it also provided kind of an
(18:07):
oxygen level indicator and the men would watch it for
when it flickered out. Yes, so when the candle flickered out,
and some sources say that that only took about twenty
five minutes or so, that was when they knew it
was time to come up for air. Some of the
sources say that they may have had as long as
two hours down there, but regardless, it wasn't a very
long time, right, Well, I think, well, I think Hunley
dot org, which is the Friends of Hunley organization, so
(18:29):
that you have about two hours, or they would have
about two hours down there. I kind of hate the
idea of watching a candle to see when my ears
kind of Yeah, it's pretty stressful. I think everything about
the Honley sort of stresses me out, including the interior dimensions. Yeah,
it was very small, with hatchways measuring fourteen inches by
(18:49):
fifteen and three quarter inches, so it was a tight
squeeze just to get into it. I think one source
I saw likened it to uh, crawling in the middle
of a tire, so if you can imagine that as
your entrance and exit, so not a whole lot of
room to move around on the inside either. Sounds pretty primitive,
but the Hunley was actually way ahead of its time.
(19:10):
Present day submarines have some design similarities, including adjustable diving
planes and a few other things that that the Hunley had,
so it seems basic, but it was really advanced. Yeah.
So it was constructed in Mobile, Alabama, and it's there
where a few successful test runs took place in eighteen
sixty three before it was put on to put on
(19:31):
a train to Charleston in August eighteen sixty three, and
the plan was to try to break the Union Army's
blockade on all Southern ports, which Charleston was, of course
the focal point there. So the Confederate hope was that
the Hunley could sneak in. It would be their secret
weapon and they'd helped break through that blockade. It didn't
(19:52):
get off to a great start, though. Yeah, before the
Hunley was ultimately wrecked, there were two failed initial runs too,
in which the sub sunk, killing most are all of
the crews. The first run or kind of attack attempt
was on August sixty three, and Honley himself was part
of the second crew, and he died October eighteen sixty
(20:13):
three when the sub sanct during a routine diving exercise.
So yeah, but the amazing thing is both times the
Hunley thinks people are able to recover the Hunley from
the ocean floor and bring it back up and put
it into service again, although surprisingly not everyone is that
enthusiastic about this, perhaps not too surprisingly since it does
seem to be a bit of a death trap already.
(20:34):
General p G. T. Beauregard, who was in charge of
Charleston's defense, really wasn't eager for a third go round.
He said, quote, I can have nothing more to do
with that submarine boat. It's more dangerous to those who
use it than the enemy. Yeah. So he wasn't for it,
but others eventually talked him into it, so he finally
agreed to a third try, with one condition that those
(20:57):
who volunteered for the crew must be warned of the
quote desperately hazardous nature of the service required case you
hadn't already gotten work, in case you hadn't already gotten
the picture. But he did get volunteers. He managed to
recruit a crew. They assembled a crew of nine and
got ready for the Hunley's third mission, which happened the
night of February sev eighteen sixty four, and their target
(21:18):
was the Union Navy's largest ship, the USS WHO Satanic,
and that was located outside Charleston Harbor, approximately four miles
off Breach Inlet and Sullivan's Island. So if you can
imagine this, imagine you're the lookout aboard the U S
S Who Satanic. He looks down and sees a moonlit
object in the water approaching the ship at a speed
(21:38):
of three knots, and he thinks it's a porpoise? What
else is it going to be? What else is it
going to be? As it gets closer, he realizes it
must be the Confederate submarine that his admiral had told
him about. There had been kind of rumors of this
floating around, of this contraption that the Confederate Army was
going to have, and so he sounded the alarm. There
wasn't much they could do at that point though. The
(22:00):
ships cannons weren't any use against something that was so
low in the water like that. So Union soldiers just
started shooting at the submarine with their revolvers and their rifles,
and the Hunley continued to advance and managed to dislodge
its weapon, which was a spar torpedo, a hundred and
thirty five pound torpedo that was fastened to the end
(22:21):
of the spar and then fitted with a barb on
its end. And it's really weird the way it works. Yeah,
So basically, the submarine had to ram the torpedo into
the Housatanic and then back away. As the Hunley backed away,
aligned from the torpedo to the submarine would spool out,
and once the submarine was at a safe distance and
the rope finished unspooling, the tightening of the rope triggered
(22:44):
the torpedoes detonation. So it's basically like a rope detonate
ever if you think about it. So the Union ship burned,
the torpedo went off, and the Union ship burned for
three minutes after the explosion before it sank to the
bottom of the Atlantic still though all x for five
of the five man crew survived, so it wasn't a
(23:04):
huge loss of life, not for the Union side, definitely.
It said that the rebels then open the hatch and
wave their blue light that they had, which was to
be their mission accomplished signal to their fellow confederates on
the South Carolina shore. But at some point after that
it vanished and theories of what could have happened very
Some people think that maybe the submarine was too close
(23:27):
to the Hausatanic when the torpedo exploded, or it may
have taken in too much water when the hatch was
lifted to wave the blue light. Some people think that
the wakes of the Union ships rushing to assist the
Hausatanic swamp the Honey or one of the ships may
have actually struck the sub Yeah. And then another possibility
is that the soldiers when they were shooting at the submarine,
(23:49):
managed to somehow shoot out the glass on the sub's
conning tower which was sticking slightly above the water, and
that allowed the water to Russia. Yeah. So regardless, though,
the Huntley went down and people looked for it for
years and years and years. P T. Barnum, our old friend.
He's appearing in all these podcasts lately. Once even offered
(24:09):
a one hundred thousand dollar reward to whomever could find it,
and it wasn't until nine though, when a diving team
that was led by the novelist Clive Cussler found the
Hunley on the ocean floor under thirty feet of water
and several feet of silt and sand, just outside of
the Charleston Harbor. Other people claimed that they found at first,
(24:31):
but Cussler gets the credit and the Hunley was finally
raised in two thousand and Since then, researchers have been
exploring it really carefully, trying to solve the mystery of
why it never came back home, why it never got
where it was supposed to go. A recent theories that
the submarine wasn't actually flooded, but rather that the crew
died of suffocation or some other cause instead. Um and
they think this because the remains that they found in
(24:53):
the submarine actually suggests that that people were still at
their assigned battle stations when they died. So mystery we
might hear more about in the years to come, I
think definitely. So the next and final ship on this
warship list is the Japanese battleship the Umato, And we
got a lot of requests for the ships that were
lost at Pearl Harbor. They were really popular suggestions for
(25:15):
this list, but so was Themato in in in a
sort of strange way, it's a bookend to Pearl Harbor,
and you you'll see why in a minute, air power
takes out battleships, except in this case the players are reversed.
But when the Imperial Japanese Navy commissioned Themato in the
mid nineties, battleships were really at their height. They were
(25:37):
key to fighting a war, and it was the heaviest
and most powerful battleship that was ever built, and a
complete secret to they didn't want anybody to know. There
were miles of fishing net that were stretched around the
dry dock where it was being built, and no one
ever even had a full set of plans, so people
didn't know what exactly they were even working on. Now
(26:00):
we know the base expects. Though it was eight hundred
and sixty three ft long and seventy thousand tons, no
Japanese shipyard at the time could accommodate these planned dimensions
that they had because they were just so massive. There
were also three main turrets that held nine guns that
fired eighteen inch shells at a range of twenty five miles,
so pretty far, because these were meant for other battleships.
(26:22):
Of course, the irony here though, is that the MTTO
never fought another battleship. But we'll find out more about
that in a minute. Yeah, the other guns on board
could shoot more rounds per minute still at really great distances,
and the turrets, the turrets for the main guns were
protected by twenty five in thick armor plates, so they
seemed pretty invincible, and the sides were also really well protected.
(26:44):
But the bow and the stern were sort of the
most vulnerable spots. That the ship is going to have
a vulnerable spot, it's that, yeah. But the ship was
quick for its size, twenty eight knots and four steam
turbine engines. It also had one thousand, one hundred and
fifty watertight compartments and these could stop the flooding or
flood on purpose to stop listing. And an added bonus
(27:06):
to this was that it was really comfy too, had
more room than average and better food on board as well,
I think is an interesting detail. I saw noted a
few times that the sailors were served white rice instead
of barley, so big difference. There another really comfortable thing.
It had a c not everywhere in the ship, but
still you have to imagine that a lot of these
(27:28):
boats would be really, really hot. I think apparently the
monitor was supposed to just be almost intolerable the ironclad ship,
but consequently the Japanese Imato was the pride of the fleet,
and it featured this six ft wide golden chrysanthemum shield
that decorated the bow of the ship. And even the
(27:48):
name Yamato had poetic connotations. So it was a real
pride for the Japanese Imperial Navy. But the ship wasn't
so well prepared for fighting aircraft, which we'll see. It
was refit in April nine with machine guns, but was
still quite vulnerable. There were no fighter planes on board,
that was one thing. They only had reconnaissance planes which
(28:08):
would fly towards targets to help gunsight these long twenty
five mile distances. That was kind of their purpose, right, yeah,
because the they wouldn't be able to see the other
ship that was twenty five miles away without this plane
sort of helping them spot it. Again, these are all
things that are designed for fighting other battleships, not fighting planes,
which is what's going to happen. But despite these shortcomings,
(28:31):
the Yamato was just almost too good to use. It
was so expensive and so impressive, and sailors joked that
being stationed there was like staying in a hotel. I
guess you got your white rice rations and you're saki,
and yeah, I mean it was kind of nice, and
it seemed almost like the Navy didn't want to risk
(28:51):
her in any way. But by nineteen forty five, with
the Americans moving in despite Kamikaze's it was really time
to commit the Yamato. She couldn't just sit around anymore.
If you have Kamikazees out there or troops, you've got
to commit your navy, Yeah, even if it meant a
suicide mission to protect the Home islands. So most of
(29:13):
the men don't know where they're going, but they assume
it's Okinawa, where the American fleet was headed. The plan
was to meet the American fleet fight ships, and failing that,
ram ships, and failing that fight hand to hand with them.
So the Japanese figured that the Yamato would ultimately fall
against the American fleet, but it would probably be able
(29:34):
to get in some pretty serious damage before that happened.
So they get three days at home to sort things out,
and then they sail with destroyers to protect them from submarines. Yeah,
so April seventh, ninety the Yamato sets out. She has
three thousand men on board just alone, plus the convoy,
their eight destroyers. There's one cruiser and the officers who
(29:56):
have a better idea of what's really gonna what's about
to happened. Then many of the men do break out
the sake for the men just trying to create like
a party atmosphere, so nobody gets too gloomy. That same day,
the Yamato was spotted by US reconnaissance planes in the
East China Sea and she was still pretty far away
(30:17):
from her intended target, which is of course the American
fleet when dive bombers started to strike from nearby aircraft
carriers and cloud cover. This is the case where the
weather proved to be really important, but cloud cover really
helped to conceal them and this first round of um
dive bombers really reeks havoc on the deck and it
makes it easier for the next round of attacks from
(30:40):
the Americans and the fighter planes and low altitude bombers
start launching torpedoes, and these guys concentrate torpedoes on the
Yamato's weaker bow and stern and all on one side too,
and all under the waterline. Yeah, so really going for
the weak spots. Yeah. At this point things are getting bad.
Even the Yamato's watertight comp artments can't handle the repeated
(31:01):
torpedo hits. It starts to flood. Some men are shut
inside these watertight compartments, which sounds terrifying, and eventually there's
a huge series of explosions and it breaks the ship
in half. People have tried to figure out by looking
at the wreckage since then what really happened. It's likely
that a fire ignited in the magazine and blasted the
(31:24):
ship in two, but it might have been the largest
blast ever at sea. And if you look at some
of the survivor accounts, it's really I mean, a lot
of them don't even remember falling into the water just
because this blast is so big. They're just launched into
the water, but two thousand, seven hundred and forty seven
(31:44):
men go down with the ship. The surrounding ships lost
one thousand, one hundred sixty seven men and only two
hundred and sixty nine are rescued and picked up by
a Japanese destroyer. And a strange thing about this, since
the Navy didn't want word of the disaster to get out,
the men were sort of taken on board the destroyer,
(32:05):
cleaned off there, coated in oil and really cold and
exhausted and taken to land and then just hidden away
for about a month and their families I think they're
dead and finally they are allowed to go home again
once word is definitely out. Just so fairly a strange
end to to such a huge disaster. Yeah, and one
(32:28):
of the worst I think that we've covered. And our
shipwreck lists are very shipwreck coverage. And as far as
life loss of life goes, yeah, definitely. Well, we have
one more battleship that we're going to cover in its
own episode just because there are two ships involved. So
I mean, how many ownus can you have on one life?
(32:50):
I guess that'll bring us to eleven total for this
little mini series. Yeah, and there's still so many more
to go. It's not like this is the last time
we're ever going to cover shipwrecks. But it's been fun
to kind of do a bunch of them at once. Yeah,
and just seeing all the all the wrecks that you
guys suggested to it's it's really interesting. I guess a
lot of y'all have favorite ship wrecks. It's been fun
to learn about them. Yeah, definitely, we're going to hang
(33:12):
onto that list and um, maybe pursue some of them
a little further in the future. Yeah. And so for
those of you who didn't get your ship wreck recommendations
into us yet, please write in with those. You can
write us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com,
or you can hit us up on Facebook or on
Twitter at Myston History. And if you want to learn
a little bit more about diving bells, which we mentioned
(33:34):
in this episode, you can look it up on our
home page by searching for diving bells at www dot
how stuff works dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com
to learn more about the podcast. Clock on the podcast
icon in the upper right corner of our home page,
(33:56):
the how stuff works. iPhone up has a ride. Download
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