August 10, 2024 • 35 mins
This 2011 episode, previous hosts 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.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. The Vasa sank on August tenth, sixteen, twenty eight,
or three hundred and ninety six years ago today as
of the day this episode's publishing. The Vasa has made
multiple appearances on our Unearthed series, I mean a lot
of them, and prior hosts of the show, Sarah and Doblina,
(00:22):
also covered it in an episode called More Shipwreck Stories
Battleships That's going to be Today's Saturday Classic. They mention
that this is part of kind of a shipwreck mini
series that they were.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
In the middle of.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
The other episodes in that were Five Shipwreck Stories, which
we ran as a Saturday Classic in July of twenty
twenty two, and Sink the Bismarck, which has not been
a Saturday Classic, that came out on Day sixteenth, twenty eleven.
This episode also includes a brief discussion of the HL Hunley,
which we covered in a full episode on August thirtieth,
(00:57):
twenty seventeen. We also had doctor Rae Lance on the
show to talk about her research into the cause of
that disaster on June twenty second, twenty twenty. This episode
originally came out on May fourth, twenty eleven, and that
is so long ago that it is no longer in
the feed, and a lot of podcast players, Just in
case folks are not aware, a lot of the podcast
(01:19):
apps have implemented a cap on how many old episodes
of a show they'll keep available. That cap is outside
of our control, not something we have any influence over.
But our show's entire feed is still available in the
iHeartRadio app, So enjoy.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Deblina Chuckerboarding and
I'm Sarah Downey, and today we are continuing our series
mini series I guess little mini series of ship stories,
and we focused a little bit on shipwrecks and our
previous podcasts, the podcast that was called five Shipwreck Stories,
(02:09):
and we chose those mainly for their historical value, just
because we liked them to yeah, retire at ships, tutorships,
that kind of thing. Yeah, we just chose them completely
at random, well not completely 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. Yeah, And this time we wanted
to focus a little bit more on military shipwrecks.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
Get somatic with it.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Absolutely. We noticed that a lot of the ones that
were on the lists that were requested were warships navy ships,
and so we wanted to look into them a little bit,
but we really didn't expect to be as fascinated by
them as we were, right, Sarah.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
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 how it turned out. But
one of the things I thought was most interesting was
to look at the technical aspects of the design for
these ships to learn a little bit about not just
(03:08):
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 were revolutionary in other ways,
and I liked that part learning about just why these
(03:31):
ships were created in the first place.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Yeah, a lot of firsts on this list, I think,
so that should be interesting for sure, But we're going
to go ahead and get started with one the oldest
one on the list, which is the Vasa. And the
story of the Vasa all started when Sweden's King, 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
(03:57):
here and so he needed more warships Sweden would be
considered a world power. So he signs a contract in
sixteen twenty five to build several ships, including the Vasa,
which was the first of those to be built.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
Yeah, and it took two years to build the Vasa,
and the goal in the King's goal was to make
it the biggest, most heavily armed ship ever. It's going
to be a goal for a few of these ships.
And it ends up being more than two hundred and
twenty feet long, about one hundred and seventy feet high,
and built to hold four hundred and fifty sailors and
soldiers and sixty four cannons, so really heavily armed. The
(04:32):
king supposedly had a lot of input in the design.
This was 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 emulate that in his own construction project.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Yeah, so definitely going for some intimidation factor, and he
doesn't want to be outdone by any other countries here.
He wants Sweden to be at the forefront, so he
puts mastership build Heinrich Hibritsen on the project. Unfortunately, though,
Heinrich dies in sixteen twenty seven in the middle of
the process and his assistant Heinrich Kine Jacobsen has to
finish up for him. Now. The really sort of key
(05:12):
point in the story here, I think is that shipbuilders
at the time they really didn't know how to calculate
stability and Dutch ships they weren't really built from drawings.
So the master shipbuilder 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 Vasa was pretty much
an experiment, there really wasn't a model for the master
(05:36):
shipbuilder to follow here.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
So 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 Coss 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
(05:59):
times like that, back and forth. What is it running suicides?
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Yeah, definitely, And it's a bobbing back and forth.
Speaker 4 (06:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
So, yeah, it doesn't bode well. But since the sea
is awfully rocky sometimes, right, But nobody steps up at
this point, Nobody puts the brake 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 voyage takes place August tenth, sixteen twenty eight,
(06:40):
with the public proudly watching. There's people. Yeah, everybody's there
to see what happens. And within minutes of being launched,
the ship sails 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 gunports start filling up with water, which at that
(07:01):
point it's done. The water coming into the ship causes
it to sink before it's even gone thirteen hundred meters.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
Yeah, and unfortunately there's not just crew on board, but
some wives and kids too, and about thirty of the
one 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 proportions were the problem. Those two big gun
(07:30):
decks had made the ship to top heavy, and no
one person was found guilty, And the reason behind that
might 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.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Yeah, it seemed like there were a lot of people
to blame in this case, the king, the admiral, the
captain who had 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 decade
after the Vasa sank, people used diving bells to recover
most of its cannons most of the ship's cannons, but
(08:06):
then nobody really did anything about it until nineteen fifty
six or so, and that's when amateur shipwreck hunter Andres
Fronsen came into the picture. He located the Vasa after
a several year search, and basically did this by using
a rowboat and a homemade sounding device.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
So the Swedish Navy helped to raise the structure. And
the really cool thing about it is that the three
hundred and thirty year old ship was really in really
good shape. It was largely intact, and conservators spent about
seventeen years preserving it and it was finally unveiled with
great fanfare in nineteen ninety And today the Vasa Museum
(08:42):
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 items on board,
including some cool things. I mean they're coins and clothes,
the sort of stuff you'd expect, but also a Batgamon
(09:05):
like board game. So they were planning on having a
good time I guess before the ship.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Yeah, well, they needed a way to while away all
those hours at sea, definitely. Yeah, So the Vasa is
kind of a museum in itself too, and it's amazing
that they found all this stuff intact, but unfortunately now
researchers are having to work to rescue the Vasa once again.
In about the year two thousand, museum staff began noticing
these little white deposits on the ship's surface, and so
(09:32):
they launched this investigation to find out, Okay, what is it, Yeah,
what's happening? And they found out that sulfuric acid was
eating away at the cellulos 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
(09:53):
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 world and otherwise save
the ship prevent.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
This chemical reaction from happening.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Yeah, I mean, you have to imagine that something so
old is going to degrade somehow or another over time.
But it has become such an educational tool, a neat
attraction to come see. They want to save it as
long as possible. Once we have it up here, I mean,
might as well let us stick around.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
So our next shipwreck has a little bit of a
Swedish connection to which I think is pretty cooid in
planet that way. But that's how nice though it is.
The USS Monitor. Of course, it went down long after
the Vasa did, and it was the invention of a
Swedish American named John Ericson, and it was the first
ironclad commissioned by the US Navy. Its dimensions don't seem
(10:55):
that impressive if you just if we look at that alone,
it's one hundred and seventy two feet let 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 hard to describe it without seeing the picture, but
I'll do my best. Almost everything is below the water line,
(11:16):
including the steam engine, which was a really useful development
because obviously it could be armored down there. 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 the guns could
turn without having to maneuver the whole ship. Apparently the
(11:38):
guys inside the turret would get a little bit dizzy
though when it started wheeling around.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Yeah, I can imagine, seems very submarine like to me
and my limited shift knowledge.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
It kind of looks like one with some strange boxes
sticking up.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
Yeah, But fans saw this as the Navy's kind of
great hope, right.
Speaker 4 (11:56):
Yeah, it was a new technology. It seemed like it
could really blow the wooden ships out of the water.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Skeptics, though, called it an iron coffin.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
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 CSS Virginia, which was another
ironclad that had been constructed from the former USS Merrimack,
(12:27):
which was a frigate. And this battle they're rushing off
to is the Battle of Hampton Roads.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah, 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 sunk the
USS Cumberland, the USS Congress was on fire, the USS
Minnesota had run aground. So clearly the older wooden ships
(12:53):
were no match for the ironclad. That was the lesson here,
But that's not really saying that the ironclad Monitor looked
that tough at all.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
No, it was kind of tiny, and it was kind
of ridiculous looking too.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Yeah. Sightings from the Virginia 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.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
Yeah, so it looked 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 the friendly Minnesota. So
managed to survive hits from both sides there, and after
(13:35):
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 from a minute. So
he had the ship veer over toward a shoal to
recover a minute to get a replacement in. And the
(13:57):
Virginia sees this and they think it's a retreat. They
think Themnitors 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. 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
(14:17):
that is ironclad ships, because as we saw from the
US's Cumberland, the Congress, the Minnesota, it was they were no.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Match, no competition. But the Monitor's celebrity really didn't last long.
It did gain some recognition. The crew I think became
quite famous, but by December of that same year, the
ship was ordered from Hampton Roads to Beaufort North Carolina,
and the plan was to towd along the steamer the
Rhode Island, since its battleready design made the Monitor very unseaworthy.
Speaker 4 (14:48):
Yeah, it was made for fighting other ships, not for
heading out into the ocean. So bad weather delayed the
trip until December twenty ninth, and the crew was expecting
pretty rough water around Cape Patteras 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
(15:11):
the most dangerous thing was going to be possible waves
breaking over the deck since it wasn't particularly water tight
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 Kate Henry out to the Atlantic.
Sharks were following along, which was kind of an ominous sign.
(15:34):
By December thirtieth, there were really high winds and seas
and 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
(15:56):
lantern on the turret mass and the Rhode Island will
know they need to go help them or system in
some way.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
So trouble does set in around seven pm when a
toe 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 patch that they have. Water also
starts coming in the coal shoots, which leads to a
pressure drop. So the red lantern of course goes up
(16:24):
at ten pm because they are in fact in serious
trouble at this point. But then the remaining toe 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.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
Yeah, so meanwhile the Rhode Island is coming over to
start rescue operations as the Monitor shuts down her engines
and drops anchor 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
(16:58):
Rhode Island and Monitor almost collided. Then the two ships
almost crush the little rescue launch that had been set
off to get a few guys, and then the loose
toe lines even get caught up in Rhode Island's paddle wheel.
So just everything going wrong. But somehow sixteen men manage
to make it aboard the rescue cutter, and it really
(17:21):
does get worse, I guess, because they're 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 they
know that if the ship hits them head on, the
(17:42):
cutter will just break in two and 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.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Does start to get a little bit better after that, though,
by about twelve fifteen, the Rhode Island's 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.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
Clinging to the turret, and by one point thirty there's
a third launch set out, but by that point nobody
is left. 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 too for
(18:40):
helping with this rescue effort. But that red lantern sort
of has an interesting role in the later history of
the Monitor because it's the first artifact that was recovered
in nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
Speaking of interesting shipwreck finds, though, our next shipwreck involves
also a signal light signal, a colored light signal in fact,
that is found after the fact many years later. It's
the HL Hunley, and it's claim to fame is that
it was the first submarine in naval history to sink
an enemy ship. And this was a Civil War era
(19:13):
Confederate submarine named for Horace L. Hunley, a New Orleans
lawyer and businessman who financed its construction.
Speaker 4 (19:20):
So we made sure we had a Union Civil warship
and a Confederate Civil War submarine.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
Yeah, balanced coverage here.
Speaker 4 (19:26):
Yeah, definitely. So Hunley, along with James McClintock and Baxter Watson,
designed 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
(19:49):
that provided a light source, but it also provided kind
of an oxygen level indicator, and the men would watch
it for when it flickered out.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:59):
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.
Speaker 4 (20:11):
Honley's enn source right, Well, I.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
Think, well, I think Hunley dot org, which is the
Friends of Hunley organization, so is that you have about
two hours or they would have about two hours down there.
Speaker 4 (20:19):
I kind of hate the idea of watching a candle
to see when my ear is kind of run now.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Yeah, it's pretty stressful.
Speaker 4 (20:25):
I think just everything about the Honley sort of stresses
me out, including the interior dimensions.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
Yeah, it was very small, with hatchways measuring fourteen inches
by 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 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,
(20:54):
but the Hunley was actually way ahead of its time.
Present day submarines have some design similarities, including adjustable diving
planes and a few other things that the Hunley had,
so it seems basic, but it was really advanced.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (21:07):
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
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
(21:29):
the focal point there. So the Confederate hope was that
the Hungley could sneak in. It would be their secret
weapon and they'd help break through that blockade. It didn't
get off to a great start though, yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
Before the Hunley was ultimately wrecked, there were two failed
initial runs too, in which the subsunk, killing most or
all of the crews. The first run or kind of
attack attempt was on August twenty sixth, eighteen sixty three,
and Hunley himself was part of the second crew, and
he died October fifteenth, eighteen sixty three, when the sub
sanc during a routine diving exercise.
Speaker 4 (22:02):
So yeah, but the amazing thing is both times the
Hunley sinks, people are able to recover the Honley 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.
General PGT Beauregard, who was in charge of Charleston's defense,
(22:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
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 who volunteered for the crew
must be warned of the quote desperately hazardous nature of
the service required.
Speaker 4 (22:50):
In case you hadn't already gotten word, in.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
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 mission,
which happened the night of February seventeenth, eighteen sixty four,
and their target was the Union Navy's largest ship, the
USS Hoosatanic, and that was located outside Charleston Harbor, approximately
(23:12):
four miles off Breach Inlet in Sullivan's Island. So if
you can imagine this, imagine you're the lookout aboard the
USS Hoosatanic. He looks down and sees a moonlit object
in the water, approaching the ship at a speed of
three knots, and he thinks it's a porpoise.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
What else is it going to be?
Speaker 3 (23:29):
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.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
No, the ship's 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
one hundred and thirty five pound torpedo that was fastened
(24:07):
to the end of the spar and then fitted with
a barb on its end. And it's really weird the
way it works.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
Yeah, So basically the submarine had to ram the torpedo
into the housatanic and then back away. As the Huntley
backed away, a line 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 the torpedoes detonation, so it's basically like
a rope detonator.
Speaker 4 (24:33):
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 except for five
of the one hundred and fifty five man crew survived,
so it wasn't a huge loss of life.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
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 to the Housatanic when
(25:14):
the torpedo exploded, or it may have taken in too
much water when the hatch was lifted to wave the
blue light.
Speaker 4 (25:20):
Some people think that the wakes of the Union ships
rushing to assist the Housatanic swamp, the Huntley or one
of the ships may have actually struck the sub Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
And then another possibility is that the soldiers when they
were shooting at the submarine, 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
rush in. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (25:52):
So regardless, though, the Hunley went down and people looked
for it for years and years and years. P. T.
Barnum are all friend. He's appearing in all these podcasts lately.
Once even offered a one hundred thousand dollars reward to
whomever could find it, and it wasn't until nineteen ninety five, though,
when a diving team that was led by the novelist
(26:15):
Clive Cussler found the Humley on the ocean floor under
thirty feet of water and several feet of silt and sand,
just outside of the Charleston Harbor. Other people claim that
they found it first, but Custler gets the credit, and.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
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 theory is that the submarine wasn't actually flooded, but
rather that the crew died of suffocation or some other
cause instead. And they think this because the remains that
they found in the submarine actually suggest that that people
(26:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
So.
Speaker 4 (26:59):
The next and final ship on this warship list is
the Japanese battleship, the Imato, and we got a lot
of requests for the ships that were lost at Pearl Harbor.
They were really popular suggestions for this list, but so
was the Ymato. In a sort of strange way. It's
a bookend to Pearl Harbor, and you'll see why. In
a minute, air power takes out battleships, except in this
(27:22):
case the players are reversed. But when the Imperial Japanese
Navy commissioned the Yamato in the mid nineteen thirties, battleships
were really at their height. They were key to fighting
a war, and it was the heaviest and most powerful
battleship that was ever built, and a complete secret too.
They didn't want anybody to know. There were miles of
(27:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
Yeah, now we know the basic spects. Though it was
eight hundred and sixty three feet long and seventy thousands.
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
(28:16):
other battleships. Of course, the irony here though, is that
the Yamato never fought another battleship. But we'll find out
more about that in a minute.
Speaker 4 (28:22):
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 inch thick armor plate, so they seemed pretty invincible,
and the sides were also really well protected, but the
bow and the stern were sort of the most vulnerable spots.
(28:43):
If the ship is going to have a vulnerable spot,
it's that.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
But the ship was quick for its size, twenty eight
knots and four steam turbine engines. It also had one
one hundred and fifty watertight compartments and these could stop
the flooding or flood on purpose to stop listing. And
an added bonus to this was that it was really
comfy too. It had more room than average and better
food on board as well, Yeah, which I think is
(29:08):
an interesting detail.
Speaker 4 (29:09):
I saw noted a few times that the sailors were
served white rice instead of barley, so big difference.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
There.
Speaker 4 (29:16):
Another really comfortable thing, it had a sea not everywhere
in the ship, but still you have to imagine that
a lot of these 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 Ymato
was the pride of the fleet, and it featured this
six foot wide golden chrysanthemum shield that decorated the bow
(29:41):
of the ship, and even the name Yamato had poetic
connotation so it was a real pride for the Japanese
Imperial Navy.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
But the ship wasn't so well prepared for fighting aircraft,
which we'll see. It was refitted in April nineteen forty
five 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 would fly towards targets
to help gun site these long twenty five mile distances.
That was kind of their purpose, right.
Speaker 4 (30:09):
Yeah, because 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,
the Yamato was just almost too good to use. It
(30:29):
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'r saki
and hay. Yeah, I mean it was kind of nice,
and it seemed almost like the Navy didn't want to
risk her in any way. But by nineteen forty five,
(30:50):
with the Americans moving in despite Kamakazis, it was really
time to commit the Yamato. She couldn't just sit around anymore.
If you have kama Kazia out there or troops, you've
got to commit your navy.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
Yeah, even if it meant a suicide mission to protect
the home islands. So most of 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, ramships, and failing that,
fight hand to hand with them.
Speaker 4 (31:20):
So the Japanese figured that the Yamato would ultimately fall
against the American fleet, but it would probably be able
to get in some pretty serious damage before that happened.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
So they get three days at home to sort things out,
and then they sail with destroyers to protect them from submarines.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (31:37):
So April seventh, nineteen forty five, the Yamato sets out.
She has three thousand men on board just alone plus
the convoy. There are eight destroyers, there's one cruiser, and
the officers who have a better idea of what's really
going to what's about to happen than many of the
men do break out the sake for the men, just
(31:59):
trying to create like a party atmosphere so nobody gets
too gloomy. That same day, the Yamato is spotted by
US reconnaissance planes in the East China Sea and she
was still pretty far away 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
(32:21):
is the case where the weather proved to be really important,
but cloud cover really helped to conceal them. And this
first round of dive bombers really reeks havoc on the
deck and it makes it easier for the next round
of attacks from the Americans.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
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.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
Yeah, so really going for the weak spots.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
At this point things are getting bad. Even the yamatos
watertight compartments can't handle the repeated torpedo hits. It starts
to flood. Some men are shut inside these water tight compartments.
Speaker 4 (33:02):
Yeah, 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 ship in two,
but it might have been the largest blast ever at sea.
(33:23):
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 men go down with the ship.
The surrounding ships lost one one hundred and sixty seven men,
(33:45):
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 cleaned off. They're coated in oil
and really cold and exhausted and taken to land and
(34:06):
then just hidden away for about a month and their
families think they're dead, and finally they are allowed to
go home again once word is definitely out. Just a
fairly a strange end to such a huge disaster.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
Yeah, and one of the worst I think that we've covered.
And our shipwreck lists are various shipwreck coverage and as
far as life, loss of life goes.
Speaker 4 (34:32):
Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since
this episode is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar
over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now.
Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can find us all over social media at missed
in History, and you can see subscribe to our show
(35:01):
on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever
else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. The Vasa sank on August tenth, sixteen, twenty eight,
or three hundred and ninety six years ago today as
of the day this episode's publishing. The Vasa has made
multiple appearances on our Unearthed series, I mean a lot
of them, and prior hosts of the show, Sarah and Doblina,
(00:22):
also covered it in an episode called More Shipwreck Stories
Battleships That's going to be Today's Saturday Classic. They mention
that this is part of kind of a shipwreck mini
series that they were.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
In the middle of.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
The other episodes in that were Five Shipwreck Stories, which
we ran as a Saturday Classic in July of twenty
twenty two, and Sink the Bismarck, which has not been
a Saturday Classic, that came out on Day sixteenth, twenty eleven.
This episode also includes a brief discussion of the HL Hunley,
which we covered in a full episode on August thirtieth,
(00:57):
twenty seventeen. We also had doctor Rae Lance on the
show to talk about her research into the cause of
that disaster on June twenty second, twenty twenty. This episode
originally came out on May fourth, twenty eleven, and that
is so long ago that it is no longer in
the feed, and a lot of podcast players, Just in
case folks are not aware, a lot of the podcast
(01:19):
apps have implemented a cap on how many old episodes
of a show they'll keep available. That cap is outside
of our control, not something we have any influence over.
But our show's entire feed is still available in the
iHeartRadio app, So enjoy.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Deblina Chuckerboarding and
I'm Sarah Downey, and today we are continuing our series
mini series I guess little mini series of ship stories,
and we focused a little bit on shipwrecks and our
previous podcasts, the podcast that was called five Shipwreck Stories,
(02:09):
and we chose those mainly for their historical value, just
because we liked them to yeah, retire at ships, tutorships,
that kind of thing. Yeah, we just chose them completely
at random, well not completely 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. Yeah, And this time we wanted
to focus a little bit more on military shipwrecks.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
Get somatic with it.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Absolutely. We noticed that a lot of the ones that
were on the lists that were requested were warships navy ships,
and so we wanted to look into them a little bit,
but we really didn't expect to be as fascinated by
them as we were, right, Sarah.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
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 how it turned out. But
one of the things I thought was most interesting was
to look at the technical aspects of the design for
these ships to learn a little bit about not just
(03:08):
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 were revolutionary in other ways,
and I liked that part learning about just why these
(03:31):
ships were created in the first place.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Yeah, a lot of firsts on this list, I think,
so that should be interesting for sure, But we're going
to go ahead and get started with one the oldest
one on the list, which is the Vasa. And the
story of the Vasa all started when Sweden's King, 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
(03:57):
here and so he needed more warships Sweden would be
considered a world power. So he signs a contract in
sixteen twenty five to build several ships, including the Vasa,
which was the first of those to be built.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
Yeah, and it took two years to build the Vasa,
and the goal in the King's goal was to make
it the biggest, most heavily armed ship ever. It's going
to be a goal for a few of these ships.
And it ends up being more than two hundred and
twenty feet long, about one hundred and seventy feet high,
and built to hold four hundred and fifty sailors and
soldiers and sixty four cannons, so really heavily armed. The
(04:32):
king supposedly had a lot of input in the design.
This was 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 emulate that in his own construction project.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Yeah, so definitely going for some intimidation factor, and he
doesn't want to be outdone by any other countries here.
He wants Sweden to be at the forefront, so he
puts mastership build Heinrich Hibritsen on the project. Unfortunately, though,
Heinrich dies in sixteen twenty seven in the middle of
the process and his assistant Heinrich Kine Jacobsen has to
finish up for him. Now. The really sort of key
(05:12):
point in the story here, I think is that shipbuilders
at the time they really didn't know how to calculate
stability and Dutch ships they weren't really built from drawings.
So the master shipbuilder 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 Vasa was pretty much
an experiment, there really wasn't a model for the master
(05:36):
shipbuilder to follow here.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
So 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 Coss 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
(05:59):
times like that, back and forth. What is it running suicides?
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Yeah, definitely, And it's a bobbing back and forth.
Speaker 4 (06:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
So, yeah, it doesn't bode well. But since the sea
is awfully rocky sometimes, right, But nobody steps up at
this point, Nobody puts the brake 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 voyage takes place August tenth, sixteen twenty eight,
(06:40):
with the public proudly watching. There's people. Yeah, everybody's there
to see what happens. And within minutes of being launched,
the ship sails 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 gunports start filling up with water, which at that
(07:01):
point it's done. The water coming into the ship causes
it to sink before it's even gone thirteen hundred meters.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
Yeah, and unfortunately there's not just crew on board, but
some wives and kids too, and about thirty of the
one 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 proportions were the problem. Those two big gun
(07:30):
decks had made the ship to top heavy, and no
one person was found guilty, And the reason behind that
might 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.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Yeah, it seemed like there were a lot of people
to blame in this case, the king, the admiral, the
captain who had 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 decade
after the Vasa sank, people used diving bells to recover
most of its cannons most of the ship's cannons, but
(08:06):
then nobody really did anything about it until nineteen fifty
six or so, and that's when amateur shipwreck hunter Andres
Fronsen came into the picture. He located the Vasa after
a several year search, and basically did this by using
a rowboat and a homemade sounding device.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
So the Swedish Navy helped to raise the structure. And
the really cool thing about it is that the three
hundred and thirty year old ship was really in really
good shape. It was largely intact, and conservators spent about
seventeen years preserving it and it was finally unveiled with
great fanfare in nineteen ninety And today the Vasa Museum
(08:42):
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 items on board,
including some cool things. I mean they're coins and clothes,
the sort of stuff you'd expect, but also a Batgamon
(09:05):
like board game. So they were planning on having a
good time I guess before the ship.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Yeah, well, they needed a way to while away all
those hours at sea, definitely. Yeah, So the Vasa is
kind of a museum in itself too, and it's amazing
that they found all this stuff intact, but unfortunately now
researchers are having to work to rescue the Vasa once again.
In about the year two thousand, museum staff began noticing
these little white deposits on the ship's surface, and so
(09:32):
they launched this investigation to find out, Okay, what is it, Yeah,
what's happening? And they found out that sulfuric acid was
eating away at the cellulos 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
(09:53):
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 world and otherwise save
the ship prevent.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
This chemical reaction from happening.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Yeah, I mean, you have to imagine that something so
old is going to degrade somehow or another over time.
But it has become such an educational tool, a neat
attraction to come see. They want to save it as
long as possible. Once we have it up here, I mean,
might as well let us stick around.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
So our next shipwreck has a little bit of a
Swedish connection to which I think is pretty cooid in
planet that way. But that's how nice though it is.
The USS Monitor. Of course, it went down long after
the Vasa did, and it was the invention of a
Swedish American named John Ericson, and it was the first
ironclad commissioned by the US Navy. Its dimensions don't seem
(10:55):
that impressive if you just if we look at that alone,
it's one hundred and seventy two feet let 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 hard to describe it without seeing the picture, but
I'll do my best. Almost everything is below the water line,
(11:16):
including the steam engine, which was a really useful development
because obviously it could be armored down there. 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 the guns could
turn without having to maneuver the whole ship. Apparently the
(11:38):
guys inside the turret would get a little bit dizzy
though when it started wheeling around.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Yeah, I can imagine, seems very submarine like to me
and my limited shift knowledge.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
It kind of looks like one with some strange boxes
sticking up.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
Yeah, But fans saw this as the Navy's kind of
great hope, right.
Speaker 4 (11:56):
Yeah, it was a new technology. It seemed like it
could really blow the wooden ships out of the water.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Skeptics, though, called it an iron coffin.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
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 CSS Virginia, which was another
ironclad that had been constructed from the former USS Merrimack,
(12:27):
which was a frigate. And this battle they're rushing off
to is the Battle of Hampton Roads.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah, 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 sunk the
USS Cumberland, the USS Congress was on fire, the USS
Minnesota had run aground. So clearly the older wooden ships
(12:53):
were no match for the ironclad. That was the lesson here,
But that's not really saying that the ironclad Monitor looked
that tough at all.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
No, it was kind of tiny, and it was kind
of ridiculous looking too.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Yeah. Sightings from the Virginia 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.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
Yeah, so it looked 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 the friendly Minnesota. So
managed to survive hits from both sides there, and after
(13:35):
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 from a minute. So
he had the ship veer over toward a shoal to
recover a minute to get a replacement in. And the
(13:57):
Virginia sees this and they think it's a retreat. They
think Themnitors 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. 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
(14:17):
that is ironclad ships, because as we saw from the
US's Cumberland, the Congress, the Minnesota, it was they were no.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Match, no competition. But the Monitor's celebrity really didn't last long.
It did gain some recognition. The crew I think became
quite famous, but by December of that same year, the
ship was ordered from Hampton Roads to Beaufort North Carolina,
and the plan was to towd along the steamer the
Rhode Island, since its battleready design made the Monitor very unseaworthy.
Speaker 4 (14:48):
Yeah, it was made for fighting other ships, not for
heading out into the ocean. So bad weather delayed the
trip until December twenty ninth, and the crew was expecting
pretty rough water around Cape Patteras 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
(15:11):
the most dangerous thing was going to be possible waves
breaking over the deck since it wasn't particularly water tight
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 Kate Henry out to the Atlantic.
Sharks were following along, which was kind of an ominous sign.
(15:34):
By December thirtieth, there were really high winds and seas
and 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
(15:56):
lantern on the turret mass and the Rhode Island will
know they need to go help them or system in
some way.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
So trouble does set in around seven pm when a
toe 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 patch that they have. Water also
starts coming in the coal shoots, which leads to a
pressure drop. So the red lantern of course goes up
(16:24):
at ten pm because they are in fact in serious
trouble at this point. But then the remaining toe 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.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
Yeah, so meanwhile the Rhode Island is coming over to
start rescue operations as the Monitor shuts down her engines
and drops anchor 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
(16:58):
Rhode Island and Monitor almost collided. Then the two ships
almost crush the little rescue launch that had been set
off to get a few guys, and then the loose
toe lines even get caught up in Rhode Island's paddle wheel.
So just everything going wrong. But somehow sixteen men manage
to make it aboard the rescue cutter, and it really
(17:21):
does get worse, I guess, because they're 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 they
know that if the ship hits them head on, the
(17:42):
cutter will just break in two and 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.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Does start to get a little bit better after that, though,
by about twelve fifteen, the Rhode Island's 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.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
Clinging to the turret, and by one point thirty there's
a third launch set out, but by that point nobody
is left. 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 too for
(18:40):
helping with this rescue effort. But that red lantern sort
of has an interesting role in the later history of
the Monitor because it's the first artifact that was recovered
in nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
Speaking of interesting shipwreck finds, though, our next shipwreck involves
also a signal light signal, a colored light signal in fact,
that is found after the fact many years later. It's
the HL Hunley, and it's claim to fame is that
it was the first submarine in naval history to sink
an enemy ship. And this was a Civil War era
(19:13):
Confederate submarine named for Horace L. Hunley, a New Orleans
lawyer and businessman who financed its construction.
Speaker 4 (19:20):
So we made sure we had a Union Civil warship
and a Confederate Civil War submarine.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
Yeah, balanced coverage here.
Speaker 4 (19:26):
Yeah, definitely. So Hunley, along with James McClintock and Baxter Watson,
designed 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
(19:49):
that provided a light source, but it also provided kind
of an oxygen level indicator, and the men would watch
it for when it flickered out.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:59):
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.
Speaker 4 (20:11):
Honley's enn source right, Well, I.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
Think, well, I think Hunley dot org, which is the
Friends of Hunley organization, so is that you have about
two hours or they would have about two hours down there.
Speaker 4 (20:19):
I kind of hate the idea of watching a candle
to see when my ear is kind of run now.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Yeah, it's pretty stressful.
Speaker 4 (20:25):
I think just everything about the Honley sort of stresses
me out, including the interior dimensions.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
Yeah, it was very small, with hatchways measuring fourteen inches
by 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 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,
(20:54):
but the Hunley was actually way ahead of its time.
Present day submarines have some design similarities, including adjustable diving
planes and a few other things that the Hunley had,
so it seems basic, but it was really advanced.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (21:07):
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
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
(21:29):
the focal point there. So the Confederate hope was that
the Hungley could sneak in. It would be their secret
weapon and they'd help break through that blockade. It didn't
get off to a great start though, yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
Before the Hunley was ultimately wrecked, there were two failed
initial runs too, in which the subsunk, killing most or
all of the crews. The first run or kind of
attack attempt was on August twenty sixth, eighteen sixty three,
and Hunley himself was part of the second crew, and
he died October fifteenth, eighteen sixty three, when the sub
sanc during a routine diving exercise.
Speaker 4 (22:02):
So yeah, but the amazing thing is both times the
Hunley sinks, people are able to recover the Honley 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.
General PGT Beauregard, who was in charge of Charleston's defense,
(22:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
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 who volunteered for the crew
must be warned of the quote desperately hazardous nature of
the service required.
Speaker 4 (22:50):
In case you hadn't already gotten word, in.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
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 mission,
which happened the night of February seventeenth, eighteen sixty four,
and their target was the Union Navy's largest ship, the
USS Hoosatanic, and that was located outside Charleston Harbor, approximately
(23:12):
four miles off Breach Inlet in Sullivan's Island. So if
you can imagine this, imagine you're the lookout aboard the
USS Hoosatanic. He looks down and sees a moonlit object
in the water, approaching the ship at a speed of
three knots, and he thinks it's a porpoise.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
What else is it going to be?
Speaker 3 (23:29):
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.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
No, the ship's 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
one hundred and thirty five pound torpedo that was fastened
(24:07):
to the end of the spar and then fitted with
a barb on its end. And it's really weird the
way it works.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
Yeah, So basically the submarine had to ram the torpedo
into the housatanic and then back away. As the Huntley
backed away, a line 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 the torpedoes detonation, so it's basically like
a rope detonator.
Speaker 4 (24:33):
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 except for five
of the one hundred and fifty five man crew survived,
so it wasn't a huge loss of life.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
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 to the Housatanic when
(25:14):
the torpedo exploded, or it may have taken in too
much water when the hatch was lifted to wave the
blue light.
Speaker 4 (25:20):
Some people think that the wakes of the Union ships
rushing to assist the Housatanic swamp, the Huntley or one
of the ships may have actually struck the sub Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
And then another possibility is that the soldiers when they
were shooting at the submarine, 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
rush in. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (25:52):
So regardless, though, the Hunley went down and people looked
for it for years and years and years. P. T.
Barnum are all friend. He's appearing in all these podcasts lately.
Once even offered a one hundred thousand dollars reward to
whomever could find it, and it wasn't until nineteen ninety five, though,
when a diving team that was led by the novelist
(26:15):
Clive Cussler found the Humley on the ocean floor under
thirty feet of water and several feet of silt and sand,
just outside of the Charleston Harbor. Other people claim that
they found it first, but Custler gets the credit, and.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
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 theory is that the submarine wasn't actually flooded, but
rather that the crew died of suffocation or some other
cause instead. And they think this because the remains that
they found in the submarine actually suggest that that people
(26:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
So.
Speaker 4 (26:59):
The next and final ship on this warship list is
the Japanese battleship, the Imato, and we got a lot
of requests for the ships that were lost at Pearl Harbor.
They were really popular suggestions for this list, but so
was the Ymato. In a sort of strange way. It's
a bookend to Pearl Harbor, and you'll see why. In
a minute, air power takes out battleships, except in this
(27:22):
case the players are reversed. But when the Imperial Japanese
Navy commissioned the Yamato in the mid nineteen thirties, battleships
were really at their height. They were key to fighting
a war, and it was the heaviest and most powerful
battleship that was ever built, and a complete secret too.
They didn't want anybody to know. There were miles of
(27:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
Yeah, now we know the basic spects. Though it was
eight hundred and sixty three feet long and seventy thousands.
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
(28:16):
other battleships. Of course, the irony here though, is that
the Yamato never fought another battleship. But we'll find out
more about that in a minute.
Speaker 4 (28:22):
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 inch thick armor plate, so they seemed pretty invincible,
and the sides were also really well protected, but the
bow and the stern were sort of the most vulnerable spots.
(28:43):
If the ship is going to have a vulnerable spot,
it's that.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
But the ship was quick for its size, twenty eight
knots and four steam turbine engines. It also had one
one hundred and fifty watertight compartments and these could stop
the flooding or flood on purpose to stop listing. And
an added bonus to this was that it was really
comfy too. It had more room than average and better
food on board as well, Yeah, which I think is
(29:08):
an interesting detail.
Speaker 4 (29:09):
I saw noted a few times that the sailors were
served white rice instead of barley, so big difference.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
There.
Speaker 4 (29:16):
Another really comfortable thing, it had a sea not everywhere
in the ship, but still you have to imagine that
a lot of these 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 Ymato
was the pride of the fleet, and it featured this
six foot wide golden chrysanthemum shield that decorated the bow
(29:41):
of the ship, and even the name Yamato had poetic
connotation so it was a real pride for the Japanese
Imperial Navy.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
But the ship wasn't so well prepared for fighting aircraft,
which we'll see. It was refitted in April nineteen forty
five 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 would fly towards targets
to help gun site these long twenty five mile distances.
That was kind of their purpose, right.
Speaker 4 (30:09):
Yeah, because 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,
the Yamato was just almost too good to use. It
(30:29):
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'r saki
and hay. Yeah, I mean it was kind of nice,
and it seemed almost like the Navy didn't want to
risk her in any way. But by nineteen forty five,
(30:50):
with the Americans moving in despite Kamakazis, it was really
time to commit the Yamato. She couldn't just sit around anymore.
If you have kama Kazia out there or troops, you've
got to commit your navy.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
Yeah, even if it meant a suicide mission to protect
the home islands. So most of 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, ramships, and failing that,
fight hand to hand with them.
Speaker 4 (31:20):
So the Japanese figured that the Yamato would ultimately fall
against the American fleet, but it would probably be able
to get in some pretty serious damage before that happened.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
So they get three days at home to sort things out,
and then they sail with destroyers to protect them from submarines.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (31:37):
So April seventh, nineteen forty five, the Yamato sets out.
She has three thousand men on board just alone plus
the convoy. There are eight destroyers, there's one cruiser, and
the officers who have a better idea of what's really
going to what's about to happen than many of the
men do break out the sake for the men, just
(31:59):
trying to create like a party atmosphere so nobody gets
too gloomy. That same day, the Yamato is spotted by
US reconnaissance planes in the East China Sea and she
was still pretty far away 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
(32:21):
is the case where the weather proved to be really important,
but cloud cover really helped to conceal them. And this
first round of dive bombers really reeks havoc on the
deck and it makes it easier for the next round
of attacks from the Americans.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
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.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
Yeah, so really going for the weak spots.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
At this point things are getting bad. Even the yamatos
watertight compartments can't handle the repeated torpedo hits. It starts
to flood. Some men are shut inside these water tight compartments.
Speaker 4 (33:02):
Yeah, 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 ship in two,
but it might have been the largest blast ever at sea.
(33:23):
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 men go down with the ship.
The surrounding ships lost one one hundred and sixty seven men,
(33:45):
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 cleaned off. They're coated in oil
and really cold and exhausted and taken to land and
(34:06):
then just hidden away for about a month and their
families think they're dead, and finally they are allowed to
go home again once word is definitely out. Just a
fairly a strange end to such a huge disaster.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
Yeah, and one of the worst I think that we've covered.
And our shipwreck lists are various shipwreck coverage and as
far as life, loss of life goes.
Speaker 4 (34:32):
Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since
this episode is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar
over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now.
Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can find us all over social media at missed
in History, and you can see subscribe to our show
(35:01):
on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever
else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Missed in History Class
Join Holly and Tracy as they bring you the greatest and strangest Stuff You Missed In History Class in this podcast by iHeartRadio.
2. Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
3. Crime Junkie
If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people.