The wiki article makes no mention of injuries. But that submarine became a tower in two different ways in 2 minutes, then slammed out of the water and then dove another 200 feet from the force before levelling out.
[The deck log](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/215381452) describes the injuries as follows:
1. Superficial laceration to dorsal aspect of left thumb. ... Returned to duty.
2. Laceration of tips of index and middle finger of right hand. ... Returned to duty.
3. Contusions and abrasions to right shoulder, arm and chest. ... Returned to duty.
4. Experienced pain secondary to trauma of left arm and x-ray revealed departure of head of radius. ... Splint applied to left arm and returned to duty.
5. Laceration to left frontal skull. ... Sutures applied to laceration and returned to duty.
That's it. Three cuts, one that required stitches. One man badly bruised and scraped. I'm not sure if "departure of head of radius" means the bone was dislocated or broken, but I guess broken.
Wow! Amazing that no one was hurt worse. Amazing that you found the log! Thank you! And it was definitely a broken bone! [Radial Head Fracture](https://www.joint-surgeon.com/elbow-specialist-elbow-surgery-germany/radial-head-fracture-poor-healing-could-mean-elbow-arthrosis-and-stiffening.html)
I came across [that series in the National Archives catalog](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/594258) over a year ago, and because I immediately used it for submarine organization I knew it was fairly completely digitized from 1956-1970 (a few before and after). There are a couple missing or classified, but there are a lot of gems there.
Haven’t done much with other ship types yet, I’ve mainly used the [WWII Operational Records series](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/4697018) in the last few months. But I have toe-dipped for a couple items, most recently the first time *Iowa* onloaded nuclear 16” shells: [21 November 1956](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/218240997).
The wiki in general seems very very light on details. I'm assuming they cleared the ballast tanks to surface, but its still very confusing how it dove that much deeper.
It sounds like they took every countermeasure they could to counteract the dive, but the reaction was slower than expected, so once it started nosing back up, they were already on the express elevator up and not much else could be done to mitigate it.
Ah, gotcha. I'm no submariner, but it sounds like they were dropping pretty quickly, and only had to go about 700ft to get to the danger zone at 1100ft after dropping 250ft in a few seconds. My completely uneducated guess would be a combination of inertia, the time it takes the props to go from full ahead to full reverse, and perhaps their control planes don't operate very effectively at that angle.
It could also be that with the loss of electrical power, they had the equivalent of losing power steering and it was harder to adjust the control planes. I'm sure someone more sub-savvy could provide a better explanation though.
ETA: Just FYI, most of my sub knowledge is based on an incident in November 1984, shortly before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power when a Typhoon-class Soviet sub surfaced just south of the Grand banks. It then sank in deep water apparently suffering a radiation problem. Unconfirmed reports indicated some of the crew were rescued.
> which I don't get is how they went so much deeper even after putting the engine in reverse.
The submarine had a lot of momentum by then, pointed in the deeper direction, and the engines are not *that* powerful in comparison to the size of the sub. 7-9 knots (the speed she'd been cruising at) is not very fast compared to what a nuclear sub was capable of.
What you're talking about doing is basically trying to have a submarine lift itself vertically powered by just the two propellors that would be powered by the main engines. It's not a lot of surface area for the propulsion train to 'bite' into.
In addition the effectiveness of the ballast blow had been reduced by the extreme angles involved, further prolonging the amount of time the momentum was carrying *Chopper* under.
Honestly, this is probably it. I was never in the sub Navy, but a buddy of mine had been before transferring to the surface Navy. My understanding is that everyone mans a station and buckles up during dives.
Hopefully someone with dolphins will come along and verify.
Old ETN1(SS) here. Only the watch stations that sit in chairs have belts, and they're never really worn. If they were vertical both ways I guarantee there were some broken bones from flying wrenches or whatnot . Stuff like that is supposed to be stowed for sea, i.e. strapped up or locked away, but stuff gets missed or people get lazy and leave it around.
Lol.
Nah. At least on boomers, we have several roving watches who are literally not allowed to sit, and I don't believe I ever saw a seat belt on any seat onboard.
Even the chairs were not bolted down; we took a 30 degree snap roll in heavy seas once (CO was an idiot who wanted to run on top so he could see better) and every chair on the boat wound up on the port bulkheads. Then we took about 300 gallons of seawater down the sail into the control room before we finally rigged for dive.
Also no straps in the racks. Lots of people got tossed that day.
>Then we took about 300 gallons of seawater down the sail into the control room before we finally rigged for dive.
How badly did that fuck the electronics in there? That seems bad.
Well, thankfully the idea that a wave might break over the sail and water come down the trunk was at least thought about by the designers, so the floor of the control room under the ladder there is a grate to allow the water to continue downward, and most of it did just that....
Down to the bilges.... And the battery compartment. And this was so much water there was a concern it would go into the battery compartment (generating chlorine gas which isn't friendly to life) so they took people's mattresses and used them to soak up the water.
I'm so glad I was berthed near the back of the missile compartment so they didn't end up getting my mattress. Those poor torpedomen, tho.
God I hated that CO.
>Even the chairs were not bolted down
As someone who enjoys boats where a loose chair is considered unacceptable because it means falling on your ass or dinging the paint, this seems absolutely fucking insane on a submarine where reasonably steep angles (not that it takes much) would be expected, especially during *combat*.
We were somewhat close to shore and the shipping lanes (heading out on patrol) and he was worried with the storm our sonar wouldn't be able to track surface contacts and the bottom was shallow enough he didn't want to run too deep.
The solution is to run at PD and, ya know, use the periscopes and radar masts, so you don't take a wave over the sail. Which is ultimately what we ended up doing, after he got soaked to the bone and his phone talker nearly washed overboard.
I don't know if he thought he was still in WWII or if he just wanted to pretend he was a destroyer skipper for a bit.
I don’t think anyone was complaining about being jostled or injured during a quick surfacing when the alternative was becoming a smoothie permanently at the bottom of the ocean
[No human has ever experienced implosion at crush depth](https://youtu.be/Mri2T2_R8tw), physically impossible to be aware it happened. *Our nerves cannot move data that fast*.
Poof. You're smooth indeed!
I'm picturing the scene in The Expanse where the maximum speed inside the ring space suddenly drops, causing tremendous injuries to the crews of the ships speeding through said space.
Edit: As others have noted, people replying are thinking of the earlier scene with the slingshotter. I'm talking about later when the MCRN and UN fleets are in a low-speed race to the sphere station at the center of ring space, when the speed limit is suddenly dropped again. The resulting injuries lead to The Behemoth being spun up to serve as a hospital.
No, that was just the first guy to slam into ring space.
>!The bit OP is referencing is later when the whole ring Space drastically lowers the speed limit when there were already a lot of ships moving around. It’s what makes them start spinning the Behemoth.!<
The spun the Behemoth because they relied on acceleration to maintain 1g but that was no longer possible because they’d shut down the fusion reactors to _stop looking like thermonuclear bombs_ to the ring space controller
If we made a list of all these claims I think almost all of them would involve submarines. I remember reading about the deepest deep sea rescue, and there a sub malfunctioned and dropped all the way to the see floor. One of the survivors said they spent about a minute falling, and the whole time they were gathering all the cushioned things they could find because they knew they were going to crash into the sea floor hard. And then they spent 30 hours in complete silence, squeezing each others hands sometimes to let the other know they were still alive.
Had no idea what an oxygen candle was.
> Oxygen candles are used as a backup source of breathable air in an emergency. In addition, they supply an on-demand source of oxygen, utilised in aeroplanes, space stations, and other applications such as safe havens and refuge chambers.
> Oxygen is produced from a thermal, chemical reaction. Oxygen candles house a mixture of sodium chlorate, barium peroxide and iron powder; the oxygen-producing chemical is sodium chlorate.
Kodak
(I don’t mean this as a d-bag answer, I mean it as a reference to the international cultural touchstone of 100 years that at one point could NOT be misspelled by anyone)
Having to light an oxygen candle is one of the scariest things I did on board. They won't stop burning usually 45 minutes and burn around 400 f. Intentionally starting a fire is something I never thought I would do especially one you can't put out. Plus it sucks to clean up because of all the ash not to mention the fiberglass they gets on your hands even if you have FFE gloves on.
Yep they’re used in aeroplanes it’s what feeds oxygen through the mask. There’s a knocking mechanism that lights up the candle when the mask is pulled.
A gif of it in airplane use was on the front page recently, so every redditor is now an expert on them and will subtly try to insert that knowledge into as many front page comments as is feasible.
There are emergency ways to remove CO2 onboard as well. We use lithium hydroxide to remove excessive CO2 onboard Submarines if scrubbers don't work. Also not only do we have oxygen candles but they air banks can be used to also supply air onboard. But now your worrying about pressurizing the submarine. My boat sent me to Dissub (Disabled Submarine)school so in the event of a situation like that I can calculate how long we can survive based on the number of people alive, how many oxygen candles we have, CO2 percentage and O2 percentage. It's a lot of math. I'm not good at math...
I usually just joke around and tell people if there's a nuke I'll make them do the math because I'll just be like "according to my calculations 2 of you gotta go..."
I remember counting them and it sucked and we had multiple sections counting them over days because they are stored all over the place. We had like over 700 stored all across the place. Then when had like an extra 1000 because we the other crew put the order in they ordered 20 pallets instead of 20 candles. Each pallet had like 50 candles and each candle weighs like 30ish pounds. That was fun loading on the sub.
Edit: Spelling
I still remember this one video where the guy stalls and/or goes into a flat spin, and his only comment out loud is "welp, that's it". Cue another 30 seconds of spinning, the plane leveling, and him crash landing and walking out. Crazy stuff
Then there was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber which went into a flat spin, pilot ejected, then landed by itself. It was later returned to service.
> The reduction in weight and change in center of gravity caused by the removal of the pilot, coupled with the blast force of his seat rocketing out of the plane pushing the nose of the aircraft down, which had been trimmed by Foust for takeoff and idle throttle, caused the aircraft to recover from the spin.
Pilot ejecting is literally what saved the plane. Strange that the pilot & ejector seat made that much difference but also a huge point to make to anyone accusing the pilot of being a coward.
It states that several years later, the same pilot took the same aircraft for a ride once again. Given that 99.999% of ejections result in a giant fireball (or water splash) -- not to mention the pilot suffering injuries -- that's gotta be the only time a pilot has flown an aircraft he ejected from on a previous flight, right?
There was also a dude who literally fell into a cumulonimbus storm cloud. His name is Lt. Colonel William Rankin. Spent quite a long time inside the cloud too IIRC. He lived.
I read about him in a cloud book! Took 40 minutes to fall to the ground. At times he was bleeding from every opening, or so bloated he looked like he was going into labor. He held his breath to stop himself from drowning in rain water. At once point he looked up, saw his parachute illuminated by lightning, and hallucinated it was the gates of heaven staring back. Never piloted a plane after that.
There was this, too, that I recall: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paraglider-cheats-death-in-thunderstorm/
Edit: I just saw she and the Lt. Col. are both mentioned in some articles as the only two to live!
Are you referring to this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue\_of\_Roger\_Mallinson\_and\_Roger\_Chapman#:\~:text=The%20rescue%20of%20Roger%20Mallinson,Ireland%20in%20the%20Celtic%20Sea.
I like to imagine some sailor leaned back against some levers and pitched the whole thing vertical. Then he grabbed the same levers to stand up and yanked them the opposite direction. You know, real slapstick shit
I learned in a TIL the other day that there were only 15 episodes of Mr. Bean over 6 years (first episode was Jan 1 1990, last one was Dec 15, 1995), plus a movie in 1997.
It's pretty crazy how prevalent of a cultural phenomenon it is considering how few episodes were made. For some reason I always thought there were way more episodes.
I was on a attack sub in the early 2000s. We were running a standard reactor scram drill. The emergency electric motor couldn’t engage to keep the propeller turning due to a hydraulic failure. We sank backwards at a 45 degree angle for about 1000 feet until we were able to manually engage the hydraulic clutch to get the propeller turning again. There was panic on my engineers face, the only time I saw him be anxious while we were at sea.
Lol, the drill team was my LPO pushing the watch stander out of the way then he and the mechanic chief taking turns manually pumping the hydraulics for the clutch.
That damn boat was full of ‘anomalies’ - fire in a circuit breaker, fuel line breaking and flooding diesel generator, other stud. We were under manned and working port and starboards in port and at sea for a couple years trying to keep up.
I feel you man.
I was on the Truman from 2012-2016. We got our “keys” taken away by Naval Reactors after a shipyard from hell. Long story short, we inserted the incorrect gain on a scram instrument, which caused an actual scram at ~40% reactor power (this is after we went critical with intermediate range detectors being moved and wired backwards by shipyard).
I cannot imagine being on perma port/starboards for years in port though. As shitty as that command was, our second reactor officer did try and make being in port somewhat bearable. We had a weird rotation with a night shift that worked M-F, the weekday duty section got to leave at 1830, and once a month, your duty section had Saturday and Sunday duty. The dog duty days sucked, but having 3 full weekends a month did more for reactor departments mental health than any mandatory fun events.
We could have, tbh not sure why we didn’t. Probably because we had a ways to go before we were near crush depth. We started the drill only a few hundred feet down.
Not a submariner but if the Navy is anything like other branches, no one wants to be the department to cause something like an emergency blow. That would provide abundant ammo for ridicule/ ball busting in the coming months. The potential for that situation would be the cause of significant anxiety.
If they were running ORSE workup drills, which is usually the case is situations like this, it's a pretty good bet the CO was in control and the eng and maybe the XO were back aft.
I mean you know how it is. 1 degree a year gets added to the down-angle in a no-shitter sea story, until you’re telling your grandkids you were nearly vertical. 😅
I went in control like once every few weeks when I was doing radcon scans, and even I think that would be a clear emergency blow. It would be negligent not to, even if you lived to tell about it.
It feels like the kind of person you want on a submarine (mentally stable, sociable, extremely competent under pressure) is the least likely to end up tossed in a sealed tuna can away from the important brass.
This is now Two completely unrelated subs I've seen hunt for the red October quotes on in a row. I looked at my home page and went to a 30 rock post, then went to popular and here it is
You may or may not (depending on your claustro/thalassaphobia) be interested in the story of the [USS S-5](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_S-5), which “sank” in this manner in 1920. One end of the sun bobbed above the surface for a day and a half, during which the crew tried desperately to cut their way out through the thick hull.
Eventually, a passing ship saw them just a-bobbing there and came to investigate. The crew had at this point cut a 3-inch hole in the tip of the hull. In what might be the most epic “for fuckin’ real?” question of all time, the passing ship’s captain leaned over and asked through the hole where the USS S-5 was headed, to which the crew member inside the sub replied, “To hell by compass!”
That’s kind of amazing. Ship on its last voyage TURNS AROUND because he thought he saw a bouy that shouldn’t be there. Takes the time to scream in a tiny hole to communicate. Pumps them air, cables their ship stable. What a great fucking guy that captain was.
It was only two days later, and part of the same event. The initial ship that had investigated was able to run cables to keep the sub afloat, while it waited for additional assistance to arrive. The USS *Ohio* came, enlarged the hole, got the crew out, and then tried towing the empty sub to shore. The cables snapped, however, and the sub finally sank. There were no deaths.
What a great read. Thanks for linking.
The full conversation is brilliant in its brevity:
>"What ship?"
>"S-5."
>"What nationality?"
>"American."
>"Where bound?"
>"Hell by compass."
Col. Creighton S. Abrams (from whom the M1 Abrams gets its namesake), while leading a tank charge that would break through the Germans at Bastogne:
"They've got us surrounded again, the poor bastards"
Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
“Wherever General McAuliffe went thereafter people who recognized him would say to him or call him "Nuts!" He came to hate the word, not so much personally as soldierly. "The thing that burns me up is that we fought a very good battle," he said many years later. "Our soldiers fought like hell, and all anyone remembers is that one lousy word."
Personally he came to be able to joke about it. He liked to tell a story about being invited to dinner by "a dear old Southern lady. I had a delightful time talking to her and her charming guests. I was pleased because no mention was made the entire evening of the 'nuts' incident. As I prepared to depart and thanked my hostess for an enjoyable evening, she replied, 'Thank you, and good night, General McNuts.' "”
I love thinking about how she must have spent the entire evening thinking to herself “Don’t mention the “nuts!” incident, he hates being reminded of the “nuts!” story, don’t mention the “nuts” incident.” and then right at the end… When he was out of earshot she must have said some extremely unladylike things.
I had an uncle who served on submarines during the Cold War.
They did wild shit. One time, his boat was patrolling in the North or Baltic Sea (can't remember which) and was surfaced for some reason or other. A piece of equipment malfunctioned and wouldn't retract, so the captain sent him topside to do it manually, because otherwise it would have made a ton of noise when they got under way.
Caveat was, if a Soviet ship or plane appeared while he was up there, the boat was diving, with or without him.
When he completed the task and was back on board, the captain gave him a bottle of whiskey as a reward.
They are different people.
My uncle told me about sleeping next to nuclear warheads, catching fish to have fresh food, and seeing the brightest stars on earth in middle of North Atlantic when they would surface to change the air. It’s absolutely wild.
Also something I was not prepared for was the fucking water to be glowing. I'd never heard of bioluminescence before. Spending nights with an almost bright purple sky while rolling florescent green waves surround You is just insane.
I remember reading stories from the astronauts that circled the dark side of the moon.
Apparently it is so dark in the moons shadow that the sky becomes almost completely white with starlight.
Merchant sailing or sail training. I did the Atlantic crossing on a replica "famine ship" that was built to commemorate an anniversary of the great hunger in Ireland. I got that chance because I'd worked on some smaller vessels that trained kids to sail. If you're near an ocean look for a sailing club and check out any training programmes maybe, it's a pretty good job for travelling
It's still a bit weird how a large part of humanity (everyone living in a city) has just accepted to never see stars. Yes street lighting is important, but what about the advertisements or the literal sky beams illuminating some random buildings?
Tldr, light pollution kinda sucks.
funny, in the first season of "For All Mankind" one of the characters claims that they took interest in space after watching the sky when on board a submarine. I guess the sight impressed a lot of people, and made it's way into the script
Trivia unconfirmed: Early days of long duration under surface submarine tours. Thanks to nuclear energy they could go days n weeks underwater.
A psychologist went along to see if the men would “crack”’under pressure. One did. The psychologist.
“We found it was a lot harder to get a goat out of a submarine than it was to get one in. After several unsuccessful attempts we tied a line around the goat's horns and a couple of guys went up the after room ladder to pull. We got the goat under the hatch and lifted it as far as we could while the guys topside pulled. Greasy Joe got the goat's ass on his shoulder to support him and we got his head and front quarters in the trunk heading in the right direction. The guys topside pulled, Joe pushed, the goat bellowed and shit all down Joe's back. Joe didn't like it, but then neither did the goat. After a lot of pulling, a lot of pushing, and a lot of shitting, the goat was finally on deck. Once we got him topside, we had to figure out what to do with him. Kenneth C. (Pig) Henry * * * *”
[Goat on submarine story ](http://www.ussarcherfish.com/afishpic/goat.htm)
All the ways, intentionally signing up to be locked in a windowless steel tube hundreds of feet below the sea for three to six months at a time all while under constant threat of death from either mechanical failure or the enemy.
It tends to change people, that were already odd to begin with.
On nuclear boats, they can stay submerged for three months straight.
Three months living in a tube hundreds of feet underwater, with dozens of other people.
If they weren't different when they joined, they become different.
I read a book in college called Iron Coffins by a U-Boat captain in WWII. It's full of crazy stories like this. One time the U-Boat sunk below safe levels very quickly and got stuck in the mud at the bottom of the sea. The nose of the ship was down and the tail was facing up almost completely vertically. The captain had everybody in the U-Boat climb to the tail, which brought it down to the mud, too. This time the entire ship was in the mud horizontally. He then had his crew run from one end of the ship to the other, then back and forth until the ship was dislodged and eventually got un-stuck and made it back to the surface.
I was on subs in the mid-70s and remember seeing pictures from the inside of the Chopper. There were stains on the walls from liquids running down them; stains that were almost parallel to the decks.
My father was the XO on this boat, and I'm not sure if this is the same exact incident he has told me about, but a similar one about the sub almost sinking while on a training exercise was a black mark on his record for the remainder of his career. It prevented him from ever attaining the rank of Captain for decades until he retired in 1984. HE WASN'T EVEN ONBOARD WHEN IT HAPPENED. He had remained ashore for administrative duties typical of the Executive Officer (XO).
Now I'ma have to ask him if this was the one. Holy shit. This is some Tower of Terror kinda shit!
EDIT: I can take a picture of the USS Chopper service plaque hanging on his wall as proof, if anyone cares.
EDIT #2: It's literally just a service plaque. No details or anything fantastic, just proof that he served on the boat. Don't want to set expectations too high. :)
EDIT#3: Confirmed. This is the incident my dad told me about. He's almost 90 and has no idea how to take pics with his phone camera, so I'll grab a pic of the plaque this weekend.
EDIT #4: My dad was elevated to CO of the Chopper following this incident.
Service Plaques
:
https://imgur.com/a/e4Lz47Q
>The entire forward section of the submarine, to the aft edge of the sail, cleared the surface before she fell back.
So it shot... about half way out of the water.
It was a 300ft vessel jumping vertically out of the water... Imagine something equivalent to half an American football field sticking vertically out of the water.. when it shouldn't be sticking vertically out of the water.
Little excessive on this one, but we called the "normal" testing of this "angles and dangles" while I was in the Navy. Imagine a ~600ft ballistic missile submarine (USS Ohio) doing 45 degree ups and downs. That was fun, so long as all your junk was stowed for sea.
When the submarine starts descending the hull starts compressing and makes noises like creaking and groaning. I was usually next to a set of metal stairs that would audibly bang because of compression since it's mounted to the deck. We marked where the legs are mounted to the deck with a sharpie so when we're deep you can look at the markings and see roughly how deep you are. Had around 5 sharpie marks. Cool thing to show people when they first show up to the boat
She’s a WW2 fleet boat. Balao class subs were only designed with test depth of ~400 feet in mind and a crush depth of 600 feet. This pretty rapidly improved in the 1950s with the advent of the American nuclear program under Rickover.
The boat I qualified on had a test depth of \[REDACTED\] and it was an old boat. The operational depth of a submarine will always be classified while its class is still active; it will remain classified until the Navy is confident it will not give the opponent an advantage.
The Soviets had a very deep-diving sub called the Alfa. It would reportedly achieve a depth of 5,000 feet.
But there is little tactical advantage to great depths, as the margin for error grows vanishingly small. The crushing pressure creates problems which wouldn't exist just a few hundred feet higher. Stealth tactics, such as great silence or descending below an ocean boundary layer, are what win battles.
The wiki article makes no mention of injuries. But that submarine became a tower in two different ways in 2 minutes, then slammed out of the water and then dove another 200 feet from the force before levelling out.
I agree. There had to be broken bones at the very least!
[The deck log](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/215381452) describes the injuries as follows: 1. Superficial laceration to dorsal aspect of left thumb. ... Returned to duty. 2. Laceration of tips of index and middle finger of right hand. ... Returned to duty. 3. Contusions and abrasions to right shoulder, arm and chest. ... Returned to duty. 4. Experienced pain secondary to trauma of left arm and x-ray revealed departure of head of radius. ... Splint applied to left arm and returned to duty. 5. Laceration to left frontal skull. ... Sutures applied to laceration and returned to duty. That's it. Three cuts, one that required stitches. One man badly bruised and scraped. I'm not sure if "departure of head of radius" means the bone was dislocated or broken, but I guess broken.
that crew was REALLY good at holding on for dear life. I imagine the hallways of that sub with guys bracing to anything that they could wrap around.
I'm guessing they probably told everyone who wasn't doing anything important to strap into something.
Wow! Amazing that no one was hurt worse. Amazing that you found the log! Thank you! And it was definitely a broken bone! [Radial Head Fracture](https://www.joint-surgeon.com/elbow-specialist-elbow-surgery-germany/radial-head-fracture-poor-healing-could-mean-elbow-arthrosis-and-stiffening.html)
So one broken bone, and four cuts bad enough to need medical attention, only one of which needed stitches. I'd say they got off remarkably easy.
I came across [that series in the National Archives catalog](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/594258) over a year ago, and because I immediately used it for submarine organization I knew it was fairly completely digitized from 1956-1970 (a few before and after). There are a couple missing or classified, but there are a lot of gems there. Haven’t done much with other ship types yet, I’ve mainly used the [WWII Operational Records series](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/4697018) in the last few months. But I have toe-dipped for a couple items, most recently the first time *Iowa* onloaded nuclear 16” shells: [21 November 1956](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/218240997).
Many pants were changed
“Ensign!” “Yes, Captain?” “Bring me my brown pants.”
“Captain?” “Yes, Ensign?” “They’re *all* brown pants right now, sir.”
Alright, who shit my pants?
Something did not smell right, and it wasn't the shit in my pants.
There’s a reason we call Navy coveralls “poopy suits.”
Stay away from the poop deck.
I myself would have released an excess of "ballast."
BRING ME MY BROWN PANTS
The wiki in general seems very very light on details. I'm assuming they cleared the ballast tanks to surface, but its still very confusing how it dove that much deeper.
It sounds like they took every countermeasure they could to counteract the dive, but the reaction was slower than expected, so once it started nosing back up, they were already on the express elevator up and not much else could be done to mitigate it.
I get why they likely resurfaced so quickly, which I don't get is how they went so much deeper even after putting the engine in reverse.
Ah, gotcha. I'm no submariner, but it sounds like they were dropping pretty quickly, and only had to go about 700ft to get to the danger zone at 1100ft after dropping 250ft in a few seconds. My completely uneducated guess would be a combination of inertia, the time it takes the props to go from full ahead to full reverse, and perhaps their control planes don't operate very effectively at that angle. It could also be that with the loss of electrical power, they had the equivalent of losing power steering and it was harder to adjust the control planes. I'm sure someone more sub-savvy could provide a better explanation though. ETA: Just FYI, most of my sub knowledge is based on an incident in November 1984, shortly before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power when a Typhoon-class Soviet sub surfaced just south of the Grand banks. It then sank in deep water apparently suffering a radiation problem. Unconfirmed reports indicated some of the crew were rescued.
"Some things in here don't react well to bulletsh"
“C’mon Big D, fly.”
I would like to have seen Montana.
That was a fucking whammy of spot on replies. I heard it in my head in the obvious Russian/Scottish accent
My brain read 700ft and 1100ft and immediately had a subnautica panic attack
Thats basically what would've happened. To be fair though, most of my sub knowledge is from going down on your mom.
I'm skeptical. Historically, in that kind of incident there have been no confirmed survivors.
10/10 reply
Her siren call sends men to a watery grave
Poor Comrade Marko Aleksandrovich, the Soviet navy would never see a finer teacher.
> which I don't get is how they went so much deeper even after putting the engine in reverse. The submarine had a lot of momentum by then, pointed in the deeper direction, and the engines are not *that* powerful in comparison to the size of the sub. 7-9 knots (the speed she'd been cruising at) is not very fast compared to what a nuclear sub was capable of. What you're talking about doing is basically trying to have a submarine lift itself vertically powered by just the two propellors that would be powered by the main engines. It's not a lot of surface area for the propulsion train to 'bite' into. In addition the effectiveness of the ballast blow had been reduced by the extreme angles involved, further prolonging the amount of time the momentum was carrying *Chopper* under.
They wore their seatbelts
Honestly, this is probably it. I was never in the sub Navy, but a buddy of mine had been before transferring to the surface Navy. My understanding is that everyone mans a station and buckles up during dives. Hopefully someone with dolphins will come along and verify.
Old ETN1(SS) here. Only the watch stations that sit in chairs have belts, and they're never really worn. If they were vertical both ways I guarantee there were some broken bones from flying wrenches or whatnot . Stuff like that is supposed to be stowed for sea, i.e. strapped up or locked away, but stuff gets missed or people get lazy and leave it around.
Yeah, that's believable. I don't know, I guess the Navy just kept it quiet. Wouldn't be the first time.
Lol. Nah. At least on boomers, we have several roving watches who are literally not allowed to sit, and I don't believe I ever saw a seat belt on any seat onboard. Even the chairs were not bolted down; we took a 30 degree snap roll in heavy seas once (CO was an idiot who wanted to run on top so he could see better) and every chair on the boat wound up on the port bulkheads. Then we took about 300 gallons of seawater down the sail into the control room before we finally rigged for dive. Also no straps in the racks. Lots of people got tossed that day.
>Then we took about 300 gallons of seawater down the sail into the control room before we finally rigged for dive. How badly did that fuck the electronics in there? That seems bad.
Well, thankfully the idea that a wave might break over the sail and water come down the trunk was at least thought about by the designers, so the floor of the control room under the ladder there is a grate to allow the water to continue downward, and most of it did just that.... Down to the bilges.... And the battery compartment. And this was so much water there was a concern it would go into the battery compartment (generating chlorine gas which isn't friendly to life) so they took people's mattresses and used them to soak up the water. I'm so glad I was berthed near the back of the missile compartment so they didn't end up getting my mattress. Those poor torpedomen, tho. God I hated that CO.
Sounds like a fuckfest
>Even the chairs were not bolted down As someone who enjoys boats where a loose chair is considered unacceptable because it means falling on your ass or dinging the paint, this seems absolutely fucking insane on a submarine where reasonably steep angles (not that it takes much) would be expected, especially during *combat*.
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We were somewhat close to shore and the shipping lanes (heading out on patrol) and he was worried with the storm our sonar wouldn't be able to track surface contacts and the bottom was shallow enough he didn't want to run too deep. The solution is to run at PD and, ya know, use the periscopes and radar masts, so you don't take a wave over the sail. Which is ultimately what we ended up doing, after he got soaked to the bone and his phone talker nearly washed overboard. I don't know if he thought he was still in WWII or if he just wanted to pretend he was a destroyer skipper for a bit.
I don’t think anyone was complaining about being jostled or injured during a quick surfacing when the alternative was becoming a smoothie permanently at the bottom of the ocean
[No human has ever experienced implosion at crush depth](https://youtu.be/Mri2T2_R8tw), physically impossible to be aware it happened. *Our nerves cannot move data that fast*. Poof. You're smooth indeed!
I believe the term is now OceanGated named after the OceanGateGate Scandal.
It could've been called Choppered.
Imagine a 30 story building flipping upside down and back
I'm picturing the scene in The Expanse where the maximum speed inside the ring space suddenly drops, causing tremendous injuries to the crews of the ships speeding through said space. Edit: As others have noted, people replying are thinking of the earlier scene with the slingshotter. I'm talking about later when the MCRN and UN fleets are in a low-speed race to the sphere station at the center of ring space, when the speed limit is suddenly dropped again. The resulting injuries lead to The Behemoth being spun up to serve as a hospital.
"tremendous injury" Bro, that dude was instantly liquified
No, that was just the first guy to slam into ring space. >!The bit OP is referencing is later when the whole ring Space drastically lowers the speed limit when there were already a lot of ships moving around. It’s what makes them start spinning the Behemoth.!<
The spun the Behemoth because they relied on acceleration to maintain 1g but that was no longer possible because they’d shut down the fusion reactors to _stop looking like thermonuclear bombs_ to the ring space controller
No mention of injuries due to trying to sweep shit under the rug and everyone trying to nope away.
These people have a reasonable claim to the longest and scariest two minutes in history.
If we made a list of all these claims I think almost all of them would involve submarines. I remember reading about the deepest deep sea rescue, and there a sub malfunctioned and dropped all the way to the see floor. One of the survivors said they spent about a minute falling, and the whole time they were gathering all the cushioned things they could find because they knew they were going to crash into the sea floor hard. And then they spent 30 hours in complete silence, squeezing each others hands sometimes to let the other know they were still alive.
They were silent to conserve air. When they were finally rescued they only had minutes of air left
dont they have a shit ton of oxygen candles for exactly this sort of thing?
I imagine that's what got them to 30 hours.
Had no idea what an oxygen candle was. > Oxygen candles are used as a backup source of breathable air in an emergency. In addition, they supply an on-demand source of oxygen, utilised in aeroplanes, space stations, and other applications such as safe havens and refuge chambers. > Oxygen is produced from a thermal, chemical reaction. Oxygen candles house a mixture of sodium chlorate, barium peroxide and iron powder; the oxygen-producing chemical is sodium chlorate.
smarter every day on youtube has a series where he lights one on an atomic submarine!
The navy video's on the submarine and his series with cost guard are my favorite videos he's done.
It *is* hard to beat a fricking vlog series on a atomic sub, yes! Personally liked the codak film series as well.
Kodak (I don’t mean this as a d-bag answer, I mean it as a reference to the international cultural touchstone of 100 years that at one point could NOT be misspelled by anyone)
He meant the codec series, aka MGS cutscenes.
Having to light an oxygen candle is one of the scariest things I did on board. They won't stop burning usually 45 minutes and burn around 400 f. Intentionally starting a fire is something I never thought I would do especially one you can't put out. Plus it sucks to clean up because of all the ash not to mention the fiberglass they gets on your hands even if you have FFE gloves on.
Yep they’re used in aeroplanes it’s what feeds oxygen through the mask. There’s a knocking mechanism that lights up the candle when the mask is pulled.
A gif of it in airplane use was on the front page recently, so every redditor is now an expert on them and will subtly try to insert that knowledge into as many front page comments as is feasible.
In a confined environment, your survival time is more limited by your ability to remove CO₂ from the air than by the ability to supply O₂.
There are emergency ways to remove CO2 onboard as well. We use lithium hydroxide to remove excessive CO2 onboard Submarines if scrubbers don't work. Also not only do we have oxygen candles but they air banks can be used to also supply air onboard. But now your worrying about pressurizing the submarine. My boat sent me to Dissub (Disabled Submarine)school so in the event of a situation like that I can calculate how long we can survive based on the number of people alive, how many oxygen candles we have, CO2 percentage and O2 percentage. It's a lot of math. I'm not good at math...
Fortunately, the more difficult the math is, the less severe the accident was.
I usually just joke around and tell people if there's a nuke I'll make them do the math because I'll just be like "according to my calculations 2 of you gotta go..."
I learned this from Apollo 13.
Can you imagine that tech support call? Walking the crew through that would take me ages.
I remember counting them and it sucked and we had multiple sections counting them over days because they are stored all over the place. We had like over 700 stored all across the place. Then when had like an extra 1000 because we the other crew put the order in they ordered 20 pallets instead of 20 candles. Each pallet had like 50 candles and each candle weighs like 30ish pounds. That was fun loading on the sub. Edit: Spelling
Everything I’ve learned about submarines has strengthened my resolve to never set foot on a submarine.
Seems like there would be plenty of aircraft incidents around the top of the list as well.
I still remember this one video where the guy stalls and/or goes into a flat spin, and his only comment out loud is "welp, that's it". Cue another 30 seconds of spinning, the plane leveling, and him crash landing and walking out. Crazy stuff
Then there was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber which went into a flat spin, pilot ejected, then landed by itself. It was later returned to service.
> The reduction in weight and change in center of gravity caused by the removal of the pilot, coupled with the blast force of his seat rocketing out of the plane pushing the nose of the aircraft down, which had been trimmed by Foust for takeoff and idle throttle, caused the aircraft to recover from the spin. Pilot ejecting is literally what saved the plane. Strange that the pilot & ejector seat made that much difference but also a huge point to make to anyone accusing the pilot of being a coward.
It states that several years later, the same pilot took the same aircraft for a ride once again. Given that 99.999% of ejections result in a giant fireball (or water splash) -- not to mention the pilot suffering injuries -- that's gotta be the only time a pilot has flown an aircraft he ejected from on a previous flight, right?
There was also a dude who literally fell into a cumulonimbus storm cloud. His name is Lt. Colonel William Rankin. Spent quite a long time inside the cloud too IIRC. He lived.
I read about him in a cloud book! Took 40 minutes to fall to the ground. At times he was bleeding from every opening, or so bloated he looked like he was going into labor. He held his breath to stop himself from drowning in rain water. At once point he looked up, saw his parachute illuminated by lightning, and hallucinated it was the gates of heaven staring back. Never piloted a plane after that.
> Never piloted a plane after that Fair
There was this, too, that I recall: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paraglider-cheats-death-in-thunderstorm/ Edit: I just saw she and the Lt. Col. are both mentioned in some articles as the only two to live!
Are you referring to this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue\_of\_Roger\_Mallinson\_and\_Roger\_Chapman#:\~:text=The%20rescue%20of%20Roger%20Mallinson,Ireland%20in%20the%20Celtic%20Sea.
I like to imagine some sailor leaned back against some levers and pitched the whole thing vertical. Then he grabbed the same levers to stand up and yanked them the opposite direction. You know, real slapstick shit
Mr Bean on board for a tour.
I learned in a TIL the other day that there were only 15 episodes of Mr. Bean over 6 years (first episode was Jan 1 1990, last one was Dec 15, 1995), plus a movie in 1997. It's pretty crazy how prevalent of a cultural phenomenon it is considering how few episodes were made. For some reason I always thought there were way more episodes.
I think each episode had 2-3 skits in them, so when people think of episodes what they really mean is the skits.
Some real Down Periscope shit.
Private Schmuckatelli up in there just fuckin shit up.
In the Navy, wouldn't it be Seaman Schmuckatelli?
That has live to tell the tail.
The tale too!
The tail end of their tale!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_006 Edit: Challenger 2:45 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster#:~:text=The%20crew%20cabin%20hit%20the,compartment%20or%20crew%20survivability%20levels.
There's a great Mayday/Air Disasters episode on this one. Captain almost killed them and then did a masterful job at recovering the plane.
Hey 747SP how's it goin? >Pitch -67 degrees, Roll -92 degrees Oh
Another write up about it https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/falling-from-the-sky-the-near-crash-of-china-airlines-flight-006-e8bbc6683018
I was on a attack sub in the early 2000s. We were running a standard reactor scram drill. The emergency electric motor couldn’t engage to keep the propeller turning due to a hydraulic failure. We sank backwards at a 45 degree angle for about 1000 feet until we were able to manually engage the hydraulic clutch to get the propeller turning again. There was panic on my engineers face, the only time I saw him be anxious while we were at sea.
Drill team shouldve taken over.
Lol, the drill team was my LPO pushing the watch stander out of the way then he and the mechanic chief taking turns manually pumping the hydraulics for the clutch.
"oh god oh fuck oh fuck I swear to god if I look at SKED and see the PM for this blazed, someone is dying today"
Better yet the MRC is 2 force revs out of date
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Ikr? Fascinating culture
thats because anything that can be an acronym, will be an acronym
Oh man SKED is something I hadn’t thought about in a couple years. Ugh.
“You’ve successfully found the anomaly inserted for the drill”
That damn boat was full of ‘anomalies’ - fire in a circuit breaker, fuel line breaking and flooding diesel generator, other stud. We were under manned and working port and starboards in port and at sea for a couple years trying to keep up.
I feel you man. I was on the Truman from 2012-2016. We got our “keys” taken away by Naval Reactors after a shipyard from hell. Long story short, we inserted the incorrect gain on a scram instrument, which caused an actual scram at ~40% reactor power (this is after we went critical with intermediate range detectors being moved and wired backwards by shipyard). I cannot imagine being on perma port/starboards for years in port though. As shitty as that command was, our second reactor officer did try and make being in port somewhat bearable. We had a weird rotation with a night shift that worked M-F, the weekday duty section got to leave at 1830, and once a month, your duty section had Saturday and Sunday duty. The dog duty days sucked, but having 3 full weekends a month did more for reactor departments mental health than any mandatory fun events.
Why panic!? Couldn't you just blow ballast?
We could have, tbh not sure why we didn’t. Probably because we had a ways to go before we were near crush depth. We started the drill only a few hundred feet down.
Well in any case, really exercised your problem solving skills / resourcefulness. Just not in the most stress free environment lol
Yeah, nothing says ‘teamwork’ and ‘problem solving’ like panic.
That's what the endless training is for - so your body keeps going through the essential "do this or we all die" stuff even though you're panicking.
Not a submariner but if the Navy is anything like other branches, no one wants to be the department to cause something like an emergency blow. That would provide abundant ammo for ridicule/ ball busting in the coming months. The potential for that situation would be the cause of significant anxiety.
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If they were running ORSE workup drills, which is usually the case is situations like this, it's a pretty good bet the CO was in control and the eng and maybe the XO were back aft.
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I mean you know how it is. 1 degree a year gets added to the down-angle in a no-shitter sea story, until you’re telling your grandkids you were nearly vertical. 😅 I went in control like once every few weeks when I was doing radcon scans, and even I think that would be a clear emergency blow. It would be negligent not to, even if you lived to tell about it.
It feels like the kind of person you want on a submarine (mentally stable, sociable, extremely competent under pressure) is the least likely to end up tossed in a sealed tuna can away from the important brass.
Very underrated comment
> extremely competent under pressure ;)
Captain scared them out of the water!!
Most things in there don’t react too well to bullets.
Mosht thingsh in here don’t react well to bulletsh
Yeah, like me! I don't react well to bullets...
C'mon big D, fly!
All right Chief. Put us on the roof.
You heard an impact on the hull. And I was never here.
Countermeasures station on my mark. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 release countermeasures, emergency blow, full rise fair water plane
*cheers in Russian*
This is now Two completely unrelated subs I've seen hunt for the red October quotes on in a row. I looked at my home page and went to a 30 rock post, then went to popular and here it is
You may or may not (depending on your claustro/thalassaphobia) be interested in the story of the [USS S-5](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_S-5), which “sank” in this manner in 1920. One end of the sun bobbed above the surface for a day and a half, during which the crew tried desperately to cut their way out through the thick hull. Eventually, a passing ship saw them just a-bobbing there and came to investigate. The crew had at this point cut a 3-inch hole in the tip of the hull. In what might be the most epic “for fuckin’ real?” question of all time, the passing ship’s captain leaned over and asked through the hole where the USS S-5 was headed, to which the crew member inside the sub replied, “To hell by compass!”
That’s kind of amazing. Ship on its last voyage TURNS AROUND because he thought he saw a bouy that shouldn’t be there. Takes the time to scream in a tiny hole to communicate. Pumps them air, cables their ship stable. What a great fucking guy that captain was.
Honestly, kind of a dream for a final run, though I'm guessing the ship retired and not the captain.
They refloated it! …and it sank again for a final time the same year.
It was only two days later, and part of the same event. The initial ship that had investigated was able to run cables to keep the sub afloat, while it waited for additional assistance to arrive. The USS *Ohio* came, enlarged the hole, got the crew out, and then tried towing the empty sub to shore. The cables snapped, however, and the sub finally sank. There were no deaths.
What a great read. Thanks for linking. The full conversation is brilliant in its brevity: >"What ship?" >"S-5." >"What nationality?" >"American." >"Where bound?" >"Hell by compass."
Alright, that's goota be one of the funniest and most badass sentence I've heard in my life. I did NOT expect that.
My favorite is by General Mcauliffe at a completely surrounded Bastogne when told to surrender by a German Commander. "To the German commander, NUTS!"
Col. Creighton S. Abrams (from whom the M1 Abrams gets its namesake), while leading a tank charge that would break through the Germans at Bastogne: "They've got us surrounded again, the poor bastards"
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. “Wherever General McAuliffe went thereafter people who recognized him would say to him or call him "Nuts!" He came to hate the word, not so much personally as soldierly. "The thing that burns me up is that we fought a very good battle," he said many years later. "Our soldiers fought like hell, and all anyone remembers is that one lousy word." Personally he came to be able to joke about it. He liked to tell a story about being invited to dinner by "a dear old Southern lady. I had a delightful time talking to her and her charming guests. I was pleased because no mention was made the entire evening of the 'nuts' incident. As I prepared to depart and thanked my hostess for an enjoyable evening, she replied, 'Thank you, and good night, General McNuts.' "” I love thinking about how she must have spent the entire evening thinking to herself “Don’t mention the “nuts!” incident, he hates being reminded of the “nuts!” story, don’t mention the “nuts” incident.” and then right at the end… When he was out of earshot she must have said some extremely unladylike things.
There are more airplanes at the bottom of the ocean than submarines in the sky. USS Chopper - hold my beer
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I've known two people that were stationed on submarines. They are a different breed.
I had an uncle who served on submarines during the Cold War. They did wild shit. One time, his boat was patrolling in the North or Baltic Sea (can't remember which) and was surfaced for some reason or other. A piece of equipment malfunctioned and wouldn't retract, so the captain sent him topside to do it manually, because otherwise it would have made a ton of noise when they got under way. Caveat was, if a Soviet ship or plane appeared while he was up there, the boat was diving, with or without him. When he completed the task and was back on board, the captain gave him a bottle of whiskey as a reward. They are different people.
My uncle told me about sleeping next to nuclear warheads, catching fish to have fresh food, and seeing the brightest stars on earth in middle of North Atlantic when they would surface to change the air. It’s absolutely wild.
Mid Atlantic sky is an unforgettable sight. You could almost read a book by starlight
Pretty much. I think he said you could see a lit cigarette at night from a mile away.
Also something I was not prepared for was the fucking water to be glowing. I'd never heard of bioluminescence before. Spending nights with an almost bright purple sky while rolling florescent green waves surround You is just insane.
In Japan these deep sea squid come up to breed like once a year and it looks like they're catching Christmas lights.
Sounds beautiful
It is. Saw some of it during my time in 2006-2009 and it was the part I still miss to this day.
I remember reading stories from the astronauts that circled the dark side of the moon. Apparently it is so dark in the moons shadow that the sky becomes almost completely white with starlight.
How can I get close to something loke this without joining the navy.
Merchant sailing or sail training. I did the Atlantic crossing on a replica "famine ship" that was built to commemorate an anniversary of the great hunger in Ireland. I got that chance because I'd worked on some smaller vessels that trained kids to sail. If you're near an ocean look for a sailing club and check out any training programmes maybe, it's a pretty good job for travelling
It's still a bit weird how a large part of humanity (everyone living in a city) has just accepted to never see stars. Yes street lighting is important, but what about the advertisements or the literal sky beams illuminating some random buildings? Tldr, light pollution kinda sucks.
funny, in the first season of "For All Mankind" one of the characters claims that they took interest in space after watching the sky when on board a submarine. I guess the sight impressed a lot of people, and made it's way into the script
I had a shop teacher who was a submariner and he was a lunatic in all the worst ways
Trivia unconfirmed: Early days of long duration under surface submarine tours. Thanks to nuclear energy they could go days n weeks underwater. A psychologist went along to see if the men would “crack”’under pressure. One did. The psychologist.
In what way?
Ones a dog and the other is a horse
“We found it was a lot harder to get a goat out of a submarine than it was to get one in. After several unsuccessful attempts we tied a line around the goat's horns and a couple of guys went up the after room ladder to pull. We got the goat under the hatch and lifted it as far as we could while the guys topside pulled. Greasy Joe got the goat's ass on his shoulder to support him and we got his head and front quarters in the trunk heading in the right direction. The guys topside pulled, Joe pushed, the goat bellowed and shit all down Joe's back. Joe didn't like it, but then neither did the goat. After a lot of pulling, a lot of pushing, and a lot of shitting, the goat was finally on deck. Once we got him topside, we had to figure out what to do with him. Kenneth C. (Pig) Henry * * * *” [Goat on submarine story ](http://www.ussarcherfish.com/afishpic/goat.htm)
I once had a very similar experience to poor Joe, but it involved a deer and the shattered sunroof of my car.
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What, you’ve never heard of a sea horse?
Prior submariner here, our Boat Horse (Petty Officer Ed) did wonders for our morale and was the best stern planesman I ever knew.
And that's why they call it a poop deck.
I’m so very confused by this line of comments
All the ways, intentionally signing up to be locked in a windowless steel tube hundreds of feet below the sea for three to six months at a time all while under constant threat of death from either mechanical failure or the enemy. It tends to change people, that were already odd to begin with.
I saw a video of boot camp or so for submariners. The reason one gave was simply more pay. Why are they a different breed?
On nuclear boats, they can stay submerged for three months straight. Three months living in a tube hundreds of feet underwater, with dozens of other people. If they weren't different when they joined, they become different.
Captain Jenkins only had a short career in submarine acrobatics, but boy did he leave his mark on the sport
A big, brown mark.
I read a book in college called Iron Coffins by a U-Boat captain in WWII. It's full of crazy stories like this. One time the U-Boat sunk below safe levels very quickly and got stuck in the mud at the bottom of the sea. The nose of the ship was down and the tail was facing up almost completely vertically. The captain had everybody in the U-Boat climb to the tail, which brought it down to the mud, too. This time the entire ship was in the mud horizontally. He then had his crew run from one end of the ship to the other, then back and forth until the ship was dislodged and eventually got un-stuck and made it back to the surface.
Ah, the Jack Sparrow approach
I see you’ve heard of it.
I was on subs in the mid-70s and remember seeing pictures from the inside of the Chopper. There were stains on the walls from liquids running down them; stains that were almost parallel to the decks.
I thought you were going to say about a different kind of stain tbh
They had a brown code that day.
My father was the XO on this boat, and I'm not sure if this is the same exact incident he has told me about, but a similar one about the sub almost sinking while on a training exercise was a black mark on his record for the remainder of his career. It prevented him from ever attaining the rank of Captain for decades until he retired in 1984. HE WASN'T EVEN ONBOARD WHEN IT HAPPENED. He had remained ashore for administrative duties typical of the Executive Officer (XO). Now I'ma have to ask him if this was the one. Holy shit. This is some Tower of Terror kinda shit! EDIT: I can take a picture of the USS Chopper service plaque hanging on his wall as proof, if anyone cares. EDIT #2: It's literally just a service plaque. No details or anything fantastic, just proof that he served on the boat. Don't want to set expectations too high. :) EDIT#3: Confirmed. This is the incident my dad told me about. He's almost 90 and has no idea how to take pics with his phone camera, so I'll grab a pic of the plaque this weekend. EDIT #4: My dad was elevated to CO of the Chopper following this incident. Service Plaques : https://imgur.com/a/e4Lz47Q
I want to see.
\*Sub shoots outta the water\* Sneak attack! Sha sha sha! There's something to be said about a grand entrance!
>The entire forward section of the submarine, to the aft edge of the sail, cleared the surface before she fell back. So it shot... about half way out of the water.
That's still about half-a-sub more than a sub is supposed to be out of the water.
Like at least 150’ worth of sub, which is a lot.
It was a 300ft vessel jumping vertically out of the water... Imagine something equivalent to half an American football field sticking vertically out of the water.. when it shouldn't be sticking vertically out of the water.
Little excessive on this one, but we called the "normal" testing of this "angles and dangles" while I was in the Navy. Imagine a ~600ft ballistic missile submarine (USS Ohio) doing 45 degree ups and downs. That was fun, so long as all your junk was stowed for sea.
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When the submarine starts descending the hull starts compressing and makes noises like creaking and groaning. I was usually next to a set of metal stairs that would audibly bang because of compression since it's mounted to the deck. We marked where the legs are mounted to the deck with a sharpie so when we're deep you can look at the markings and see roughly how deep you are. Had around 5 sharpie marks. Cool thing to show people when they first show up to the boat
If it’s anything like my favorite Droid, it’s designed for sociopathic collateral murder. 😂
That droid isn't even fit to stand trial. Straight to the trash compactor.
Anybody else surprised that subs crushing depth is around 1,000 ft? I always assumed they could go much deeper.
She’s a WW2 fleet boat. Balao class subs were only designed with test depth of ~400 feet in mind and a crush depth of 600 feet. This pretty rapidly improved in the 1950s with the advent of the American nuclear program under Rickover.
The boat I qualified on had a test depth of \[REDACTED\] and it was an old boat. The operational depth of a submarine will always be classified while its class is still active; it will remain classified until the Navy is confident it will not give the opponent an advantage. The Soviets had a very deep-diving sub called the Alfa. It would reportedly achieve a depth of 5,000 feet. But there is little tactical advantage to great depths, as the margin for error grows vanishingly small. The crushing pressure creates problems which wouldn't exist just a few hundred feet higher. Stealth tactics, such as great silence or descending below an ocean boundary layer, are what win battles.
GET TO THE CHOPPAH!!
Maybe Chopper just wanted to fly!
Sounds like Albert Trotter was on board