Stuff You Missed in History ClassThis 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.
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, 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.
In the middle of.
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, 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 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.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
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, 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.
Get somatic with it.
Yeah.
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.
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 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 ships were created in the first place.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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 shipbuilder to follow here.
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 times like that, back and forth. What is it running suicides?
Yeah, definitely, And it's a bobbing back and forth.
Yeah. And so after they did that, the ship was bobbing a little bit too much, it seemed, and the test was even stopped. Fleming supposedly says had they run more time, she would have keeled over.
So, yeah, it doesn't bode well. 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, 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 point it's done. The water coming into the ship causes it to sink before it's even gone thirteen hundred meters.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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 like board game. So they were planning on having a good time I guess before the ship.
Yeah, well, they needed a way to while away all those hours at sea, definitely. Yeah, So the 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 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 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.
This chemical reaction from happening.
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.
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 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, 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 guys inside the turret would get a little bit dizzy though when it started wheeling around.
Yeah, I can imagine, seems very submarine like to me and my limited shift knowledge.
It kind of looks like one with some strange boxes sticking up.
Yeah, But fans saw this as the Navy's kind of great hope, right.
Yeah, it was a new technology. It seemed like it could really blow the wooden ships out of the water.
Skeptics, though, called it an iron coffin.
Because it does look kind of like a scary submarine. So regardless of what people thought, it got tested really quickly. It's maiden voyage was from New York to Virginia to meet the Confederate counterpart, the CSS Virginia, which was another ironclad that had been constructed from the former USS Merrimack, which was a frigate. And this battle they're rushing off to is the Battle of Hampton Roads.
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 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.
No, it was kind of tiny, and it was kind of ridiculous looking too.
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.
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 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 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 that is ironclad ships, because as we saw from the US's Cumberland, the Congress, the Minnesota, it was they were no.
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.
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 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. 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 lantern on the turret mass and the Rhode Island will know they need to go help them or system in some way.
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 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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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 Confederate submarine named for Horace L. Hunley, a New Orleans lawyer and businessman who financed its construction.
So we made sure we had a Union Civil warship and a Confederate Civil War submarine.
Yeah, balanced coverage here.
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 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.
Yeah.
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.
Honley's enn source right, Well, I.
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.
I kind of hate the idea of watching a candle to see when my ear is kind of run now.
Yeah, it's pretty stressful.
I think just everything about the Honley sort of stresses me out, including the interior dimensions.
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, 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.
Yeah.
So it was constructed in Mobile, Alabama, and it's there where a few successful test runs took place in eighteen sixty three before it was put on to put on a train to Charleston in August eighteen sixty three, and the plan was to try to break the Union Army's blockade on all southern ports, which Charleston was, of course the focal point there. So the Confederate hope was that the 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.
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.
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, really wasn't eager for a third go round. He said, quote, I can have nothing more to do with that submarine boat. It's more dangerous to those who use it than the enemy.
Yeah.
So he wasn't for it, but others eventually talked him into it. So he finally agreed to a third try, with one condition that those who volunteered for the crew must be warned of the quote desperately hazardous nature of the service required.
In case you hadn't already gotten word, in.
Case you hadn't already gotten the picture. But he did get volunteers. He managed to recruit a crew. They assembled a crew of nine and got ready for the Hunley 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 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.
What else is it going to be?
What else is it going to be? As it gets closer, he realizes it must be the Confederate submarine that his admiral had told him about. There had been kind of rumors of this floating around, of this contraption that the Confederate Army was going to have, and so he sounded the alarm. There wasn't much they could do at that point, though.
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 to the end of the spar and then fitted with a barb on its end. And it's really weird the way it works.
Yeah, So basically the submarine had to ram the torpedo into the housatanic and then back away. As the 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.
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.
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 the torpedo exploded, or it may have taken in too much water when the hatch was lifted to wave the blue light.
Some people think that the wakes of the Union ships rushing to assist the Housatanic swamp, the Huntley or one of the ships may have actually struck the sub Yeah.
And then another possibility is that the soldiers when they were shooting at the submarine, 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.
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 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.
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 were still at their assigned battle stations when they died. So mystery we might hear more about in the years to come, I think definitely.
So.
The next and final ship on this warship list is the Japanese battleship, the 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 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 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.
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 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.
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. If the ship is going to have a vulnerable spot, it's that.
Yeah.
But the ship was quick for its size, twenty eight knots and four steam turbine engines. It also had one 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 an interesting detail.
I saw noted a few times that the sailors were served white rice instead of barley, so big difference.
There.
Another really comfortable thing, it had a 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 of the ship, and even the name Yamato had poetic connotation so it was a real pride for the Japanese Imperial Navy.
But the ship wasn't so well prepared for fighting aircraft, which we'll see. It was 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.
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 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, 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.
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.
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.
So they get three days at home to sort things out, and then they sail with destroyers to protect them from submarines.
Yeah.
So April seventh, 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 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 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.
And the fighter planes and low altitude bombers start launching torpedoes. And these guys concentrate torpedoes on the Yamato's weaker bow and stern and all on one side too, and all under the waterline.
Yeah, so really going for the weak spots.
Yeah.
At this point things are getting bad. Even the yamatos watertight compartments can't handle the repeated torpedo hits. It starts to flood. Some men are shut inside these water tight compartments.
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. 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, 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 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.
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.
Yeah, definitely.
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