great history book

The entire first season, and part of the second season of 'Silent Service' is on Youtube. It is a late '50 TV series about WW Two submarines.

It must have been horrible to serve on a sub, but subs spun off some great books and movies.

I'll try the youtube thing.

mandag den 9. august 2021 kl. 20.16.20 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:

a real sub must have been luxury compared to things like these:

The first episode of 'The Silent Service' is here:

My paternal grandfather served on a WW1 K-class submarine. It damaged him physically and mentally. Having to kill his best friend to save the sub didn't help.

Close the hatch, take her down.

I had a friend who served in a boomer, a nuke powered nuke missile sub. He said that was actually pretty nice, except for being all guys.

One of my uncles was a Ships Electrician on a nuke. He maintained the control systems for the weapons. I also knew Frank Holland, who was the Nuclear engineer aboard the Nautilus when it sailed under the North Pole. There is a local Submariner Veteran's group in my area. I want to see if there is a database of Navy personnel who served on subs, and which subs. I was a young kid the last time I saw that uncle, and didn't learn any details of his sevice. Most people don't know, but serving on a submarine was voluntary in the US Navy. Wikipedia has information on the different classes of Submarines, along with names and dates that they served, along with known details of the ones that were lost. Some names were reused for subs that were retired, or lost

It was, arguably, worse: close the hatch and get her up.

The history of England for the past thousand years reads as a long list of Henrys, Richards, Williams, and Harolds with a commentary that reads something like "And Henry so-and-so was a brutal tyrant. He was deposed by Richard III who was also a mad tyrant. Then Richard's heir William VI was a pretty good king. He ruled for four years until he was deposed by Harold IV, who was a mad petty tyrant..."

Movie plots commonly show subs going to the bottom or near the bottom, even far from shore. As unlikely as that seems, I was surprised at how shallow their max depth is. Larger models usually go deeper and it seems the max depth is usually around 5 times the boat's length.

When the enemy is deploying depth charges, you want to be as far away as possible. Since they could easily track your motion with even late WWII Sonar, diving ads low as possible was often the only choice. Risk the hull imploding, or having a depth charge blow a hole in the hull.

There is a radio ad for STEM where a 'woman scientist' claims that their research sub failed, and they settled to the bottom, in the middle of the ocean but she fixed it. It might have happened in shallow, coastal waters, but not in some of the deeper areas that could be many miles deep, and most research subs are tiny. It sounds not only made up, but it is an insult to those who lost their lives when subs sank.

You are an insult to science.

Many research subs can go much deeper than military subs, presumably there's little of tactial importance down there.

I'm a WW2 sub buff, and the first of those videos I picked was about the Wahoo. It was horribly inaccurate.

I also like the Mattingly book.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

"The Tudors: Keeping the 'nasty' in 'dynasty' since 1485!"

I have a physical therapist (for lack of better word) who was on this submarine when it almost sunk. The ship was sinking and had pitched 45 degrees, an officer on board made a split second decision to that saved the ship. If the decision had not been made within several seconds the ship would have gone to the bottom. The fellow I know was in the control room when this was all happening.

I'll give it a try. I love sailing naval history/ battles. Have you read "The Age of Fighting Sail" by CS Forester.

I have that but don't remember it. I'll read it again.

The Hornblower books are OK.

"Nelson's Trafalgar" is good.

I read the Aubrey/Maturin books maybe 3 times, but that was enough.

Still plenty of Spanish DNA in the Irish population as a result of that debacle. :-)

We stayed in a b+b in Ireland and the lady owner claimed that one of the Spanish sailors was hanged nearby. Maybe they tell that to the tourists, but Mattingly says that the few who survived shipwreck to make it ashore were hanged. Certainly not enough survived to affect the population.

The Irish population wasn't all that fond of the British.

I'd venture that most Spanish sailors who washed ashore somehow never came to the attention of the British.

I wonder what DNA surveys of the relevant coast of Ireland show.

Joe Gwinn