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Submarines are strange in that unlike other naval vessels, they’re actually designed to sink and then rise again.

It just so happens that occasionally that second part of the equation is a little bit difficult to pull off.

In the pantheon of naval designs, there have been some magnificent seaorthy warships.

But brilliant design doesn’t just come from nowhere.

Often designers learn from their mistakes and their misjudgments from along the way.

Now, we’ve already looked at some poor warship designs in brief on this channel before, but some designs are so poorly executed, they deserve their own spotlight.

The British K-class submarine was intended to fill a gap in the Royal Navy’s fleet, fast enough to keep up with the massive battleships in fleet engagements.

It resulted in a bizarre design that despite being one of the largest submarines built for the age was also one of the most cramped and critically the most dangerous to its crew.

Amid trials and disasters, lost boats and narrow escapes, the concept was finally scrapped, but not before dozens of Royal Navy crewmen had lost their lives.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m your friend Mike Brady from Ocean Liner Designs, and this is the story of Britain’s bizarre and exceptionally dangerous steamowered submarine, the dreadful KClass boat.

[Music] Our story begins just before the outbreak of the First World War in the early 1910s, where in Britain’s Admiral Ty, some interesting things were happening.

See, back then, there had been a massive technological surge with new designs and technologies being introduced all the time.

It was difficult for regulation and conventional guidance to keep up.

For centuries, the most advanced warships had sea had been sailpowered and oak hullled line of battle ships like HMS Victory.

But the industrial revolution and the introduction of iron and then steelhold ships powered by steam engines changed everything.

Then came torpedo boats as steam engine technology improved.

The slower, clunkier expansion engines being largely supplanted by immensely powerful steam turbines which could drive ships up to previously unthought of speeds.

Within just a short few decades, Britain’s warships had changed from awkward half sailing ships to fullyfledged steelhull battleships like HMS Dreadnaugh, fielding monstrous guns and capable of cracking top speeds.

Now, that wasn’t all.

The submarine had been a figment of science fiction not long before, but by the late 19th and early 20th century, it was a fully realized bit of military tech.

Battery and then diesel engine technology improved more and more.

It meant that subs could go along on the surface with their diesel engines thumping ahead while below they could use their electric motors which were quieter and crucially wouldn’t create any kind of dangerous fumes.

Now this age of technological leaprog the stage was set for a showdown of international and epic proportions because of course Britain wasn’t just the only nation doing it.

America, France, Italy, and especially Germany began to pump funds into their navies as well in the battle for international glory.

And for Britain, Germany was the biggest concern.

The closest thing in more recent years would be probably the USA and USSR’s space race, a lasting and bitter rivalry like that.

Britain’s military planners began to envisionage a showdown with Germany in one or more massive battles at sea.

The only problem was these new style of warships had never really been proved before in battle.

It was a whole different game.

So, the hypothetical reigned supreme.

And this is the kind of fluid, fast-tracked environment that encouraged a few of the more creative ones among the British admiral te to propose designs that on paper at least sounded interesting.

And in 1913, thought was put towards a new class of submarine whose purpose and function was entirely original, but which would prove disastrous.

Because submarines were such a new piece of technology, nobody really knew what purpose they could ultimately serve in the outbreak of war.

They had some serious drawbacks which limited, at least in planners eyes, their usefulness.

And truth be told, they were seen more before the First World War as a bit of a curiosity, even a toy.

Surface warships had ruled the waves for centuries, and the advocates for submarine warfare who were real visionaries of their time were scoffed at by colleagues and higher-ups who saw them as buffins playing with their toy boats.

For one, surface warships like battleships were really, really fast, much faster than submarines.

Subs used their diesel engines, but in the pre-war world, the diesel engine itself was in its infancy.

Early diesel engines were quite underpowered.

The reason that diesels actually had to be used in the first place were twofold.

First, diesels burn their own fuel oil, which is injected right into the engine and doesn’t need massive boilers like steam engines do.

This means the inside of the submarine already cramped because of the necessary pressure bearing form of the hull isn’t taken up by a massive steam power plant.

Especially those boilers.

They just wouldn’t really fit.

Secondly, coal and steam are dirty and in confined spaces like a submarine, extremely hazardous.

In big ships of the age, like Titanic, massive ventilators were placed all along the upper decks to get as much fresh air below as possible.

Without it, the boiler rooms would become uninhabitable, and the stokers and engineers would suffocate in 70° air and choking cold dust.

How would that arrangement work in a submarine, which is a confined space where holes for ventilation cannot really exist without seriously hampering the sub’s ability to dive? This is, by the way, what we in the industry call foreshadowing.

The short of it is that submarines were slow on the surface, able to achieve just about 15 knots at most.

Now, that isn’t that sluggish, given that at the time, most big merchant ships chugged along at about 12 knots.

It meant that wellpositioned submarines could engage enemy shipping by cutting them off on the surface before diving to attack.

Below the surface, the submarine’s electric motors pushed the subs along at speeds that were much slower, about 9 knots.

Not fast enough to catch up to any real enemy ship unless they were crippled in the water already.

Now, for many Navy planners, that only reinforced the idea in their minds that the submarine was little more than a toy.

that it would be useless in engaging the Kaiser’s battleships and battle cruisers, which by the way could steam at least 10 knots faster than a British sub on the surface.

And that was that.

But then there came some alarming news from Europe.

In 1913, someone somewhere had leaked intelligence that said Germany was preparing a new class of submarines that would overcome all of these issues.

That the new German boats would be able to keep up to the pace and steam over 20 knots.

They could maintain pace with battleships and destroyers.

Now, this changed the game because it meant that the new German submarines, if introduced, could sail alongside larger fleets of battleships and cruisers, keeping up the pace until the enemy fleet was spotted, and then they could dive and hunt freely from below the surface at the vanguard of the action and sink capital warships left and right, cutting off retreat and routes of escape.

It was a terrifying thought.

It’s just a shame for the British Admiral Ty that these reports were incorrect.

Now, even if the German boats didn’t actually exist, it really seemed a possibility at the time.

Germany submarines were well-developed because unlike the British Admiral, German naval planners took them a little more seriously, and the diesel engine had been refined by German manufacturers to a higher standard than Britain’s.

The response was swift, frantic even.

Britain needed its own fast submarines.

The challenge had been issued and a design specification was put forward.

At the time, the most advanced British submarine was the E-class boat.

It was about 180 ft or 55 m long and of around 660 gross tons displacement on the surface.

The cylindrical pressure hull could fit 30 crewmen in cramped but relatively cozy conditions.

They were powered by two 800 horsepower Vicar’s diesel engines above the water.

And those boats could dive and then switch over to a pair of electric motors which are outputting around 600 to 840 horsepower.

It meant the ebboats had a top speed of 15 knots at the surface and about 9 or 10 knots below.

Now obviously this kind of speed just wouldn’t contend with those fast German boats.

Speeds in excess of 24 knots had been reported.

Way more speed would need to be squeezed out of these submarines if Britain was ever going to keep up.

The boats would need to be big.

Larger vessels move faster through the water, for one thing, but they would need to be big to provide a stable platform for the immense engines that would be needed to actually hit those ridiculous speeds.

They would need to be at least double the length of the E-Class and more than double the displacement at about 1,500 tons.

But there details began to get murky because obviously the speed would need to come from the engines.

But which engines? Diesels were thought to be too primitive to be able to hit the required power.

But steam engines provided a whole fresh selection of issues already evident to many in the Admiral Ty.

In fact, future first lord of the Admiral, Sir Jackie Fischer, apparently famously remarked that the most fatal error imaginable would be to put steam engines in submarines.

But then the design’s development was actually halted because an opportunity to test the idea came up.

A different proposal had been made for a submarine capable of international and long-ranging service capable of speeds of around 20 knots on the surface.

So for this design, two prototypes would be built to test the two different options.

HMS Nautilus with the more powerful diesels in a showdown against HMS Swordfish and her turbine steam engines.

The proposed high-speed submarine’s future would depend on this test.

And the only reason steam turbines had become a viable option in the first place by that point was because they could by 1913 burn fuel oil instead of coal which vastly reduce the amount of dust and misery that the crew would need to endure.

Vicar’s ship building at Barrow in Furnus, England had basically held the monopoly on building submarines and their diesels for the Royal Navy.

They would build the diesel-powered Nautilus but in a stroke of healthy competition encouraged by the head of submarine service Commodore Roger Keys.

The second design, powered by steam turbines, HMS Swordfish, would be built in Scotland.

They would both need to be quite big, well over 200 ft, around 1,00 to,400 tons.

The work had got underway in 1912, and the proponents of the fast fleet submarine design would be watching closely.

Already, there were doubts that the diesel engines could do the job, and we already know that there were reservations about using steam engines.

In the end, the test would never be conducted as intended because the war rudely interrupted proceedings in 1914 as Nautilus was sitting at the fitting outwarf and Swordfish was still under construction on the slipway.

Now, what happened next shocked a lot of the Admiral T submarine naysayers.

Suddenly, German hubot began to do devastating work on British ships.

The submarine SMU9 pulled off a major coup in September 1914 when she caught three old British cruisers as they were sailing unprotected on patrol.

She sank one after another and killed around 1,500 men.

SMU35 alone would go on to sink 220 Allied merchant ships during the war for a total tonnage of over a half million tons.

Now suddenly the submarine didn’t seem like much of a toy anymore and the Admiral Tok subs very seriously indeed.

German hubot were quite quick on the surface with their powerful advanced diesel engines able to achieve close to 17 knots.

They were bigger too than their British rivals and improved design was needed and fast.

Quickly, the old pre-war plans for the fast submarine designs were dusted off.

And without being able to properly run HMS Nautilus and HMS Swordfish up against one another since they were still under construction, Vicers provided a design for a boat they hoped would be able to hit those long desired fast speeds.

Vicers simply designed a bigger submarine than they’d used before and fitted their biggest diesels possible.

Massive 12cylinder units capable of outputting 1,200 horsepower each.

Now, the new class of sub would get no fewer than three of these, each driving its own propeller.

The resulting boat was called the J-class submarine, and although it was a fine boat, it fell short of the speed requirement.

They were still impressively fast on the surface, but they maxed out at about 19 knots.

Faster than the German submarines, but nowhere near as fast as the other battleships or surface units.

For the British, it should have been the writing on the wall, the sign that technology just wasn’t there yet.

But instead, the Admiral T began to seek out other options.

And there, powering their fast battleships were the fast steam powered turbines.

And what if they could be fitted to a submarine? Eyes turned towards HMS Swordfish, which in April 1916 had been renamed HMSS1.

The boat had a pair of geared steam turbines fed with steam from oil burning boilers.

The submarine was big, but the massive, heavy machinery made her sluggish to turn and dangerously unstable.

She could only hit 18 knots on the surface.

But still, what if the turbines were yet more powerful? What if the boat were larger? Surely that would work.

Well, the Admiral must have thought in their wartime desperation that it was a worthy endeavor.

The K-class submarine was born.

A class soon to be known as the Calamity class.

And for good reason.

The primary issue with the K-class boats was the choice of propulsion.

Steam turbines are very big and very heavy.

They need accompanying boilers which themselves are also very big and very heavy.

The fumes from burning the oil need to be adequately vented through funnels.

The boilers themselves raise temperatures and the surroundings to alarming degrees.

Now these all presented design challenges that the Admiral T had to overcome.

They started by making the K-class into a monster of a submarine.

The old E-class boats had been about 180 ft or 55 m long, but the K-class boats would be a whopping 339 ft or 103 m in length.

Now, looking at the plans, it’s clear to see why.

An enormous amount of the submarine’s interior would need to be taken up by the massive propulsion, the boilers, the turbines, and the auxiliary machinery.

In fact, about half the sub’s massive length is taken up by the machinery alone, giving the K-class crews the unique and unfortunate distinction of serving in both the largest and the most cramped boats in the fleet.

Now, the idea was for the K-class to use their turbines to steam along at 25 knots on the surface, but then dive below and switch over to their electric motors as usual.

to charge the batteries and provide a backup power plant.

A diesel generator was fitted for good measure, which took up yet more space and added more weight.

A driving along at 25 knots sounds well and good.

But in the event of a crash dive, the crew of a steam powered submarine presented with a unique situation.

To vent all the gases and smoke out of the boilers, funnels needed to be fitted, which meant, to put it simply, so did holes.

Too many holes.

Submarines rely on their watertight design and the elimination of natural weak points in their hulls in order to stand up to the crushing pressures at depth.

Adding more holes into a submarine’s hull is just about the worst thing designers could do.

It just added more possible failure points.

The crews would need to be impeccably well drilled and trained to close all the vent hatches and trunking off to the water in order to actually dive the boat.

Now, in practice, this proved to be a fairly elaborate procedure and added just more steps for the sub’s crews to keep track of under pressure.

This, too, by the way, is a nice bit of foreshadowing.

The first K-class boats were completed by May 1916, and the good news was that the ever reliable and powerful steam turbines could do their thing, and the boats could zip along at about 24 knots on the surface.

Unfortunately, that’s about where the good news ended for these white elephants of the sea.

The boat’s massive length and bulk made them extremely difficult to control, as swordfish had been in testing.

But the issues of controllability were almost nothing compared to the issues with the process of actually diving.

The idea went like this.

If running on the surface at speed under steam power, then the boilers furnaces would first need to be safely dowsted and put out because if they stayed burning below the surface, it could prove lethal to the crew thanks to the buildup of gases and fumes.

Hydraulics would lower the smoke stacks into wells in the deck and secure them in place, while the holes left behind for venting the smoke would be closed over with hatches.

The other holes that were needed to feed the boilers with air from above and sea water from below, called the main injectors, would all need to be closed and secured as well.

Only then could the submarine attempt a dive.

But here too was an issue.

The hole filled hull meant the K-class sub could have a maximum safe dive depth of about 200 ft or 61 m.

Now, this was similar to the older E-class boats, but the Kboats were more than 200 ft long, and it meant that the submarines, which are already hard to control, could dive improperly trimmed, with one end of the ship still on the surface in plain view, and the other end approaching maximum safety depth.

Crews were said to sardonically quip, “I say, number one, my end is diving.

What’s your end up to?” Speaking of the crew, it seems almost as if there was something of an afterthought when it came to designing the K-class boat.

How exactly 60 men were supposed to live comfortably in close pack conditions with boilers running hundreds of degrees behind them is unknown.

Of course, conditions were hellish with temperatures nearly unbearable and humidity was absolutely off the charts.

The massive exterior size of the Kboats was offset by the fact that around half their length was packed full of machinery.

Men sweated and suffered down below as their boats lumbered and stumbled over the waves.

Testing got underway and the results, aside from the speed, were worrying.

First of all, the elaborate dive process was difficult to pull off quickly.

The quickest Kboat dive speed is argued about to this day with times ranging from 5 to about 30 minutes.

Now, the original design specification called for a dive time below 5 minutes.

In practice, a safe dive took somewhere around 20 to 25 minutes to pull off, but a crash dive could be affected by ignoring or at least rushing certain safety protocols in close to 4 minutes or so.

But in a sub full of hatches, vents, holes, and burning hot boilers, rushing it is something the crew would probably not want to be doing.

Surface testing showed the subs capable of their design speed, but nearly impossible to turn effectively.

It was said that they had the speed of a destroyer and the turning circle of a battle cruiser.

Now, that wasn’t all.

The boats had low freeboard.

There just wasn’t enough of them above the water line considering their enormous weight and bulk.

They would ship massive amounts of water over their bows as they steamed at speed.

But fortunately, the crew were given a fully enclosed bridge on the deck to make up for it.

Now, all these issues and failures of logic were to catch up with the K-class boat and the submersible destroyer idea itself.

First was K13.

She was on her sea trials in January 1917 which culminated in a series of dives.

The boilers were dowsted, the vents were shut, and the funnels folded flat, and down she went.

But she did not come up.

A vent hatch had failed to close and lock, and at depth, water roared into the turbine engine room.

80 men were on board, including her crew and members of the shipyard that had built her.

The submarine sank and despite blown ballast tanks, it went down to the bottom.

Messages were sent up from below in capsules and remarkably K13’s captain was able to escape.

He reached the surface and began to coordinate a rescue mission.

But inside the sub, the engineers had calculated there had been just about 8 hours of air left, and the saga of getting the boat skipper up had chewed up about seven.

An airline was attached from rescue vessels above, but couldn’t pump any down.

From below came Morse code tapped on the side of the hull by the survivors inside.

Give us air.

Give us air.

Over and over.

And finally the blockage in the line was identified.

It was successfully passed down and the subs boughs were refloated to the surface enough that holes could be cut in and men could get out.

Just over 30 had died, mostly trapped and drowned in the massive engine rooms aft.

Reports showed that the main vent hatch in the engine room hadn’t shut.

And in fact, indicators in the command room had showed that it was open.

But when one factors in the human element, it becomes clear that so complicated a dive process as the Kboats had introduced many different points of failure.

The Admiral T had other ideas.

The first six Kboats were put into their own flatillaa and given the bizarre task of hunting the smaller, nimler Germanot.

Now, the Kboat’s issues are legendary, and their spotted careers border on the monstrously unlucky and the unjust.

K5 was conducting trials when she went for a routine dive, but was never heard from again.

K3 dove out of control to way below the safe 200 ft dive depth, hitting a maximum of 266 feet, somehow avoiding catastrophic crush failure.

The boat managed to surface, and she actually survived.

HMS K12 took her sea trials in the same lock as K13.

She encountered a similar issue and ended up stranded on the bottom, but fortunately her crew were rescued.

Then the same thing happened to K16.

Morale and the submarine flatillaa plummeted during the First World War.

As if conditions weren’t already bad enough, word had got around the new bulbous bow was to be installed on the remaining K-class boats, indicating to the crews that the Admiral thought them incapable of adequate seaeping.

The problems of containing hot steam and boilers within a submarine hull were tragically demonstrated when K26’s steam lines failed and scolded two stokers to death with superheated steam.

Men who volunteered for service in submarines and were assigned to the K-class boats began to refer to themselves as the suicide club.

The K-class boats ungainainely bulk earned them a reputation for terrible, terrible handling as crews of other vessels watched them bumble about.

And in late 1917, the flatillaa was out at last, steaming alongside large fleet ships as they had been designed to do.

When the cruiser HMS Blonde set a new course, it caused chaos.

The Kboats altered their courses, too, but their awful maneuverability in the close confines caused a fender bender and K4 slammed straight into K1.

In January 1918, though, the Kboat suffered their most infamous incident.

The entire Grand Fleet was to undertake exercises off the Orcne Islands.

The Kboats had been split into two flatillas, the 12th and ominously the 13th.

And they set off, each led by a lead vessel.

For the 12th, the cruiser HMS Fearless, and for the 13th, the destroyer HMS Ethereal.

Passing the aisle of May at the mouth of the F, things began to go horribly wrong.

Lights were spotted by the 13th flatillaa ahead and the vessels changed course to avoid them.

They were probably fishing trollwers or other small merchant vessels.

But in typical Kboat fashion, K14’s rudder jammed and she swerved off into the night and out of line.

K22 behind her had lost sight of her flatilla mate went to their horror.

The submarine was spotted dead ahead across their boughs.

Now K22 cut straight into K14 and they stuck fast.

The massive battle cruisers from the fleet swept past and one gave K22 a good tap as she went by, causing serious damage and more flooding.

Now the submarines were floating dead still in the water, incapable of moving and not sinking thanks to their watertight doors.

The 13th Latella received word of the collision and turned back to help their comrades.

HMS Athereal and the other Kboats fully illuminated to prevent a collision from turning and running back through the main fleet while heading back to K22 and K14.

But suddenly out of the mist appeared the 12th flatillaa with HMS Fearless at the lead and the result was catastrophic.

Fearless smashed through K17 and cut her nearly in half and left her sinking while K6 smashed into K4.

The two were locked together and began to sink.

Now all the other boats twisted and turned to a try avoiding one another, creating a scene of absolute utter confusion.

Dozens and dozens of men were left in the water.

And then the unthinkable happened.

The fifth battle squadron, three dreadnots and their escorting destroyers came barging through at near full speed.

The men in the water were run down and killed by the score.

Nobody from K4 survived, and 48 from K17 died as well.

In the end, around 105 men lost their lives.

Three Kboats were badly damaged and two were sunk outright without ever having encountered the enemy.

But the tragedy came to be sadonically referred to as the Battle of May Island.

Now, it should have been the end for the Kclass as a concept.

But remarkably, they were kept on until well after the war had ended.

In May 1918, K15 took a huge sea in through her funnels, which extinguished the boiler furnaces, leaving her powerless and with a flooding engine room.

The stern sank, but the bow was left with just enough buoyancy to float above the water line thanks to her fast acting crew.

The ballast tanks had their valves jammed, and it took eight harrowing hours for the boat to be properly refloated.

Now, this speaks nothing of the many, many collisions and near accidents throughout the boat’s careers.

It seems like even despite the design issues and faults, the boats were just haunted by some kind of curse.

K7 had finally got a clean shot at an enemy submarine on the surface.

A spread of torpedoes saw one hit the German boat fair and square on the conning tower, but it failed to detonate.

Despite the class’s many, many failings, it has to be pointed out that the men that actually crewed and operated them worked like lions to make the submarines work at all, and they’re deserving of every praise.

In the end, the concept of a fast fleet action submarine building steam turbines was soundly and decisively disproven.

Ironically, today modern nuclear submarines are equipped with reactors that are essentially a refinement of steam propulsion in a way, but unlike those hungry boilerpowered K-class boats, they don’t need the huge amounts of ventilation and extraction, and they certainly don’t need any funnels.

Between 1921 and 1926, the Kboats were scrapped with a couple of incomplete holes used to create a new diesel-powered boat called the Mclass.

In the 1920s, a fleet submarine capable of quick speeds was designed and could hit 22 knots thanks to advances in diesel engine propulsion.

The story of the K-class submarine is like that of Icarus, the Admiral T aiming for new and exceptional technological heights, only for them to be reminded of the lethal consequences of overreaching.

After all that, it’s still difficult somehow to look back on planners and designers from back then with too much of a judgmental eye, considering that so much of this technology had been untested and it was in its infancy at the time.

But even so, Lord Jackie Fischer had known it way back in 1913 when he had said that the most fatal error imaginable would be to put steam engines in a submarine.

And he was proven tragically correct.

This is the German submarine U843.

And if she’s looking a little worse for wear, that’s because by the time this reel of film was shot, she’d actually been underwater for over a decade.

Yubot.

They were the most feared nautical hunters of both world wars.

Silent, ferocious.

Winston Churchill famously said that the only thing that really frightened him during the Second World War was the Yubot peril.

Early on, they had sunk thousands of tons of shipping.

But then, as time went on and the technological tide turned against the Yubot, they were hunted down and sunk in droves.

Decades later, some long-lost Ubot were recovered from where they’d lain on the seabed and boarded again, even by some of their old crew.

These are the true stories of three recovered, long- lost German hubot.

The First World War, the world’s navies filled massive battleships designed to lob devastating salvos at one another like prize fighters.

It’s probably the first mental image that comes to mind when you even think about the word navy.

But a furious war was being fought beneath the ocean as much as on top of it.

Because below the surface, hunters stalked their prey and exacted a terrible toll.

The submarine had been a 19th century invention that by about 1914 was refined enough that most of the world’s major navies had put it into use.

It was the German Navy which had deployed the submarine most successfully.

In typical German fashion, they received a stark to the point name unto literally under ocean boat or submarine.

and the Yubot was born.

They hunted alone or in packs, operating mostly on the surface until a target was cighted and they would dive, carefully aligning their torpedoes and delivering a devastating payload.

In the course of the First World War, some 6,000 Allied ships were sunk, totaling 14,200,000 tons of shipping.

The Yubot dominated the waves, but in 1917, finally, the tide began to turn when the Allies began to change their tactics and engaged submarines that dared to attack escorted convoys.

Yubot losses began to mount.

375 were built.

In the end, 178 were lost in action.

Because so many had been built, some ended up in weird and wonderful places.

The U118 was being towed after surrender when she broke her lines and washed ashore at Hastings in Sussex, providing beachgoers with what can only be described as an extraordinary view.

But still, there were more incredible sites as Yubot, which had actually been sunk with their crews on board, were raised and recovered.

One of these was the UB110, possibly the last Yubot to be sunk in the First World War.

In July 1918, the boat was patrolling off the Sunderland coast in northeastern England.

UB 110 was a coastal submarine designed to hug the shallower waters around Britain for easy targets.

She had sunk two ships in 1918 when her luck finally ran out and the British destroyer HMS Garry spotted her and ran her down.

The British warship was commanded by none other than Charles Loller who had been second officer of the Titanic.

He was also a famous hardcase.

UB 110 was depth charged, damaged, and then surfaced but not content to let the submarine fight another day.

A light holler swung his destroyer around and chased the sub down.

HMS Garry rammed UB 110 and sent it to the bottom in a flash.

There were only 15 survivors.

But what may have happened next is horrifying because with the submarine gone and survivors bobbing on the surface, UB10’s commander alleged that Gary drew to a halt and its crew began firing into the water with small arms, even throwing lumps of coal.

The shooting only stopped when a convoy of merchant ships arrived on scene, at which point Gary put lifeboats into the water and picked up the few that had survived.

Light, for his part, never even denied the violence.

He said he refused to quote accept the hands up in the air business.

Later said it was simply amazing that they should have the infernal audacity to offer to surrender in view of their ferocious and pitiles attacks on our merchant ships.

Destroyer versus destroyer, as in the Dover Patrol, was fair game and no favor.

One could meet them and take them on as decent antagonist.

But towards the submarine men, one felt an utter disgust and loathing.

They were nothing but an abomination, polluting the clean sea.

2 months later, with the war still raging, UB 110 was raised from its shallow grave with a view to recover code books, ciphers, and any other precious material.

Not only that, but the boat could be restored and remarkably put back into action as a fighting vessel under the British flag.

She was located from a dirty patch of oil staining the ocean surface and it was found that the boat was some 144 ft or 43 m deep.

The photographs that resulted are nothing short of astonishing.

These come from an album from the Ty and we archives and museums and show UB 110 in an incredible detail after having sat on the sea floor for months.

The control room was confusing.

massive tangle of pipes, valves, and gauges.

UB 1110’s bow was gone.

It had either been cut off in the salvage or destroyed in the sinking.

This photograph shows her torpedo doors and tubes almost fully exposed.

The British salvers were horrified to discover the tubes still had torpedoes locked and loaded, armed with an infamously unreliable magnetic firing pistol that could have gone off at any moment.

The crew’s lockers were intact.

Virtually everything was in working order despite having sat submerged.

In this photo, the crew quarters still have their wood paneling and the falling table still works.

In the end, the war came to an end and the UB 110 was no longer needed.

Restoration works were halted and the boat was broken up for scrap.

As for Loller and the murder of the submarine’s crew, it was never proved to have actually happened with certainty and there was never any inquiry.

Instead, for his part in the action, Loller was awarded a bar to his distinguished service cross.

Flash forward about 20 years and once again the world’s major navies were at war.

And again, it was the German yubot fleet that was relied upon to inflict some serious casualties on Allied shipping.

In the early days of the war, the Yubot hunted with virtual impunity, almost undetectable and with no counter.

But then Allied technology caught up and slowly the Yubot transitioned from hunter to hunted.

On top of that, Allied airplanes owned the skies.

Yubot spotted resting on the surface were bombed and sunk in droves.

The Yubot arm of Nazi Germany had the highest casualty rate of any combat unit in the entire conflict.

Around 75% of all Yubot men were lost.

One victim of Allied countermeasures was a U843, a longrange type 9C-40, a Yubot that was motoring off of Sweden.

Sadly for its crew, the end of hostilities in Europe was just days away when a mosquito fighter bomber spotted their sub on the surface.

A squadron of mosquitoes attacked with rockets and the boat was damaged.

Repairs were underway when the boat suddenly capsized unexpectedly and she sank so rapidly that only 12 men of 56 survived.

This was the fate of many German subs in the Second World War.

And usually this kind of sinking meant the Yubot was lost to the deep forever.

But U843 was a unique case.

In 1947, 2 years later, divers rediscovered her on the sea floor of Katagat Bay, lying upright and intact.

This sparked an idea.

The boat had been carrying a valuable cargo of rubber, minerals, tin, and opium.

The contents were valued at around £80,000, and the cost to raise the sub might equate to just about 20,000.

After a lot of careful planning, it was in 1958, some 13 years after the boat had sunk, that U843 was hoisted to the surface.

Incredibly, her captain had survived the sinking and was on hand to supervise the salvage.

I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for him to walk through his lost command again.

There’s this haunting footage of him stepping through the bulkhead hatches and into the control room, examining the contents of the sub.

No doubt they would have had to have cleared the remains of his crew out from their boat beforehand.

I’m sure it must have been an extremely emotional experience.

In the end, U843 was broken up for scrap in Gtenberg after the valuables had been retrieved.

A strange footnote of recent history.

But while German submarines were recovered by human means, sometimes Mother Nature did her thing and recovered some longlost boats.

Recently, in 2019, something interesting happened in Vissant, France, when the twisted and rusting remains of a German sub emerged from the sand, and they told a fascinating story.

In 1917, the German sub61 was in trouble.

It had become hopelessly stuck.

The submarine was a mine layer, a part of the UC2 class.

The boat still carried torpedoes, but it also packed a nasty surprise weapon.

18 mines could be laid to catch out unsuspecting Allied shipping and sink them.

At this UC61 proved very effective.

Her career was short.

She entered service in early 1917, but then over 4 months she damaged or sank no fewer than 15 ships.

This was a decent record for a mine laying sub.

But then her luck ran out.

In July 1917, the boat was trying to lay mines off the French coast.

The water was extremely shallow and near Wasant.

The boat ran ground and came to rest on the soft sandy sea floor.

The captain and crew, it must have been frustrating to bring their successful wartime career to an end like this.

At low tide, their boat was stuck high and dry.

An embarrassing sight.

They had to act quickly.

They would be under arrest soon.

They planted explosives and blew their boat clean in two.

The explosions also blew off the bow and stern, exposing the torpedo tubes.

Sure enough, French authorities arrived on scene and arrested the German crew, and after a brief stint as a local curiosity, the twisted remains of UC61 were all but forgotten about.

She was buried by the shifting sands and lost to time.

But then in 2019, with the tide way out, and after a heavy sea, locals were shocked to see a surprising sight.

There, peeking through the sands, was the UC61.

The ears had not been too kind.

In fact, little of the boat remains recognizable.

You can make out the outline of the pressure hull, which would have kept the crew safe from the crushing pressures of the ocean and a general rounded hull shape.

Locals say the submarine is visible every 2 or 3 years or so as the sea washes the dunes away.

It’s amazing to think the submarine was just left behind and sat there for over a hundred years, but can still be visited today.

It makes UC61 a unique site because most other Ubot were lost at sea.

And unlike the U843, they would never be seen again.

Across the globe today, hundreds and hundreds of German Ubot still littered the sea floor, most of them containing the remains of their crews.

They are war graves and are mostly left alone.

But if you’re interested to see an intact German submarine, there are still a couple left.

Probably the most famous being the type 9 submarine U505 in Chicago, USA, which is apparently well worth a visit.

Maybe I’ll go someday.

In the Second World War, German hubot hunted Allied shipping with ruthless efficiency, claiming thousands of victims and threatening Britain’s sea lanes.

German submarine captains racked up impressive kill tallies.

In fact, if I were to ask you what the most successful submarine of all time was, then you might think it had come from that war, World War II.

But incredibly, you’d actually have to cast the history books back nearly 20 years prior to the First World War, when the SMU35 somehow defied the odds and overcame technological limitations of the time to become the most deadly undersea hunter of all time.

The submarine would go on to sink a devastating amount of Allied shipping, equating to nearly half a million gross registered tons.

This is the insane true story of the SMU35, the most successful submarine of all time.

The submarine was at the start of the First World War as yet unproven.

Many in the British Admiral T considered it to be little more than a toy.

But it was the German Imperial Navy that had taken a much more active role in developing the submarine into a fearsome fighting weapon.

The German subs called Yubot from the German word punto emerged in the early 1900s and were refined with each subsequent class.

In 1912, enough lessons had been learned to begin production of a particularly efficient class of sub called the U31 class.

Now these things were for their day absolutely cutting edge.

U31 and her sisters were fairly long at around 212 ft or 65 m with space inside enough for 35 men.

On the surface, the boats were powered by sixcylinder two-stroke diesel engines, giving them 3700 horsepower total.

Now, back then, diesel technology was really just in its infancy.

The engines gave the boats a fairly modest top speed of about 16 knots on the surface.

Below the water line though, the diesels were disengaged and the screws were driven by electric motors.

Now, this silent setup could drive the sub forward at just over 9 knots.

Not fast enough to catch up to or overtake enemy vessels, but fast enough that repositioning could be done for a better attack.

The boats were actually designed to operate mainly on the surface, diving only after the enemy had been cighted.

At the start of the war, the Ubot operated according to the so-called cruiser rules, intercepting Allied ships, ordering them to surrender and only then engaging and sinking them.

The Germans were dismayed to discover though that the British and Allied ships instead of surrendering, began to attack the surface submarines, with some even veering off to ram and sink them.

It changed German doctrine and the way submarines were used forever.

Now there would be no warning before the deadly blow was struck.

The Yubot’s primary weapon was the torpedo, then over 6 m or 263 in long, packing a massive 353 lb, 160 kg hexanite explosive warhead.

Now, they were driven at speed by piston engines turned with compressed air mixed with kerosene vapor, which would ignite, expanding the air to provide more power and driving a single propeller.

Now the Kaiser’s Yubot fleet was very well trained and they were keen to show what they could do at the outbreak of the war.

Unfortunately for the British, one of those submarines would prove to be very, very good at hunting.

Indeed, U35 was sister boat to the U31.

And from the outside, there was nothing out of the ordinary about her.

Her design was not revolutionary.

She didn’t push the technological boundaries or anything like that.

And there was nothing to suggest that this modest yubot would go on to become the deadliest submarine of all time.

Her first skipper was Captain Voldemar Copaml, a capable German Navy veteran who led U35 on her first successful patrols.

After initial reconnaissance work, U35 was let loose to do as much damage as she could, and those early days were highly lucrative for the boat.

For the first year or so of the war, she sank no less than 38 ships, nearly all of them British and French transports.

Her final kill in this period was a ship of some notoriety.

Back in 1912, the liner RMS Titanic had sunk after striking an iceberg, and famously a mystery ship could just be seen off in the near distance, which never seemed to respond to distress calls or rockets.

That ship was called SS Californian and her crew were horrified to discover the next morning that Titanic had sunk and that the strange sights they had seen had actually been the Titanic going under.

In late 1915, it was Californian’s turn when she had been damaged by a torpedo hit from U34.

Undertoe by a French vessel, U35 struck the final killing blow and Californian, the unlucky villain of the Titanic story, was sunk.

At that point in 1915, the war had been going very well indeed for U35.

But something was about to happen that would blast her kill count into the stratosphere.

Captain Copham was transferred and down the conning tower hatch for the first time strode Captain Lothar von Ano de la Perier in his place.

Dea Perier was a Prussian aristocrat of French German ancestry who’d served in battleships, cruisers, and then as an agitant at the war’s outbreak.

He then had a quick stint in the Zeppelin service before bizarrely transferring to the Yubot arm, which is about as far away from airships as one can get.

And it was here that Deer would find his true calling.

In January 1916, U35 began to take a deadly toll on British and Allied shipping.

Working a way through the Mediterranean, U35 would engage enemy ships according to the old prize rules.

Dip Perier himself explained when he said, “We stop the vessels.

The crews boarded the lifeboats.

We inspected the ship’s documents, told the crews how they could reach the next port, and then sank the stopped prize.

It meant that U35 achieved most of her kills not with torpedoes, but with her single deck gun.

Now, most of U35’s victims at this time were cargo ships, less than about 5,000 tons, but a few notable exceptions stand out.

In February 1916, she encountered and sank the beautiful old French ocean liner La Provence.

And then in October, the troop ship and former liner Golia Golia had been another French liner operated by the same company as La Provence, the company general trons at Nontik or CGT.

At this time, Deer did not play by the old prize rules.

Instead, he torpedoed Golia, but then looked on in horror as ammunition deep in the ship’s holds detonated.

The ocean liner sank in just 15 minutes with more than a thousand victims.

As the war dragged on, U35 sank ship after ship after ship.

A glimpse inside her log book reveals dozens and dozens of ships names.

In April 1917 alone, for example, U35 sank the ships Ardas, Margarite, Parkgate, Maplewood, Miss Morris, India, Jeppia, Kame, Adysius, Stromboli, Patagonia, Panagi, Draatos, Brisbane River, Corfu, Fernmore, Tchiev, Soell, Leo Castle, Lowale, Nentmore, Bandiiera, Emoro, Bienn, Prof, Luigi, Nordson, Travor, Vilham, Krag, and Triana.

Then one day, the familiar shape of a four-funneled ocean liner came into view in the boat’s crosshairs.

Delerier gazed through and recognized the mighty ocean liner Olympic sister ship to Titanic, then serving as a trooper.

Fortunately for the ocean liner, conditions were bad enough as to prohibit an attack, and she got away unscathed.

U35’s July to August 1916 patrol stands as one of the most successful submarine patrols of all time because the boat sank no fewer than 54 ships for about 90,000 gross registered tons and having only used four torpedoes.

Now for this Deer was awarded one of Germany’s highest military honors the polarite medal also known as the blue max.

Now by 1918 deer and his boat had done some devastating damage to the allies.

In fact, under de la Perier alone, some 193 Allied ships totaling about 453,000 tons of shipping, which is by itself an astounding amount, had been sunk.

It made Deerier the most successful submarine skipper of all time, a record as yet unchallenged.

Deeper was replaced by two captains who couldn’t quite recapture the magic of their forebear.

But still, by the end of the war, U35 had sunk a further seven ships.

In late 1918, she was surrendered to the British, who at last came face tof face with the boat that had hunted them for 4 years.

U35 had sent 220 ships to the bottom of the ocean from as many nations as Denmark, Egypt, Greece, France, Japan, Italy, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Tunisia, and Britain.

She had engaged and sunk three Royal Navy warships and the final tally of sunken tonnage came out to 505,121 gross registered tons.

It’s a record for a single submarine that hasn’t been challenged ever since.

By contrast, in World War II, the most successful German Yubot U48 sank about a quarter of the number of ships U35 had.

and USS Tang, the most successful American submarine, also sank about one quarter the amount of tonnage that U35 did.

Dela Perriier, U35’s most successful commander, was quite flippant about his success.

When asked about his record-breaking 1916 patrol, he said simply that it had been quote quite tame and dull.

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