Midget Submarines of WW2 - Small and Possibly Deadly?

[Music] [Music] the world of submarines is a mysterious one with many of the most closely guarded secrets of even today's navies being concentrated in the submarine arms of their various services in the first half of the 20th century the submarine and its uses were at an even more basic level a mystery because it was a brand-new technology and nobody actually knew what is the full capabilities were whilst the first world war had established some of the basic parameters of submarine performance use and countermeasures to it going into the second world war there were three broad common classes of submarine the smaller coastal or trading submarines of several hundred ton displacement the ocean-going submarines that range from the high hundreds to just over a thousand ton displacement and a few leftovers from attempts at so-called fleet submarines that were larger still sometimes these latter two categories are conflated but for our purposes I'm dividing off the larger subs designed for independent operations such as the T class or the type 7 or type 9 u-boats from those such as the Argonaut and the French Surcouf which were designed with other roles in mind such as direct fleet support or surface based commerce rating but whilst the trend towards massive cruiser submarines had been curtailed by treaty and also to be honest partly by practicality at the other end of the spectrum mini subs or [ __ ] subs there was still a lot of work being done very early work had been done in the First World War in this field particularly by the Italians who had scored a significant success near the end of the war by sinking the battleship barabbas Unitas in Harbor using an early form of so called manned torpedo as the Second World War rolled around it would be unsurprisingly the Italians who took the lead in the development of small underwater attack craft over the five major navies involved in the conflict four of them would eventually develop [ __ ] submarines and man torpedoes at varying stir of the war the US Navy was notable in not making developments in this field during World War two albeit that this is properly as the rather understandable result of the limited range of such craft as contrasted with the vast distances that the US Navy actually needed to go and find somebody to shoot at since they'd already beaten up Mexico earlier in the 20th century and the red coats worn by the Mounties properly gave them mild case of institutional PTSD and a strong desire to run back to defend the white house anyways back to our al dente underwater escapades taking a theme from their first world war achievements the mid-1930s had seen the development in the italian navy of the low-speed torpedo otherwise known as the maya la i think or pig which is what we'll call it from now on a name derived from the fact that early test versions were rather stubborn in their refusal to do what the operators actually wanted them to do the device looked like and to a certain degree was a torpedo with a tandem riding arrangement stuck on top of it with a couple of shields to improve hydrodynamics and prevent the riders being swept off whilst things underway however such a small craft had a very small margin of neutral buoyancy and it tended to either climb or dive rather uncontrollably and more often than not diving straight down into the depths fortunately for the riders escape was very easy you just let go since the riders were already wearing underwater diving gear the nose of the device held the warhead for easy transportation but this was no suicide weapon the idea was to motor along up alongside the targets get off open up the front remove the charge or charges set the timer running and get on out of there since a single 300 kilo charge or to individual 150 kilo charges could be used in an ideal scenario the escape would be as unseen as the approach then sometime later up to two and a half hours depending on how you'd set the timer the charges would explode and the target would sink wire cutters and other useful equipment were carried in a small mounted toolbox in order to allow the divers to deal with anti-torpedo nets and other similar static defenses a small set of hydroplanes and a rudder were fitted for steering and a lot of thought was given to how you actually got these things to the target area special pressurized containers were developed that could be fitted to a larger submarine which allowed the operators to board their craft and head out without the main submarine actually having to surface the only downside was that since the guidance system was purely the mark one human eyeball they had to remain relatively near the surface unless the day was especially bright and the water especially clear but in any scenario these small underwater craft ran a high risk of being spotted especially from the air nevertheless despite a few early failures in December 1941 the Italian submarine skiore headed for the British Mediterranean fleet base at Alexandria carrying three of the so-called pigs releasing them just over a mile from the harbour a heavy anti-submarine net was in the way and this turned out to be too thick for their wire cutters but they enterprising Li just waited around until a squadron of British destroyers came passing by and the boom was opened for their passage thus allowing the Italian frogmen to ride in through the same gap thus inside the British anchorage they headed for Allied shipping placing their charges under HMS Queen Elizabeth and her sister ship HMS valiant which were the two most bond lized of the Royal Navy's World War one era battleships as well as a tanker that had a bunch of destroyers refuelling from it it certainly wasn't an easy task but two of the crews managed to attach their charges ditch their craft and escape ashore the crew working on valiant had a bit more trouble and were forced to surface where they were promptly spotted and then captured they refused to answer any questions about what they were doing and so they were locked in a compartment deep within the valiant whereupon with about quarter of an hour left on the timer they suddenly became a rather enthusiastic about telling the ship's captain that there was about to be an explosion under the ship however they were still not willing to scupper their mission and so refused to give any details about exactly what was about to happen and so they were locked back up again all three sets of charges detonated sinking the tanker and badly damaging HMS Jervis which was the nearest fuelling destroyer as well as putting valiant and Queen Elizabeth on the bottom the other two crews made it out of Alexandria but were spotted in captured a few days later while still in Egypt this was a potentially game-changing success for the Italians a German u-boat had sunk HMS bahram a few weeks earlier and the loss of Queen Elizabeth and valiant gave the italian navy uncontested superiority at sea perfectly aware of this the Royal Navy resorted to something of a gambit luckily for them the harbor was only actually a few feet deeper than the battleships draft in the area where they'd been moored and the ships have settled upright with the crews in custody the Italians didn't actually know about their success except fire things like aerial recon and so the British decided to keep up appearances with crew running their daily routines above deck whilst furious work was being done below decks to pump out and patch up the ship's thanks to the relatively small change in depth only a very close inspection would reveal that the battleships were riding suspiciously deep in the water and this was enough to make the italians a bit more cautious than they needed to be during the first half of 1942 whilst the battleships were quietly towed off for repair and refit nonetheless of the work of these crafts continued they found a disused merchant ship in a Spanish port about a mile away from Gibraltar and set up shop inside the hull cutting underwater hatch to give the pigs access in and out without having to surface the Italian frogmen would then go on to repeatedly blow up merchant vessels in Travolta's harbour marking these targets as much easier as opposed to force H due to the significantly weaker security surrounding the mercantile Anchorage the British would never actually figure out during the war quite why their ships were randomly exploding let alone where the attackers were actually coming from after Italy surrendered in 1943 a number of their underwater specialists would work with the Allies and help them develop their own ideas further but we'll cover that a bit later on there were two other main forays into [ __ ] subs by the Italian Navy the CA and CB mini subs four of the former and 21 of the latter being built the CA class were originally two-man coastal and harbor defense craft armed with a pair of lightweight torpedoes but once the USA entered the war the idea was hatched to stick one on the back of a much larger submarine take it across the Atlantic and attack New York Harbor the reasons for using this instead of one of the pigs was threefold the mini sub could travel faster and for longer which would be needed operating in the more powerful currents off the American coast the distance from the launch to the target would be greater which made the additional range of the mini sub necessary and finally the waters around New York really really cold especially compared to the Mediterranean and whilst diving suits had been invented and were in use nobody especially wanted to spend hours and hours in an unheated suit in the middle of the Hudson and then try and perform some kind of complex task at the end of it all the Seabees were improved versions of the CAS with a four-man crew more power and more versatility as to their offensive payload some of these would be used in the Black Sea against Soviet forces in the region losing one of their number in a viciously for coastal submarine campaign being transferred to the Romanian Navy after the Italians left the war from the access point of view and with four of those being eventually captured and brought into Soviet service after they in turn over around the operational Theatre in the Mediterranean initial operations as the world's tiniest hunter killers didn't quite work out and with the Italians as we said leaving the axis in 1943 a number were then used in Allied service on patrol and Special Forces missions with a number being lost import and in service to air attacks from both sides the planned attack on New York Harbor that we mentioned before ended up being canceled as the submarine that was being fitted to carry the sub was sunk in the line of duty before the mission could be given the green light the high loss rates showed the dangers of using small submarines in active operational environments where aircraft and ships that were designed to hunt they're much larger cousins were active the next Navy that we'll consider who made use of mini subs was at Japan and they went about things the other way around from the Italians starting out with mini subs and then moving on to in their case literally manned torpedoes for the Japanese with a much larger expanse of the Pacific to consider as well as numerous enemy harbors smaller units like the pigs were not considered viable instead full-on [ __ ] submarines were needed this was started well before a war with the so called target type a submarine or kohai or techique Ogata with each craft simply being assigned as a boat associated with the mothership it was attached to rather than be given its own name the aim of the target designation was so that the Imperial Japanese Navy could claim that the craft were simply small towing units for battle practice targets instead of actual weapon systems if anyone actually found out they existed initial models had no conning tower but this made them likely to roll when corkscrew underwater given their hull shape and so conning towers were rapidly added in production which gave them even better stability and of course better visibility for the crew unfortunately as with the loss of Imperial Japanese Navy vessels at the end of the war burn everything so no one can learn our secrets approach means we don't know as much about these craft as we do about other [ __ ] submarines with much information drawn simply from where they were actually found or observed in operation these subs carried too small torpedoes as offensive armament with their first operational deployment of world war ii being use of five such craft during the Pearl Harbor attack of these number 19 grounded and was captured number 18 with was depth-charged damaged and abandoned at some point whilst number 20 was detected by USS Ward and became the first Japanese vessels be sent by American forces during the course of World War two albeit that USS Enterprise still gets to claim the first kill of the war since this incident took place before a formal declaration of war by the USA number 16 and number 22 made it into the harbor with number 22 firing its torpedoes at US Navy targets but missing and hitting a dock and the shore respectively one of its targets the destroyer USS monican took exception to this and promptly sank number 22 in return number 16 is the most interesting of the five though as it also fired its torpedoes and there's some evidence based on interpretations of photographs taken during the attack and the recovery of a Doug torpedo during work on battleship row that indicates it may have managed to torpedo the USS Oklahoma in the middle of the Japanese aerial assault three more submarines number fourteen number 24 B and number 21 was sent to attack Sydney Harbor in May 1942 number fourteen got stuck in a torpedo net and blew itself up number 24 B was engaged by the USS Chicago fired its torpedoes and managed to miss its intended targets but did sink the depot ship HMAS cuttable as well as donator torpedo to the Allied cause as the other torpedo ran ashore without exploding number 24 B then broke with Imperial Japanese Navy [ __ ] subtrahend actually escaped only two apparently found about 20 miles away number 21 was attacked with depth charges withdrew came back again and since obviously the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing multiple times in expecting there to be a difference managed to get herself depth-charged again at this time sinking it also in May 1942 two [ __ ] submarines were sent into Madagascar's Harbor both were spotted and depth-charged but managed to fire their torpedoes sinking a tanker and damaging the battleship HMS Rama Lee's and neither the subs nor their crews would survive this mission either the [ __ ] subs would also be used in the waters off Guadalcanal and the Philippines with the degree of success sinking a number of US ships albeit with very heavy losses to the [ __ ] submarine force one other interesting item of note is that both the attack on Sydney Harbor and the attack on in Madagascar were precipitated after scalped reports from the float planes carried by Imperial Japanese Navy submarines so there is perhaps some viability in that concept afterall compared to most other [ __ ] submarines they were actually quite capable performance-wise able to make a rather blistering for the period nineteen not submerged albeit apricots cost of range improved versions the type B and type C were constructed with increased range and other performance enhancements a final and much larger more capable type D variant sometimes called the koryu class was in production at the end of the war and was to be used as more of an independent small submarine as opposed to earlier types which were generally deployed from larger mother vessels as the war got worse for Japan they would go on to develop the Chi 10 a suicide torpedo to match the kamikazes in the air and the suicide boats on the surface these started off as simply a type 93 torpedo that had been cut in half and had a section stuck in the middle to allow the placement of a pilot and controls whilst all being wrapped up in a slightly larger hull initially there was a provision for pilots to eject at the last minute but this was later removed due to of all things an apparent lack of use one major difference compared to the original torpedoes capabilities was a significant drop in speed that this would vary depending on the model but no Chi 10 was anywhere near as fast as a normal torpedo with any models being quite a bit slower than even the targets that were shooting at believe it or not there was actually a full training regime in place for suicide weapons and in this course trainees would gradually get closer and closer to operating the real thing as they progressed along the training path in some cases a little bit too close to the real thing as despite not having actual warheads aboard a number of pilots were killed or seriously injured when they managed to hit to the practice target ship and it turned out that slamming into a solid steel object at 30 knots or more without a safety harness whilst confined in a small metal compartment with a lot of buttons and knobs sticking out of it was actually fairly bad for your health due to being larger than a normal torpedo the Chi 10 who was supposed to be launched either from the deck of a submarine from a coastal installation or from a destroyer or other properly equipped surface warship on a submarine a docking tube would allow the pilot to enter the craft from the main submarine without needing to surface there were a number of other disadvantages beyond the reduced speed that came with the use of these weapons despite having human guidance the Chi 10 themselves could not dive especially deeply but this also meant that the submarine carrying them couldn't go very deep until they had been launched which made the whole contraption a much easier target furthermore once the target was found whereas a normal submarine would simply begin attack procedures for a chi 10 you then had to brief the pilot charge the Chi tens air tanks ventilates the pilot compartment get the pilot aboard and then finally launch now it must be said at this point it's easy to dismiss these efforts as crazy suicide by the Japanese but it's got to be remembered that the young men involved and the shipmates that they left behind knew exactly what they were doing and they were human the same as me and you and so regardless of whether they hit their targets or not this kind of warfare would leave vicious psychological scars on those who had to witness and take part in send they're friends to certain death that said a number of different types of chitin were produced with four primary types noted in post-war evaluations type one was the closest to the original and type 93 torpedo except with the warhead tripled in size to near enough guarantee a one-shot kill regardless of the target it was capable of about 30 knots at top speed and like all chitin would have to surface at the last moments of an attack run in order to bank the necessary course corrections a number of faults including leaks in the operators section and engine compartment would mean that production would stop at around 300 units although this production run would go with surpass of the development of a number of other types the type 2 was a departure from the previous design becoming much more a separate mini sub as opposed to an adapted torpedo the powerplant was changed to give a total speed of 40 knots which sounds great until you look at the fueling requirements and realizing included such materials as hydrogen peroxide hydrazine hydrate and potassium ku pro cyanide materials for which the best safety gear is generally considered to be a very good pair of running shoes when they have to be brought into close proximity to each other on the other hand it was able to dive deeper and it was much more stable when set on course without any human input which was probably just as well given that the chances of the pilot being dissolved depended entirely on whether the worker responsible for lining the peroxide tank that sat right behind the pilot seat was as good at his job as he was supposed to be and was provided with all the right materials for insulating the tank in 1944 245 at Japan unsurprisingly this and numerous other issues with the power plant led to the type 2 being discontinued well before the type 1 the type 4 was a type to that swapped out the rather interesting fuel mixture for the same kerosene and oxygen mixture as the type 1 but significant issues with engines leaking oxygen fuel and the resulting low speed somewhat increased combust ability of the interior meant that this type would also be canceled again whilst the type 1 was still in production the last major kite n type to see any form of significant production level was the type 10 this used the electric type 92 torpedo as its base and was much smaller than the type 1 so the warhead was only one-fifth the size primarily designed for coastal operations and launched from land-based installations it would only have an upper hatch but it was very simple to build operate and maintain but again water leaks through bad seals and poor construction quality proved to be a problem and although hundreds were ordered the war ended before any could be deployed top speed was very low at 7 knots and it would have had to been used primarily as a stealth attack unit at night usually in stationary amphibious fleets as opposed to an open ocean attack craft as with the other kite ends exactly how effective these units were depends on who you believe officially the US Navy estimates that three ships were sunk by heightened attacks conversely the remaining Imperial Japanese records indicate that a number of additional successes which in US records are credited to Mines or unknown causes were achieved plus of course additional cases where kite ends were heard to detonate by the remaining crew on the mother ships but US Navy records confirm that the ship in the area at the time had not in fact been hit and so in these cases detonation was likely the result of the kite n self-destruct device and yes for a suicide weapon they also had a self-destruct lastly there was the car you [ __ ] submarine designed pretty much entirely to defend the Japanese home islands it combined two torpedoes with an explosive charge for a final suicide mission with a relatively low top speed of between 7 and 10 knots depending on whether you're going on the surface or underwater much like the type 10 Kai 10 though it was not completed in time for any known active operations would likewise have had to been used in stealth attack missions then we move on to the British although there were some concepts in the works at the start of the war it was the successful attack on Alexandria that galvanized the developmental efforts and provided a number of inspirations for successful designs in British service there would be two distinct lines of development craft for direct defensive operations and crafts specifically designed for Special Forces operations first out of the starting block in the former sec part of those two categories was the chariot a man torpedo whose development started in early 1942 and unsurprisingly heavily resembled the Italian Pigs chariot mark 1 was pretty simple although with the top speed of only 3 and a half knots in good conditions the speed dial settings of slow medium and full were some somewhat ambitious with crawl amble and walk possibly being more accurate unlike the pigs the warhead only came in one variant a 600-pound torpex device about the same weight as the larger Italian charge but some somewhat more powerful thanks to the use of torpex instead of earlier explosives and the slightly faster chariot mark 2 available from early 1944 carried double the amount of explosive could hit four and a half knots and had a fairing which fully enclosed the crew with two openings allowing them to pop their heads out for observation purposes or conversely to duck back under cover when they were passing under or through dangerous obstacles operational use was also very similar to their Italian counterparts with the warhead set on a timer and the idea being to ride the chariot back out to the mother sub or ditch it and escape on foot depending on the operational environment with the UK remaining in the war to the end the chariots had more chances for operational use the first try involved carrying a couple on a fishing trawler to Norway with the intent of using them against the Tirpitz but both units were lost in bad weather whilst they were on to tow this caused the Royal Navy to adopt the Italian practice of moving them by submarine albeit in container oops from which the units had to be removed whilst on the surface prior to use and then later simply by tying them down not adopting these sealed units the Italians had used that allowed for underwater launch the various attempts on enemy shipping met with a high combination of equipment failure and poor luck but there were also occasionally successes in early 1943 the first major success was ironically enough against the Italians themselves sinking a cruiser and damaging a troop ship in Palermo Harbor however without a formal program of digit submarine development before the war the British were very much learning on the job and something could usually go wrong on almost every mission normally mechanical issues that would then limit the number of actually deployable units once the Italians had largely joined the Allied side help from former pig drivers and developers led to another success against the Italian Cruiser ballons Oh which it was feared might be seized by the Germans in the meantime they were also used for recon operations using their small size - getting close to various beaches prior to landings during vely at various allied assaults honor Italian positions especially in and around Sicily the original plan was to take out two cruisers when they went after palanzo but one of the chariots sprang a leak and had to be ditched the much-improved chariot mark - was used in late 1944 in an attack on Phuket Harbor where for a change nothing actually went wrong and two ships were successfully sunk in parallel development was the x-class a larger [ __ ] submarine with substantial operational range the primary limiting factor being more the crew rather than the vessel due to their size they had to be towed to the operational area with a caretaker crew aboard before swapping in for the operational crew and casting off intended as fully reusable they were supposed to make it back to the mother submarine for a return trip home as an operational [ __ ] submarine it had a full diesel electric drive system using an adapted London bus engine for the diesel half of operations although his top speed was somewhat glacial jogging speed on the surface but slow enough underwater that it could be overtaken by a particularly reckless Mach one chariot driver they also had an airlock which allowed a diver to enter and exit the craft whilst it was underwater unlike many other [ __ ] submarines however it did not carry torpedoes for the ex class was designed specifically for use against more chipping in harbors instead to massive explosive charges each one containing a worryingly large two-ton amytal payload on a timer were carried one on either side because of their specialists attack profile they were also fitted with electromagnetic baffle devices to cancel out the signature of the hull in order to evade induction loop sensors that guarded many harbours and would also reduce the chances of the hull setting off a magnetic mind they also carried hydraulically powered net cutters for getting through anti-torpedo and anti-submarine Nets although to operate them that required a diver to exit via the airlock and work on the Nets manually as they were not fitted to the submarine themselves the idea of the ex craft was to sneak under especially large targets and deploy the charges and run away given the specialist nature of this mission and the risks to the fore crew experimental runs were done with the first few craft produced with the results fed back into the layout of subsequent craft and due to this and the slow speed of production compared to the chariots they did not operationally deploy until late 1943 with the first operation aimed at using six craft to [ __ ] the small German fleet based in Norway as with many such British operations it didn't start out too well to craft parted their toes and went off on other adventures in the North Sea another broke down and had to abort the mission and a fourth was spotted and successfully attacked that left x6 and x7 who managed to work their way through the defences and drop a total of eight tons of explosive underneath Turpin the lack of other craft meaning that Lutz ow and Shawn host would remain unmolested this time both crafts were then spotted and attacked leading to the crew abandoning the subs and being captured whilst the damage wasn't actually enough to sink the German battleship due to the explosives obviously being somewhat away from the hole it did cause enough damage to put it out of action for quite a while as amongst other things that the shock of the explosions dismounted one of the main turrets later in 1944 ex craft would continue their attacks on Norway sinking a merchant ship and after a couple of tries a floating dry dock like the chariots the ex craft were also used for recon work in their case mainly off the beaches under consideration for the d-day landings and then further used as navigational beacons for sword and Juno beaches to help direct shipping and landing craft using visual radio and sonar signals for all-weather capability for the war in the Pacific whilst the ex crafts were theoretically fine it was felt a slightly larger craft would be more suited to the area and so the ex eClass was developed with a little bit more room a bit more performance and half a dozen limpet mines to give the diver something to do if they didn't run into any Nets in something of a throwback to room 40 operations in World War one one of the first missions was to cut cables in this case telephone cables the idea being to then force Japanese commanders into making radio transmissions which could of course then be intercepted and decoded using a towed grapnel line xe4 managed to find both of its target cables hauling them out of the seabed where her divers promptly cut them denying the Western Japanese holdouts secure communications capability xe5 targeted another cable and with some difficulty also managed to succeed although due to the poor visibility they weren't sure they'd actually been successful until after the war when they were able to check Japanese records by August 1945 it was decided to try and complete the kill list of Imperial Japanese heavy cruisers as by this point almost all of them had been sunk or a mobile mostly by the US Navy in an effort to add the Royal Navy to this particular scoresheet hms XE 1 and XE 3 headed for singapore harbour with their targets being the cruisers Miyoko and 2 Cal respectively thanks in part to the usual Japanese standard of anti-submarine warfare xe3 managed to drop its charges and attach its limpets mines before withdrawing albeit finding that tucao had been stationary for so long that fouling on the whole had made it impossible for the magnetic limpet mines to actually attach through all the seaweed and so the diver grabbed some rope and physically tied them on instead XE one failed to find Miyoko although as it turned out the ship was already a mobile due to combat damage and so instead they added their side charges to the steadily building pile under two cow needless to say Takhar would not be going anywhere under her own power again apart from these craft the Special Operations Executive also developed a trio of their own craft specifically for unsurprisingly special operations purposes with varying levels of success first off was the Welman submarine you'll find practically anything the SOE actually built carried the well prefix this was brought to you by the wonderfully named leftenant Colonel John dolphin and in many ways it was something of a halfway house between a chariot and an ex craft as you can see it was very chariot like in being effectively a manned torpedo with a detachable warhead designed to be fitted magnetically to the side of a ship however unlike chariot the operator was provided with a fully enclosed conning tower meaning a diving suit wasn't required although ordered into production it quickly became clear that although this approach was more comfortable for the operator the limited visibility from the small windows the lack of a periscope and the inability for the operator to deal with any anti-submarine Nets due to being stuck inside meant that the Royal Navy's options were considerably more effective when it came to using chariots and x-craft instead nonetheless we've quite a few built before a production halt was ordered due to the aforementioned problems trials were run to try and determine if there was any use for them a mission was eventually attempted an attack on the floating dry dock that the ex craft would eventually destroy that sentence might give you some idea of how successful this particular mission was unfortunately for the Wellman's the craft encountered an anti-submarine net and with one of them spotted and captured the other three crafts were forced to scuttle themselves with their operators going into hiding with the aid of the Norwegian resistance until the Royal Navy had come and pick them up this debacle relegated the remaining craft to basic training devices and the main focus would remain on the X and X Y as well as the chariots within the Royal Navy however upon seeing these latter types exceeding leftenant Colonel dolphin went back to the drawing board with a new idea the well freighter whilst the X craft were primarily for attack purposes with recon and other uses secondary the well freighter was specifically for covert ops with attack as a secondary function primarily it was supposed to help with the landing recovery and supply of agents and resistance fighters in coastal regions as well as Intel and recon efforts with a subsidiary capability in theory to lay explosive charges the concept was for the craft undertake longer missions and thus be semi independent and thus it was designed to resemble a normal motorboat and spend a lot of time on the surface running in toward the enemy coastline at night only submerging if enemy activity was detected it would then deploy its passengers and hang out on the seabed during the day coming back up the next night to pick up anyone who was coming back home then head on home or back to a mother vessel if the target was especially far away a number of prototype models were tested resulting in significant revisions to the final design with final specifications being for a thousand miles of operational range normally with another sixteen hundred miles possible if additional fuel tanks were added and the storage compartment used for still more fuel a maximum of six people could be carried of which only two were needed as crew and speed was relatively high for a [ __ ] sub on the surface at seven knots although underwater speed was still a pedestrian three knots on a good day specialist storage units for supplies to be taken ashore were generally attached to the back of the craft but in the end the craft were only ready once the war in Europe was almost over and Germany had little coastline left at that point so a few of them were sent to the Pacific but was still undergoing operational trials when that part of the war ended as well finally came the motorized Smurfs herbal canoe and yes regard this picture with all the hilarity that that entails only in Britain oh well anyway this Special Operations Executive craft did not in fact get to the well appellation I guess well canoe probably didn't really cut it and it was designed by major Hughes with the craft acquiring the nickname Sleeping Beauty when the good major was found fast asleep in one of the prototypes much smaller even than a chariot the craft was designed to carry only hand portable limpet mines but be incredibly cheap and easy to build and required only a single operator ambitiously they were also supposed to be capable of being dropped from the air by bombers presumably I hope with a parachute although luckily for all concerned this doesn't appear to have managed to make its way into operational usage as a canoe it could also be paddled or even sailed for additional range despite its limited explosive payload it did have its attractions in being small light and easy to use if not so much easy to control we're the submarine able to transport quite a few of them as opposed to only a couple of chariots or a single X craft since it did not have a warhead of its own the idea was to use it as a transport vehicle with the diver leaving the canoe to attach the mines to the target before returning to it for an escape operationally it wasn't the greatest of successes with the often overlooked Australian New Zealand and British head force of commandos trying to use some of them in a raid unfortunately in that case the mothership was found by the Japanese before they could deploy and significant portions of the crew were executed another mission in Norway had less fatal results but it was still a failure with the operators being chased Benny Hill style across Norway by the Germans before finally making their escape in the end their greatest success would come in their use by the OSS later the CIA in evaluating the capabilities of US Harbor defenses via mock attacks and other exercises which would help to develop countermeasures and inform a number of post-war underwater covert ops projects last of course would come the Germans they would be somewhat late comers to this particular game but if you want to know more about them I would suggest you check out military history visualized video link appearing above now that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for drydock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 915,812

Keywords: wows, world of warships, midget submarines, World War 2, Italian Navy, Royal Navy, Japanese Navy, Raid on Alexandria, Chariot, X-craft, Pigs, CA class, CB class, frogmen, Kaiten

Id: zt1O8RIX9pw

Length: 41min 57sec (2517 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 07 2019