The K class - Lawn-darts of the sea?

[Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] this video is made possible with the help of Dr Sam Willis of the society for nautical research who runs the Mariners mirror podcast which you can find on its own YouTube channel uh Link in the video description below and also on the society for nautical researchers website so many thanks to Dr Willis both for his assistance in the rather wonderful animation that you'll see later in the video and also on some of the material that he's done on the k-class as well as of course the other sources we consulted but let's get on with the K-C class themselves shall we ah yes the infamous k-class yeah to cover them some point Drac well here you go the cake last submarines had their Origins actually in a rather interesting concept that arose just before World War one and would recur frequently over the next few decades even if that aim was never quite realized namely the fleet submarine a vessel that was fast enough on the surface to keep up with the main Fleet formation of battleships before then submerging to deal out unseen torpedo attacks to an enemy Fleet in the midst of battle even the much famed gato class was both an attempt at this concept and something of a failure in that regard since by the time they entered service a good portion of the 21 not U.S battle line was out of action and the newer battleships were considerably faster but for the Gatos at least the capabilities that the attempt granted them made them exceptionally good Commerce Raiders but back in 1913 Britain had a surprisingly large Fleet of submarines considering pop culture history seems to talk about the Germans with Subs but it was also suffering from early adopter syndrome as most of its Subs were only really suitable for short-range Coastal missions and could not serve overseas unless somebody towed them to a literal theater elsewhere and then let them loose assuming that the sub survived the trip and so in 1913 Admiral Keys asked two shipyards Vickers of Sheffield and Scots of granuck to come up with designs for a large submarine initially these were for an overseas design which was wholly British as a number of foreign designs had recently been procured but it was fairly clear that a native design capability for a submarine capable of operating at long distances in the oceans was needed Vickers came back with what was for the time a monster sub of the largest submarine then in British service or under construction was the E-class which took the scales at just over 660 tons on the surface the new submarine was proposed at well over twice that at around 1450 tons when on the surface and with a operational range of 5 300 miles this actually put it in the size range of the Tambor class of the late 1930s United States Navy which was the immediate predecessor class in terms of continuity of design to the Gatos and it actually made this Vicar's proposal larger than any type 7 U-Boat variant of World War II and larger than all but one of the type 9 variants in the critics Marina of World War II Scott's design was a little bit smaller at merely 932 tons but that was still 50 larger than anything in the Royal Navy inventory to date but there was a big difference between the two designs that wasn't anything related to their size whereas the E-class used a pair of 800 brake horsepower diesel engines the two shaft Vickers design required no less than 3700 brake horsepower or about 1850 brake horsepower per engine which those of you can do a bit quick bit of maths we'll realize the 250 more brake horsepower per engine than the combined power output of an E-Class ostensibly this would give the craft a surface speed of about 20 knots assuming that everything worked but this ambition was somewhat offset by Scott's proposal now they had a license to build a Fiat diesel engines since no British design was up to the power output that even their smaller sub needed to reach 20 knots realistically speaking but even then Scots were hesitant about putting a guarantee on the reliability of even the better Fiat license built engines instead they suggested that the sub should use steam turbines Keys who was already somewhat wary of Vicar's promises that honestly these hilariously powerful almost 2 000 brake horsepower diesels would work decided that it was best to order one boat of each design to see how they compared with each other in service the Vickers craft would become hvs Nautilus which was almost 260 foot long and fitted with eight torpedo tubes two in the bow two in the stern and four on the beam with a single reload provided for each tube she featured a double Hull for her ballast tanks instead of the at the time far more common saddle tanks and the Scots craft became HMS swordfish she didn't have Stern tubes but otherwise the ornament layout was similar to Nautilus saved that the bow tubes were 21 inch is in diameter whilst the beam tubes were the smaller 18-inch tubes compared to Nautilus which had an all 18 inch fit out swordfish was somewhat based on an Italian design that Scots had access to but whilst her Steam Plant was Kept Secret just in case it actually happened to prove to be an innovation Lord Fisher who at the time was yet to return to the animal Jewel though he would soon do so become Admiral Fisher again was not particularly impressed he wrote in June 1913 the oil engine I.E Diesel and heavy oil fuel engines will govern all sea fighting and all sea fighting is going to be governed by submarines and yet like damned fools we are only spending as much money on them as the Germans and we are behind them in the oil engine and so like the French we are fatally hankering after steam engines in submarines this is actually another reference to the fact that pre-war the German U-Boat budget actually wasn't that large but whilst these two designs Nautilus and swordfish were being refined into something that could actually be built the director of Naval construction came up with his own idea which was for a submarine 338 foot long with an even greater 1700 ton displacement when surfaced which was considerably larger than most destroyers of the time it was equipped with steam turbines and would reach 24 knots on the surface and carry eight 21-inch torpedo tubes four in the bow and four on the beam it's somewhat shorter range of only 3 000 miles but trade a shift over towards the idea of supporting the fleet which this design theoretically could actually do quite well because it could range ahead of the fleet at 24 knots when the fleet was only capable by a maximum of 21. but the great size of the sub compared to existing designs coupled with its novel power plant and what that size might do to the sub's ability to control its depth which turned out to be something of a pressing concern meant that the design was put on hold until Nautilus and swordfish which had already been ordered could be evaluated you then got the return of Fisher in the outbreak of war in 1914 which meant that some time passed before the idea of a large Fleet submarine was Revisited as Fisher ordered a fleet of new submarines but they was were all based on the proven E-class as this allowed them to boost numbers very quickly and it was known that the E-class didn't have any particularly finicky handling characteristics but towards the end of 1914 rumors began to circulate based on some somewhat sketchy Intel before the war that suggested the Germans might have been planning a class of high-speed submarine of Their Own and now these uh somewhat dodgy Intel reports seemed to suggest that this was true and the pre-dreadnought HMS formidable was lost to a U-Boat attack on the first day of 1915 and the survivors swore blind that the submarine that had torpedoed her had kept pace with the old battleship in the midst of a gale whilst a battleship was churning along at full speed this was not something that any existing British sub would have been capable of Fisher reacting to this demanded a new submarine design immediately he wanted the submarine to hit 20 knots on the surface the director of Naval construction pointed out that even though Nautilus was on paper supposed to be capable of this she wasn't yet in service and there was considerable doubt about what top speed she would actually manage spoiler alert in fact she'd only managed to get up to 17 knots in her trials but they didn't know that at the time the fastest any submarine that was actually in service under the right enzyme could do at that point was a touch over 15 knots but steam engines as opposed to a diesel power plant could manage to get the speed that fisher wanted but Fisher was adamant there would be no steam engines on his watch at least in Subs in December 1914 the French submarine archimede a small steam-powered vessel had joined the British Subs that were trying to torpedo hippa's battle Cruisers who were on their way back from bombarding Scarborough and Hartlepool akamide was struck by Heavy Seas that bent over her funnel so badly that it couldn't be lowered and since it couldn't be lowered the hatch that kept the area water tight when she was submerged couldn't be closed and thus she was stuck on the surface with limited steam power thanks to the crimping effect of the bent funnel and with water pouring in through the now warped seal the crew ended up having Till My Bucket Brigade to keep the engine room vaguely dry and the subs slowly limped home this Fisher insisted was one of the many many reasons he did not want anything to do with steam engines on submarines the director of Naval construction accordingly went back to the drawing board and came up with another option instead of aiming for the moon with over 1800 brake horsepower per shaft on a two-shaft design like the Vickers sub he put no less than three shafts on a 1200 ton sub with a 1200 brake horsepower engine attached each these engines were simply extended versions of the Vickers diesels that could be found on the D and E-class as Vickers reckoned they could get about 100 brake horsepower out of a single cylinder and the d-class engine so thus had six cylinders for 600 brake horsepower the E-class had eight cylinders for 800 brake horsepower and so Vickers reasoned if they made a 12 cylinder version they could get 1200 brake horsepower the director of Naval construction thought this might enable the sub to reach 21 knots or so and thus 8 j-class submarines were ordered since it was hoped that this speed which was exactly the current speed of the British battle line might also allow them to tick the box for a submarine that could support the battle Fleet this battlefleet support sub was still a feature in high demand amongst the senior officers of the fleet despite some early War efforts to carry this out using slower Subs leading to three cases of the submarines thinking the British ships they were traveling with were hostile which resulted in the near torpedoing of the cruiser lower stopped by its own side and several attempted rammings by Cruisers who thought that the friendly submarines traveling with them were in fact U-boats keys at this point stopped being in charge of the royal Navy submarines and was sent over to the Dardanelles and commodore Hall took over the position he was also a proponent of the fleet submarine idea but one of his first jobs was to tell Fisher that the j-class probably would only reach 19 knots which was two knots slower than the fleet's combat speed and Vickers had also indicated that anything more than 12 cylinders per engine was beyond them at the moment with Nautilus now looking like it was going to fall short of speed as well as we mentioned earlier they'd only ever manage 17 knots even Vickers had gone to suggesting steam engines if Fisher really wanted a 21 knot sub or faster the director of Naval construction dusted off his design from 1913 and combined in a few good ideas from the latest Vicar's scene power proposal and pointed out that this revised version of his design couldn't suffer from the same fate as Archimedes due to differences in the funnel and vent designs it was seeming to have no other option Fisher gave in although he insisted that a small diesel engine be included to allow the submarine to move immediately under internal combustion engine power when it surfaced before the boilers brought up to speed and would also allow the steam engines to be doused early if they needed to dive which would accelerate dive times since in theory they could run for a short time on the diesel on the circus as well a few other changes were also included since the residual heat in the boiler room once the boiler highs had been put out made the chamber completely unlivable for a while after the submarine had dived and the vents had been closed the plan had been to Simply isolate the boiler room until it cooled down with obviously the sea on all sides acting as a heat sink but this effectively cut the submarine in half for the crew as the turbine room the diesel and most of the batteries and pretty much most of the crew quarters to say the least were all at the back and the command center the forward Torpedo Room the beam torpedo brims and a number of other functions were all ahead of this area and so a small insulated side passage was added that went past the Boiler Room a third deck gun was also added to the design and the 21 inch torpedo tubes were changed to 18 inch tubes as the 18 inch tube was already being made in large numbers and it was thought that this would help accelerate construction as opposed to speeding up the rather limited number of 21-inch submarine torpedo tubes that were being built at the time to compensate for this slight reduction in Firepower the four bow and four beam tubes were supplemented by placing two single deck mounted torpedo launchers near the funnel which would give the submarine additional Firepower at least when surfaced each internal tube carried a single reload so there were a total of 18 Torpedoes carried four submarines to this new design were ordered first from Vickers then another two from Portsmouth then Fisher resigned over the dardanelle's campaign and then 10 more were ordered shortly after he left from a number of dockyards a number of other orders would follow and we'll cover all of them briefly a little bit later the director of Naval construction went off and happily began drafting an even larger 30 knot submarine but news for HMS swordfish which was by this point on Trials was not great so the board gently pushed back on this new design until a bit more was known about the performance of steam driven submarines in fact even Commodore Hall was having his doubts writing to the third Sea Lord the k-class must be considered a very bold advance in submarine design being an increase over 300 percent on anything previously tried it is not yet certain that high speed will always carry tactical Advantage generally speaking in submarines the power to submerge takes the place of high speed a high-speed submarine will have many disadvantages her length makes her a great Target for torpedo attack her visibility makes it easier to stalk by hostile submarines it is true that high speed enables her to zigzag and thus renters her more difficult to hit but the balance is considered to leave her with disadvantage underwater she is made unhandy to maneuver quickly for a torpedo attack and she requires deep water to work in she's more likely to strike mines both on the surface and submerged she's also much more costly and a much greater anxiety to the personnel only the necessity of accompanying the battle Fleet justified in my opinion the size of the k-class but on paper at least the idea was sound the k-class would be easily able to keep Pace with the fleet and then at the report of the enemy fleet's location they could proceed at a speed that was almost as good as a Queen Elizabeth class Battleship to a position ahead of the enemy they could then submerge and await the chance to unleash a devastating torbido volley they might even be able to flat out chase down an enemy Fleet at night since their high speed and low observability seem to suggest that stealth attacks on the surface might well be possible in August 1916 HMS k-3 was the first of the class to be commissioned but this is where reality met Theory the first trials the submarine ran were surface speed trials she did indeed manage 24 knots but the temperature in the boiler room and the turbine rooms climbed and kept climbing the hatches were all opened but still the heat built until the engineers were forced to flee to the submarines Upper Deck poking into the furnace below occasionally with a stick until some brave souls doused themselves in the spray that the sub was throwing up which gave them just enough time to head down and start to reduce the power and thus the speed as well as the generated Heat traveling at a more sedate Pace the submarine then ran into a high C which smashed all the windows in the upper part of the conning Tower and then a British armed trawler on patrol saw a very large submarine of unknown designs sailing toward itself at high speed and promptly opened fire and K3 managed to evade the shots which largely fell short and thinking better of the whole situation decided to turn around and go home a few changes were made as a result of this especially to the level of heat insulation and the power of the ventilation fans in the Machinery spaces and at the end of 1916 the submarine was scheduled for diving trials with no lesser person than Prince Albert the Future King George VI and a serving naval officer who had already seen action aboard a turret to board HMS Collingwood at the Battle of Jutland present when the submarine began to slip beneath the waves the prince decided to head aft to see the electrical motor controls when suddenly the bow dropped like a stone and the submarine dived at such a steep angle that many men were thrown off their feet and into bulkheads that had suddenly become the floor the prince in his escort grabbed on to various hand holds and managed to ride out the dive until K3 plowed straight into the bottom bow first the water was only 150 foot deep and K3 was 339 foot long this circle was squared as her Stern reared out of the water propellers still spinning and once everyone had picked themselves up it took about 20 minutes to figure out how to get the stern back into the water to allow the propellers to bite and thus reverse the sub out of the seabed then blow the ballast tanks to surface the whole submarine it was a lucky Escape having then scraped the mud and rocks out of the bow tubes K3 headed for scalperflow and joined the grand Fleet but things proved to be quite difficult here as well on January the 9th 1917 she was steaming along when a port beam sea sent water cascading down the funnels or where they didn't bend so at least that was correct the water Cascade put out the boilers losing power the sub was then rolled Beam on onto the sea with each wave bringing in yet more water The Boiler Room was over half full of water by the time the funnels were lowered and sealed and the sub's a great size managing to keep it afloat despite having over 100 tons of water now board Fisher's foresight proved invaluable though the diesel engine that he'd insisted on fitting which was the same power as one of the power plants on an E-class sub was brought back to life and K3 was able to move on its power heading for a safe harbor whilst the diesel also drove the pumps which tried to get some of the water back where it belonged outside of the sub K2 4 6 and 13 were undergoing acceptance trials at around this time and k-13's trials seemed to be going well with only minor and easily fixable issues noted when she prepared for her final test Dive In garalock the funnels tuck themselves away on electric motors and hatches on both the superstructure and the pressure hole closed to CLD resulting holes in those holes the latter also being sealed by hand from within most of the ballast tanks were flooded and the submarine began to dive a warning light was flickering on one of the boiler and ventilation monitors but the officers were assured that the circuit had just been wired wrong and so the last ballast tanks were flooded and the hydroplane set to a down angle luckily an engineer went to check the boiler room which was cool by now as the sub had been proceeding on diesel and electrical power for a little while and he saw a Cascade of water pouring into the Boiler Room from one of the ventilator shafts the watertight doors were rapidly slammed shut but somehow the water continued to spread the submarine was only 10 foot under when the order was given to put the hydroplanes to the full rise position and to start blowing the ballast tanks but the Saab kept dropping in moments all watertight doors were ordered shut not just the ones in the Boiler Room the 10 ton keel up forward was ordered dropped this was an emergency measure designed to lighten the sub all forward ballast tanks were blown but still the submarine continued to sink at 50 foot down the sub finally stopped diving but only because she'd reached the bottom of garelock water then started venting through the voice tubes shorting out the electrical boards and starting fires that prevented access to the valves that would stem the flow of water eventually sacking was used to plug the tubes and after a number of injuries some minor and some severe the electrical switchboard had its fires put out but only after smoke had filled the air and fire had burned through much of the precious oxygen even in sealed portions of the submarine the bulkheads were beginning to leak as it turned out the seals on the pipes and wires that passed through them happened to have been rated for 15 psi but with everything from the Boiler Room aft seemingly flooded they were being subjected at a 50-foot depth to at least 25 psi the AFT ballast tanks and the AFT droppable Keel were controlled from the engine room and it seemed likely and indeed this was the case everyone there was dead the crew did try and raise the brand new submarine e50 which was also on Trials via an early underwater sound Power telephone but the device wasn't working the captain then did a roll call 49 men answered 31 did not a naval architect for the trials calculated that based on his knowledge of human anatomy and his knowledge of the Interior volume of the sub and they had about 15 hours of air left if they waited for rescue whereas if they worked to try and fix the boat which was obviously a more energetic activity and they had about eight hours of air left luckily the commander of e50 was good friends with Lieutenant Commander Godfrey Herbert who was in charge of k-13 and when k-13 failed to surface e50 headed over to investigate although the initial signs a little bit of a will and a few air bubbles seemed somewhat perplexing below some of the survivors were expert workers from the dockyard and rewiring and rebuilding was taking place to try and restore as many of the subsystems as possible and to stay ahead of the various short circuits as water continued to infiltrate the sub several rescue ships gathered alongside e50 but in an attempt to dive down to find out what happened to the sub failed when the diving suit which had rotted from years of unuse fell apart on entering the water and nearly drowned the diver another diving suit was sent for from the shore and a tapped Morse code was exchanged but shortly after this message was exchanged further messages tapped out from the sub became unreadable the levels of oxygen in the sub were falling and the buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases was Rising too quickly and finer language skills like how to hammer out Morse code seemed to have been one of the first things to go having earlier pumped some air from the sub into the various air bottles to reduce the overpressure that was being caused by the flooding the crew now swapped this contained relatively Fresh Air with the stilted air of the submarine to try and eke out a little bit more time at this stage however Dawn had risen the next day and they were rapidly coming to the end of the calculated 15 hours of air they had left realizing that the vessels on the surface might not realize their predicament and try and raise the sub entirely rather than fix Airlines to the valves that were on the outside of the hull for the purpose which would thus delay the access of fresh air to the sub and doom them all lieutenant commander goodheart who was the captain of k-14 and had to come along for the ride was asked to risk leaving the sub via the conning Tower to tell the people above this particular set of news uh Lieutenant Commander Herbert joined him in the conning Tower with the idea being to seal it from the rest of the sub and then flood it save for the small Dome forward with the pressure between the outside and within the cunning town are now roughly equalized good heart would open the upper hatch in the conning Tower work his way through the Chart House above and out into Open Water Herbert would then close the hatch and knock on the cunning Tower floor signaling the men below to drain the conning Tower so that he could rejoin them after some jury rigging to enable all this the attempt was made with a watertight tin containing farewell letters and a message telling the rescue ships what to do going with them goodheart was told to release this tin which was wrapped in red bunting for extra visibility the instant he was clear of the sub just in case something happened to him on the ascent part of the jury rigging included a blast of high pressure air which was to be released at the same time as the hatch was opened to speed him on his way and to equalize the last bit of pressure that might otherwise impede his opening of the hatch as it turned out this blast worked a bit too well catapulting good heart through the Chart House like a human ICBM but also sweeping Herbert off of his feet in the conning Tower and chucking him through the Chart House and out into Open Water up above after some argument between the various Salvage ships about the best way to go about things the rescue ships were in the process of trying to drag a wire underneath the bow of the sub in an effort to raise it to the surface and extract the crew via the torpedo tubes when a burst of air on the surface brought a man to the surface it was Herbert goodheart was nowhere to be seen rapidly informing the rescue ships of the situation Herbert ensured that divers tried to connect e50's powerful air pumps 2K13 but for some reason the divers could not find the external connections that should have been present the air inside ran lower still most men were unable to move and their pulses and breaths skyrocketed as their bodies searched for oxygen that simply wasn't there then at six in the evening well past the estimate for the air to run out divers managed to find one of the missing connections and hooked up an airline but for whatever reason this didn't seem to work two and a half thousand PSI was being chucked down the airline but no air was getting into the sub time ticked by at one in the morning the entire pipe was removed as a last possible check and was found to be full of ice that explained to the lack of airflow rather rapidly the ice was cleared out and the exhausted divers went down yet again 35 hours after the submarine went down and more than twice the time after which the air in the sub was supposed to have run out fresh air was finally pumped into the submarine it was only just in time as many men had succumbed to near unconsciousness at this point and virtually no one was capable of thinking straight well long enough to do any significant work and the work that was being done was taking 10 times as long as it would have done had they had clear heads but now airport into the sub and the men revived rather quickly and then once they were sure that they had enough oxygen they began filling the compressed air bottles using the onboard compressor and then blowing those into the ballast tanks tank after tank was fully blown but the sub still refused to move only two small tanks were left and hope appeared to be fading again but then as the valves opened to blow air into the penultimate tank the bow slowly began to rise the ships with the wire looped around the bow put in their own efforts to help as a froth of air on the surface clued everyone in onto what the sub was trying to do the Bell Rose and Rose until it was only eight feet below the water and then held there a tube was fitted to the ammunition passage hatch on the outer Hull to allow the passage of fresh water food and considerably more air by a considerably wide opening but it took some hours to convey the message accurately enough through the hull for the men to understand what they needed to do when they opened that hatch a great waft of horrific black Air burst out of the tube leaving a small Cloud over the assembled ships and the drop in pressure within the sub tore at the crew's eardrums but at last supplies were reaching them even if people on the surface when leaning over the tube quickly staggered away with their eyes watering as the air inside the sub was still utterly foul the lower pressure did however accelerate the leaks through the bulkheads the higher pressure within the sub had actually helped to push back slightly against that and so it was decided to haul the bowels out of the water to get the men out via the torpedo tubes before the flooding got too bad additional ships took the strain of the wire and the sub was hauled further up but then the subs started to slip backwards when the torpedo tubes were mostly but not entirely clear of the water and efforts to haul them up had to be stopped again an attempt was made now to cut a hole higher up in the subs Hull with an oxyacetylene torch the first torch caught itself on fire a new one was then sent for but at that point the rumor of from the sub of chlorine gas coming up almost prompted the men on the surface to try and hold the sub up the last few inches quickly and save as many as they could through the torpedo tubes before she slipped back into the water luckily however Karma heads on the sub prevailed pointing out that the batteries were all in the after section and completely flooded there was nothing in the unflooded section of the submarine that could generate chlorine gas and so everybody calmed down a new cutting gear arrived at last holes were cut down to the pressure Hull and then through the pressure Hull it was now three in the morning two and a half days since the sub had slipped beneath the waves and after 57 hours underwater the last men managed to leave the sub although a few of the larger ones had to be pulled through a slightly too small hole as the hull had been cut in haste rather than a slightly larger one which would have taken more time indeed by the time the last man left the sub with the rising tide in garalock the water was a mere three inches away from this newly cut hole later in the day a bulkhead aboard failed and the submarine sank back out of sight now the mission was purely salvaged divers went down to k-13 and found goodheart's body still trapped in the Wheelhouse most likely he'd been slammed into the roof of it with by far too much force by the high pressure Air Blast eventually once the Suburban brought to the surface and the bodies recovered it was found that faulty indicators had caused a ventilator valve to be left open modifications would have to be made to prevent this in future and K13 would believe it or not eventually be salvaged and return to Service as K22 one chief petty officer moth who managed to lose his hair from the stress of this incident found himself posted back aboard his old sub some months later the issues with the k-class on their trials didn't stop there though K1 had so many minor faults that she took five months to complete her trials K2 suffered an explosion and a fire from her electric motors after their insulation failed during her first dive then nearly sank again when I see water partially froze the oil in the mechanisms that closed the hatches over the funnels the fleet had to be ordered to use Arctic rated oil in all systems from now on K4 ran aground on Wally Island k6 Dove and refused to come up again until a dockyard worker found and repaired a fault in the air compressor k14 sprayer Lee katanka when a ballast tank plate worked loose and flooded all the batteries which also fill this up with chlorine k-16s hydroplanes jammed while she was on a dive and cat like K3 she knows dived straight into the seabed once the k-class were actually in service still more problems arose it became apparent that the bowels of the subs were negatively buoyant and that meant that at speed the sea would come in and batter the glass of the bridge because the bow wouldn't ride over the waves and just simply smash straight through them this is what had smashed the glass on K3 thicker glass had been ordered fitted but that didn't solve the underlying problem erasing water over the bow also created a downwards pressure that would make the subs dive completely at random which forced many submarines to run with their forward ballast tanks completely empty forcing the bow to stay just above water the sluicing water across the top of the hull also made it completely impossible to man The forward deck gun in anything other than a dead calm and low speed and the churning water so battered the superstructure torpedo launchers that they were eventually ordered removed as they were constantly getting broken being somewhat narrow for their length heading into anything other than a head C would also tend to send the subs rolling when they were on the surface which resulted in water pouring in via the conning Tower and the funnels completely at random because it seemed the roll rate had no particular Rhythm to it they also had an alarming tendency to dive out of control this was eventually found to be because of their great length which gave their bowels an inertia once they started heading down which combined with the non-boyant nature of the bow and a quirk of the design that meant that once the sub went past a given angle the upper deck and superstructure tended to act like another giant hydroplane thus giving the bow even more downforce so it was all too easy to suddenly find the bow pointing down at increasingly steep angles until like some kind of underwater dive bomber the sub was plunging Neo vertically the submarine's rated depth was 150 feet which was much less than the total length of the hull which averaged about 340 feet as a result captains became very picky about where they dived to ensure that in the event of a runaway descent they would at least not go past Crush depth before they hit the seabed the fuel tanks caused problems as well they were open to the Sea at the bottom as were a number of other submarine designs of this period and shortly thereafter the idea was that as the fuel was drawn up off from the top because oil is lighter than water sea water would naturally come in from the bottom and thus the overall weight of the sub would remain relatively unchanged as the fuel tanks would always be full of a liquid but the rolling was so violent at times that this actually mixed the oil and the water in the fuel tanks into an Emulsion that had enough water in it that when it was sprayed on the boiler fires it put them out this was nicknamed losing suction amongst the fleet and was a semi-permanent issue K2 was almost crushed in one such runaway dive on an exercise with a grand Fleet saved only by a quick thinking Captain who blew every single ballast tank aboard and just about arrested her descent in water that at its base was 360 foot deep when k-11 had to make an emergency dive after the appearance of an unknown ship the oil pump refused to turn off and a runaway oil spray set the Boiler Room on fire below 80 feet it was also found the hydroplanes tended to jam most likely due to the finer nature of the hull distorting just enough to cause the jams under pressure but since the high seas Fleet seemed somewhat disinclined to come out and fight the grand Fleet to the k-class gradually filtered into service over 1917 and were sent paradoxically on anti-submarine patrol something to which they were singularly unsuited a K7 turned out to be the only sub to find a Target firing a salvo at the u95 of which one torpedo hit but then failed to explode the German sub tried to return the favor but K7 used its speed to just leave before the U-Boat could do all that much and this came after K7 had to survive a depth charge attack by her own side who once again thought that she was some kind of unusually large U-boat during the same anti-sub operation K1 ran aground later in the year K4 ran into K1 whilst trying to avoid running into the fourth flight Cruiser Squadron the Damage Done to K1 was bad enough that after a brief attempt to tow it the light Cruiser blonde had to take off k1's crew and sync the sub with gunfire in late 1917 the surviving Subs were gradually brought back in to have large flared so-called Swan bowels fitted this was to try and improve sea worthiness and give the bow a little bit of buoyancy one of the deck guns was removed and the other two guns were located higher up on the superstructure somewhat ironically given that they were submarines the k-class went out also fitted with depth charge launchers K13 now renamed K22 did however manage to join the fleet without any major upsets just in time for the k-class to be moved from scappor flow to rossyth by Admiral Beatty who was now in charge of the grand Fleet this was done over December 1917 and the submarines prepared themselves in their new home as best they could although it was not an uncommon sight to see the stern of a k-class sub screws thrashing vainly at thin air propped up at an alarming angle from the water before with a blowing of ballast tanks the bow would rise from the mud and a slightly embarrassed crew brought this up back onto a more even Keel and headed off then BT's next orders came in operation ec1 would see a full-scale fleet exercise involving ships from scappa and rossyth including the 2K class flotillas the fleet left on the night of the 31st of January 1918 with the primary formation consisting of HMS courageous in the lead followed by the cruiser ethereal and the five submarines of 13th flotella all k-class then second battle cruiser Squadron then the cruiser fearless and the 12th floater which was another 4K class then three of the queen elizabeths and their screening Destroyers proceeding out at 16 knots at night the line of vessels progressed East at 0620 a Mist descended and the forward submarine flotiller sped up to try and find courageous which had vanished into the Merc at 0706 courageous passed May island with us the small Isle on her starboard side and then she sped up as a U-Boat had been spotted the previous day in the area and the high-speed run was designed to throw off any chance the sub might have at catching the formation with torpedoes visibility was down to a mile and a half or less and dropping fast as ethereal passed May Island k-14 saw first k11 and then k-17 slow and haul out to Port moments later k-14 saw the problem mine sweeping trawlers completely unaware of the operation had wandered across the formation's bowels k-14 also hauled out to Port but in the middle of the hard turn her steering jammed she slowed down checked for K-12 and K22 coming up behind and seeing the K-12 would pass well behind them and K22 should in theory be following K-12 k-14 slowed down which freed up the rudder somehow and thus began making her way back on a course to try and fall back into formation but further behind K22 had in fact lost sight of k-14 and without any reference points she had unknowingly drifted off course now heading slightly more north than she was supposed to and then suddenly 200 yards ahead a red navigation light sprang out of the Gloom even a destroyer would have found it impossible to Dodge in the clumsy K22 which of course had been formerly k-13 stood at no chance of avoidance the rudder was put over but traveling at 19 knots she hadn't even begun to swing about when her bow slammed into whatever it was that was in their way the sub closed all watertight doors and began checking for internal damage while some of the officers made their way forward to see what they'd struck a k22's forward Torpedo Room was flooded as was the compartment behind it but the water had gotten no further recognizing the outline of another K boat they assumed that they'd somehow overhauled and run into K-12 in fact thanks to being off course they'd run into k-14 just as she'd started freeing up her steering k14 almost had her bow cut off by the same Collision two men were killed instantly and only a burst of superhuman strength from her first officer saved her as he wrenched a wooden door from the officer's quarters completely off its hinges in order to get it out of the path of a watertight door which he then slammed shut K22 signaled the Collision to ethereal and asked for some help although K22 could probably make it back to Harbor k-14 was in a much worse State and so K22 maneuvered itself to face the correct direction as if she was still heading forward which would hopefully mean The Ships coming up from behind would see her main lights which like all of the ships were shuttered to only cover a single point of the compass directly aft this would obviously make it much harder to spot from the sides or a head which was a good anti-u-boat measure but by having the light pointing directly after this would hopefully avoid any further collisions K-12 had also avoided the trawlers and tape it now took up station behind k-17 thinking that k17 was in fact k-14 completely unaware of what had gone on behind them k14 and K22 were now treated to the utterly terrifying site of the three main members of the second battle cruiser Squadron flying past them at speed along with a fan of Destroyers in escort formation luckily their distress signals were seen by the Squadron Flagship hmas Australia and she dispatched the Destroyer Gabriel to assist indomitable managed to pass on by as well but then as a destroyer Street pass no no more than 10 feet from the bow of K22 the battle cruiser in flexible came steaming out of the Mr 18 knots heading straight for the subs G tried to swing away as the K22 whose Captain interspersed his orders with voluminous curses at the battle cruiser for not seeing the very light flares that they've been launching for the past several minutes and the minor course alterations made at least meant that instead of splitting K22 in half inflexible merely smashed to the forward 30 foot of the bow over at 90 degrees before scraping along the side of the submarine and stripping off every ballast and fuel tank that was mounted on that side somehow after the prop washer died away and extremely battered K22 was still afloat inflexible steamed off into the night apparently completely unheeding of the chaos she'd left in awake it was now 07 41. after some confusion decoding messages by oh 800 ethereal was aware of the first Collision behind her although K22 still thought she'd hit K-12 instead of the sub she'd actually hit but nonetheless ethereal wheeled back to help with the three remaining K boats of the flotilla due to flu following she decided to take a wide turn to pass south of second battle cruiser Squadron which she was aware was coming up behind them only to almost immediately run headlong into the Australia as somehow the battle cruiser formation was now off course to the South by almost exactly the same amount that ethereal had allowed from the original course ethereal dodged the subs were far less agile and now both sides just had to roll the Collision Dice and hope if Australia changed course her Stern would swing out and would definitely hit one of the subs and so she held her path passing so close to K-12 that a man could have reached out and touched the racing battle cruiser up ahead ethereal was now playing Dodge the Destroyer with violent turns leaving the bewildered following Subs to just work out their own salvation for some reason despite having been told to send a signal to the rest of the fleet as to what they were doing ethereal's radio operator hadn't actually signaled their change of course yet and wouldn't do for quite a while so the first that anybody knew about it was when Australia radioed everyone to say that well she just seen the cruiser and three of the K boats heading in completely the opposite direction Fearless leading the other 4K boats further aft got this signal at about the same time they spotted the lights of the First flotiller with ethereal crossing their bow moving at 21 knots Fearless slipped past ethereal and two of the K boats but this maneuver put her right in the path of k-17 or perhaps to put k-17 right in fearless's path either way the sub apparently didn't see the cruiser at all or at least didn't see it until it was too late and fearless ran headlong into k-17 just forward of the conning Tower somehow as the sub sheared down the port side of the cruiser no one aboard was killed by the Collision water rushed in uncontrollably the doors were closed and the men all scrambled up onto the deck the sub sank rapidly by the bow dumping all of the crew into the water fearless's floater of Subs completely unaware of what was happening ahead suddenly found themselves having to dodge each other as K4 slowed down and K3 narrowly avoided rear-ending her K-12 which was of course coming back almost ran into k6 which was heading the other way unfortunately whilst both subsmashed to evade each other this carried k6 into a collision with K4 which had stopped ahead of her there was no time to do anything at all and k6 almost cut K4 in half this actually wedged the subs together for a moment before K4 began to sink like a stone threatening to take k6 with her the latter rapidly moved over to diving stations and with her engines in full reverse she managed to drag herself free before she was dragged under completely behind this k7s or fearless and turned to port to avoid her this found the sub and now about to run down k6 which was stopped in the water just ahead a last minute turn and reversing the engine saw K7 just about scraped past k6 only to run straight over the already sinking K4 fortunately the Cavalcade of collisions now came to an end partially by judgment and a good way by luck as the Destroyer vanessia leading the fifth battle Squadron managed to put a Searchlight on k-14 leading the Queen Elizabeth's to give the first Collision scene a wide berth but ethereal signals officer apparently only now woke up to what his job was and started transmitting the ship's intentions which was a little bit late and with a variety of submarines plus Fearless stopped sinking or just confused the luck element came in as fifth battle Squadron completely overran the second Collision scene missing K3 by mere inches unfortunately luck was not so kind when it came to the Destroyers who were escorting the battleships one of whom sailed straight through most of k-17 survivors the bloody aftermath leaving only nine men alive in its wake one of whom would die hours later in the confusion it took a while to figure out just who had hit who and which ships were missing eventually it became clear that K4 had gone down with all hands and fearless was having to limp home backwards escorted by k6 and K7 K22 despite being run down by a battle cruiser managed to limp home by itself whilst k-14 was towed home by the Venecia thus ended what would become termed the Battle of May Island nor did the issues end there in May 1918 k-15 was out on patrol when a heavy sea overwhelmed the funnels filling the boiler and engine rooms before anyone could do anything to stop it k-15 sank Stern first but had you bow kept that end afloat and the seabed turned out to be only 80 foot down which left the sub with about the earth and the stern on the bottom this was however the first time a k-class had dived uncontrollably by the stern so new accomplishments and all that it took eight hours to get the submarine pumped out and re-floated since for some reason a large amount of cotton waste showed up and was clogging the bilge pumps and they had to be repeatedly cleared by freezing cold diving crew still they refloated her and she continued her patrol bizarrely enough also in May K3 with one Commander shove in charge decided it was just going to randomly dive against its crew's wishes whilst K3 was sailing over an underwater sinkhole in the pentland Firth the sub actually went down 266 feet well below its test depth and the pressure buckled and distorted almost every part of the submarine but by some miracle she didn't crush the somewhat battered vessel then managed to resurface and Limp back to port with a commander shove and his pet white rat which lived in his pocket safely making it ashore speaking of ashore the admiralty however seemed to think that these incidents could just be ignored and instead more and larger Subs were under consideration k-18 k-19 K20 and k21 just ordered were reordered to a modified design that to be fair ditched the Steam Plant for all conventional diesel plant but then mounted a 12-inch gun forward instead these were then redesignated M1 through M4 oddly enough despite the massive weight of a battleship Cannon up front the m-class were much better handling than the case not that this was an especially High bar to clear to be fair M4 was actually canceled due to the end of the war and the progress of the m-class is a completely different matter for another day ke 23 through k28 were also ordered toward the end of the war to a modified design although with the end of the conflict all but k26 the most advanced of the set were canceled thus in the postwar environment the k-class fleet consisted of the wartime survivors plus k26 but this Fleet rapidly diminished K3 was moved to reserve and quickly scrapped after her high pressure crushing encounter and K7 was put up for sale around the same time the remaining submarines were divided up amongst the first submarine flotiller which was charged with gaining experience in all-weather Oceanic work with large submarines whilst the other five left over from this would be used as experimental craft to test new technologies during this period k-15 had two out of control Dives K-8 caught fire k-14 suffered a boiler explosion and then a battery explosion on her next Voyage off she'd been repaired oddly the keys managed to pass through summer 1919 all the way through to Summer 1920 without any major incidents despite a lot of sailing albeit they did launder into the seabed at a disturbingly regular set of intervals this streak came to an end when K-5 dived into the seabed in Largo Bay and then had to extract herself followed by a minor collision with a destroyer which was itself under tow for scrapping by the end of the year K2 K10 and K20 had also been earmarked for disposal K5 was refitted and with a mostly new crew she sailed out to an exercise in January 1921 along with k8k9 k-15 and K22 at the start of the exercise they were supposed to practice their Fleet attack roll steaming ahead of the fleet which was done without much issue then they were to dive under Cruiser screen and then pop up to Periscope depth to engage the battleships much as they would do in a natural Fleet action K9 had trouble diving after a while with all of the ballast tanks full it was realized that the safety valves on the swan bow had been left shut when the submarine left Harbor which was then holding the sub on the surface like a giant life preserver however K22 decided that it was going to try and launder into the seabed again on the opposite end of the spectrum and her experience Commander immediately blew War Tanks to get her back to the surface even if this meant failing his attack run as he popped up in the middle of the Cruisers K-9 incidentally had actually managed to release the safety valves on her Swan bow dive and commence a proper attack run as the scattered Subs regrouped it was realized though that K5 was nowhere to be seen the exercise was paused and a large-scale search was ordered eventually some oil and wreckage showed up it seemed that K5 had also dived out of control but her new crew were not quick enough to respond and she'd passed through her Crush depth and imploded a loss with all hands bought K2 a reprieve from scrapping briefly as a replacement in first submarine flotilla but in summer k-15 sank in Portsmouth whilst moored as temperature changes led to her hydraulic fluid Contracting which opened up vents which then caused her to take on water and sink as she was however successfully salvaged in a couple of weeks but subsequently sold to The Breakers at least she'd sunk without any loss of life k26 the modified sub proved a significant Improvement she had six 21-inched torpedo tubes in her bow instead of four 18 inch which made her a little bit longer her superstructure was altered which almost entirely eliminated all cases of water getting into the funnels she had 50 more fuel which gave her more range she had better ballast tanks and better batteries which improved her dive time and her endurance underwater and her Hull was built stronger adding about 100 foot to her test depth she and all surviving k-class were also fitted with a New Rapid blow system which was installed in the forward tanks to save the craft from unexpected out of control Dives k-22 demonstrated the wisdom of this when she dived with her funnels still open the new system managing to recover her back to the surface before the Boiler Room had completely flooded and she repeated the garalock debacle in much deeper water but by 1926 the last of the original k-class was sold for scrap luck thus leaving ironically enough k26 is the only Survivor she however remained in service for the rest of the decade performing somewhat better than her predecessors but at 2140 tons surface displacement it turned out she was just too large for the limits that were imposed on Subs by the London Naval treaty and so she was sold for scrap in the Mediterranean in 1931. with her past the last steam-powered submarine until the launch of USS Nautilus at the start of the Cold War albeit Nautilus was had by a nuclear reactor not an oil-fired boiler the case Legacy such as it was was to spark an interest across the world in the fleet or cruiser submarine something that until their full reveal after the war only the US had been really considering ironically the German threat that they'd been built to counter had never actually existed and never would exist whilst the UK and Germany remained on opposite sides and so ended the story of one of the greatest greatest examples of looks good on paper possibly a good idea for the first five minutes of their lives but practically quite terrible a thing in execution 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 dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 353,411

Keywords: wows, world of warships, K class, WW1, Royal Navy, Kalamity class, Battle of May Island, K-19, K-3, M class

Id: DekglrcbW2Q

Length: 59min 4sec (3544 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 06 2023