The Underwater War on the USS Drum | History Traveler Episode 168

when one thinks about world war ii and all of the different possible ways that a person could serve in that conflict whether it was in the army or in the marines or in the army air corps or in the navy each one presented its own sets of challenges but to me the one place that i've always thought would unnerve me the most would be surfing aboard one of these things right here this is the uss drum in mobile alabama and it is a fully restored world war ii submarine and today we're gonna go through this beast and see what we can learn [Music] so [Music] all right uh so we're getting ready to get up here on the drum uh now whenever it comes to world war ii i'm gonna go ahead and admit the thing that i know the least about are the submarines which is why i have tom with me uh tom is the resident expert on the uss drum as a matter of fact he is really responsible for a lot of the restoration work that is done here what'd you say you volunteered for 12 years and then you've worked here for 16. a total of six total okay so total of 16. so in other words he knows way more than i do so we're going to go ahead and jump on the drum here and uh yeah see we can learn the drum was commissioned the first of november 1941 one month before pearl harbor it was the first of this new class of submarines to be completed it was built in portsmouth new hampshire danville shipyard it was the first production submarine that could go to 300 feet they did a three experimental submarines before that that could go to 300 250 was the test steps before that a big advantage and the drum went out on its first patrol they sent it to the mouth of tokyo bay and i got there two weeks after the doolittle raid we wanted to make a statement to japan that they messed up and on their first patrol not knowing what they were doing and not knowing they had a boatload of defective torpedoes they managed to sink four ships oh wow uh the first submarine uh to sink that many ships on their first patrol or any patrol is very successful and they uh and went on throughout the war they made 13 patrols sank 15 ships damaged 12 others and placed eight for tony sunk during the war it would have made more patrols probably would have had the most patrols in the most hunting sunk except for was damaged twice and they had to go back to california for repairs on the 8th patrol the depth charge landed on the deck up here by the guns when it went off it cracked the conning tower underneath it flooded it so they had to go back to california and get a new conning tower they took they didn't have any more of this class at the time so they gave them the cutting tower for the next class and the advantage there was it had a thicker skin it could go deeper and also it had different periscope shears so a lot of people get confused when they look at this boat and say no this is a boyle class because of the periscopes but a lot of different changes were made and then after the 13th patrol they had to go back again because depth charges had knocked the superstructure loose and that was banging and clanging and making noise and they were losing pieces so that cut out another four months so they lost eight months in the shipyard during the war otherwise they would have a much better record interesting all right now what we are looking at right here is the five inch gun here on the drum now tom was telling me that they didn't use the guns that often because it was kind of difficult on a submarine the ship is constantly pitching and rolling and everything like that because it's a smaller vessel but i do want to explain how this went so the person sitting in this position right here whenever he would operate this mechanism that would traverse the gun so basically make it go right and left you would have a couple guys that would act as loaders back here [Music] the can that held the five inch rounds was right here behind them and then the person who was operating the elevation would sit right here and they would also with these foot pedals operate the the five inch gun itself so that so they would shoot basically by pushing down on these pedals yeah pretty cool to to learn a little bit about how these things worked all right so as i mentioned uh the drum operated also as a surface vehicle so needed to have protection from enemy aircraft so here you can see a 20 millimeter gun on this side and then if we move forward a little bit well then there's a 40 millimeter gun here okay this is a sonar head and it's rotated by hand down in the torpedo room with a hand crank they use this to look for ships when they were submerged now originally it was on that side over there but the 45 that went in the shipyard they moved it over here mainly to make a bigger shower for the officers oh interesting [Music] okay well we just got down here in to the drum and uh this is the torpedo room and something that is really quite remarkable about this whatever you think about submarine i always think about being claustrophobic and everything being really tight i didn't know that in the torpedo room itself uh what did you say 38 bunks uh no no no 18 bucks okay there were 18 punks in the torpedo room uh so the the crewmen of the drum would have to sleep right here next to the torpedoes uh pretty remarkable [Music] these are the original mark 14 torpedoes they came out in 1939. weren't tested very much we only shot two for tests they were very expensive they didn't want to spend the money when we went to war we found out that magnetic exploder did not work and that was a brand new exploder that they wanted the submarine skippers to rely on the idea was to shoot the torpedo underneath the ship and the magnetic field would set it off break the ship's hall it didn't work sometimes it exploded prematurely the contact exposure didn't work because it was made out of two light material and it uh collapsed before it detonated the torpedo these store pitot weighs two thousand pounds the depth setting didn't work and the gyro didn't work they'd take off go wherever they want we lost two submarines during the war to their own torpedoes circling back and hitting them at night they couldn't see them it took two years to finally convince them that the torpedoes were defective and start getting repairs done it was very frustrating the drum fired 133 torpedoes got 38 hits that exploded they had a lot of prematures and they had one circular torpedo they were able to avoid [Music] [Applause] all right so what we're entering in right now is the torpedo room and uh tom was telling me if you go up here i got to be you got to be careful not to slip and fall a little oily here uh typically this area is closed off but tom opened it up for me typically the um the drum would go out with all six of these torpedo tubes loaded and then they would have eight reloads up here and then in the aft there would be six i'm sorry four that were loaded with with six reloads so you got 24 that that you're going out to see with but here's something that's pretty interesting if you look and if you wondered how they load these big torpedoes into these tubes well it was on a pulley system so let me back up here this piece right here would go into the back of the torpedo and you can see it's got this pulley system on here they would rig up the ropes and then the crew would pull it and it would load your torpedo into the tube okay now anywhere i go i try and give a little bit of a bathroom to her well here is the officer's washroom so again we're still here in the torpedo room so as is common with everything in a submarine very tight quarters here is the toilet and here's something that tom was telling me this is like the most dangerous piece of equipment on the entire sub because flushing it is done through c pressure and there were eight valves that you would have to uh operate and open and close in order and if you did it wrong well the c pressure could go backwards and then you'd have like this wicked bidet and you could potentially sink the ship you wouldn't be able to get back in because the sea pressure would be too great that is something that uh never thought of all right moving now out of the torpedo room oh little door little door uh into the uh next part of the submarine look at that okay so where did you have to be a certain size to you had to be between three foot and two foot okay all right so you have to be between three foot and ten foot oh man i cannot imagine being well a tall guy in here during the war was short okay this boat had a six foot seven officer and a six foot four engine oh my gosh a six foot seven officer and a six foot four engine man can't even imagine well this is a lot of room everything to do so wow and the highest construction now is six foot seven wow this is known as forward battery because there's a battery compartment underneath the deck here there's two battery compartments this is also officers country now this is the officer's pantry they ain't the same food as the crew but they bring it up here keep it warm or cold for them fancy it up a little bit and then we have the officer state rooms this is a two-band stateroom uh and then in here is the wardrobe uh where they ate and planned war and played games and they got the fancy silverware the crew got playing civil war there was only curtains on the doorways [Music] all right moving on now and looking at uh the captain's cabin which is just as you can see the height of luxury so in the captain's cabin you can see uh he would have a depth gauge and then also a compass down here so that whenever he woke up he could take a quick look and uh know that the the basics of everything were um you know operational on the ship they were headed the right direction at the right depth but yeah that's where the captain slept all right uh moving now into the control room of the drum this this you can almost think of it as i guess like the the brain of the submarine and uh you get a whole new respect for the men who operated on these vessels because i'm looking at a whole bunch of knobs and meters and things like that that i absolutely do not understand so this is the helm of the drum and obviously what we are looking at right now would be the steering wheel and uh there are all kinds of different gauges so we have a compass here to tell us what direction we are going uh here's something to tell us what our speed is uh there's a sounding indicator that basically tells you how much water is is beneath you uh so yeah it's it's almost exactly like driving a car except for not at all [Music] underneath here is the master gyro and here's the auxiliary gyro the gyros is basically a compass magnetic compasses don't work too good in submarines because you're surrounded by metal so they use the gyro the gyro is tied to the plot table here there's a pointer that with a light that shines up through the chart would be on top when you're dinner or get a good star fix or they're an island that you can recognize you can pinpoint your position and you're just appointed the pointer would move with the ship's course and speed and so you have a rough idea where you're at when you're submerged or if you couldn't go and get a site or a fix for two three days you're way out from where you think you are yeah so it's very hazardous uh we actually lost five submarines during the war running the ground on reefs they were on charge uh and also they didn't know exactly where they were we got the crew off but we couldn't get the submarines back but this was a very vital piece of equipment for us all right and what we're looking at in here is another very important part of the sub which i guess there's no unimportant part but this is the radio room typically this is closed off but tom let me take a little peek back in here wow very very interesting okay so uh leaving the control room now and here's something that i didn't mention is that this vessel would have had a crew of 72 oh little door again that includes uh officers uh but every single person on this ship i'm talking cooks everybody had to know how to operate every part of this vessel and i think they had like a year to do it so pretty impressive to think about what the men who served on this submarine would have had to have known in order to be on here and operate it right what we're looking at here is the cruise mess so this is probably the most spacious part of the submarine that i have seen so far and if you look over here here's something that you wouldn't know unless you were hanging out with somebody like tom that hatch right there is where the surface ammunition was stored and they would also have you know small arms like pistols and rifles and things like that and then right here they would set up a little small screen and you could watch movies in here machine oh and also yeah tom just reminded me again living in luxury here on the submarine they also have an ice cream machine okay we just came out of the control room and here to the right is the galley so this is where all of the food preparation would have taken place so uh yeah don't ever complain about how small your kitchen is ever again after looking at this and they've done a really good job of recreating you know what it would have looked like so it looks like we're whipping up some some breakfast right here and tom's telling me that whenever him and leslie were rehabbing the ship this whole area was completely empty and they have done a outstanding job of bringing it back to life right now here's something kind of interesting that if you didn't know you might just walk on by this is a picture of a dog named stateside this was the mascot i guess you could say of the drum and they actually took this dog with them on their last patrol and then if you look over here well this is the christmas dinner menu from 1944. interesting [Music] okay leaving the crew mess and entering the crew birthing area so this is where the crew would sleep obviously you know with 72 people on this ship you couldn't have everybody sleeping at the same time so you would sleep in shifts and here's something that is exceptionally interesting to me tom was telling me these are all items that they found on the drum whenever they were cleaning up and restoring it so just in little crevices and nooks and crannies and whatnot down here you have these big chunks of lead that were used for for ballast if i can get it focused and uh beneath us would have been the afterward battery so obviously a submarine whenever it is submerged has to run on battery power here is one of the battery cells now there would have been 126 uh in the two battery spaces and that would give you a total of 252 storage batteries one of these weighed 1 647 pounds pretty remarkable okay and then this is the shower room and also there's a washing machine in here they didn't get this until 1945 though but again very tight quarters here and here we're looking at one of two toilets that would have served the entire crew wow [Music] all right we're moving now into the forward engine room and as you can see we have two quite large 1 600 horsepower engines that are diesel operated so the the engines would have been used whenever the submarine was on the surface and uh would have powered the generators to recharge the battery so that the submarine could operate below the surface but uh yeah this is the forward engine room [Music] all right and now moving into the after engine room and uh they've got a bit of a cutaway here so that you can see inside of one of these engines and man just to think about the engineering that went into these vessels it's really quite remarkable okay moving now into the maneuver room kind of a tight squeeze through here and uh if we go back and look at all of these uh gauges and things like that well we can see here that uh the the battery power is kind of controlled in this room but but really what you're controlling in the maneuver room is the speed of the ship [Music] okay now moving in to uh last room here this is the aft torpedo room so you can see they have another one of these torpedoes set up uh this one you can see the the bunks set up a little bit clearer which is just crazy to me to think that these guys are sleeping in amongst the torpedoes so whenever they were operating the submarine if they were firing from the aft well obviously they would have to completely turn the sub around and point their back in towards the target so we have four tubes here in the back and then you would have had uh six torpedoes in the reserve for reloading [Music] all right the loader torpedo first thing you got to do you lecture the sight glass ensure that it's empty and then you unlock the inner door open it up and then we'll go through the loading this is a blocking castle used to load the torpedo and it goes down through the tail piece like we showed you before and comes up it hooks onto here and that's used to pull the torpedo in once you get the torso in you close the door i'm not going to close it right now and then you flood the tube down here you got drained and flood valves up here you got vents and blow valves you open the flood valve open the vent and you put air pressure on the water around torpedoes tank and that pushes water around until you get water out the vent and the tube is flooded then you close out then you open the door [Music] normally the torpedoes are fired from the conning tower electrical when they hit the firing button this valve here will open up air pressure will push the water and the torpedo out there's a guy standing here on earphones and they'll hear fire seven if he doesn't hear the valve open he hits the manual fire equipment back here fires it manually and reports that the client tower number seven fired mechanically [Music] all right well that was the uss drum uh pretty interesting to go through an original world war ii vessel that typically gets overlooked whenever you're talking about world war ii history and something i appreciate just as much as you know the the history behind the ship is the history of the restoration and the work that tom and leslie did to save the ship we almost lost this submarine uh but you have a few people who are passionate about history who were willing to spend their time and money and efforts and their knowledge to basically keep this thing uh open to the public and keep keep the history alive but anyway very cool experience but as for now we're off to the next place [Music] [Applause] [Music] dive dive [Music] okay [Music] you

Channel: The History Underground

Views: 24,199

Rating: 4.9812832 out of 5

Keywords: history, history travel, history traveler, mobile alabama, alabama, uss alabama, wwii navy, uss alabama tour, uss alabama battleship, uss alabama history, wwii, pacific battles, wwii naval battles, wwii battleship gun size, history underground, naval warfare, uss drum, wwii submarine, wwii submarine documentary, wwii submarine warfare in the pacific, wwii submarine tour, wwii submarine engine, submarine documentary, uss drum tour, uss drum museum

Id: RjBDq48CEfU

Length: 27min 20sec (1640 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021