The floating “Shangri-La,” the Yorktown-class carrier USS Hornet (CV-8) arrives at Pearl Harbor directly after the Doolittle Raid on Japan, 30 April 1942. Her harbor escorts, a pair of early 77-foot Elcos of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron One (MTBRON 1), PT-28 and PT-29, are speeding by in the foreground.
Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), # 80-G-16865.
MTBRON 1 had been commissioned 24 July 1940, with 58-foot Fisher boats which were later transferred to the Royal Navy under lend-lease. The unit also tested out prototype 81-foot Sparkman/Higgins, 81-foot PNSY, and 70-foot Scott-Paine boats before finally fielding the Elco 77s, which had originally been trialed with MTBRon 2 in the Caribbean in the winter of 1940-41.
Sent to the Philipines prior to the outbreak of the war, MTBRON 1 had only made it as far as Pearl Harbor before the beginning of hostilities.
During the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, PT-28 and PT-29 were already loaded on the replenishment oiler USS Ramapo (AO-12) for MTBRon 1’s assignment to the Philippines and as they could not get her motors started, the hydraulics on their gun turrets were not operative.
Crew members cut the hydraulic lines and operated the turrets manually. All 12 boats of the squadron fired on the attacking Japanese aircraft with one, PT-23, credited with shooting down two Nakajima B5N “Kate” torpedo bombers.
PT Boats and Zeros Painting, Oil on Canvas; by Griffith Baily Coale; 1942; Unframed Dimensions 10H X 20W Accession #: 88-188-AF “On the brightly colored waters of the lagoon, the PT’s are skimming about, darting here dodging there, maneuvering between the rows of machine gun splashes, incessantly firing their twin pairs 50 caliber guns.”
For the record, PT-28 was wrecked in a storm on 12 January 1943 at Dora Harbor, Unimak. Sistership, PT-29 completed the war and was struck from the Navy list 22 December 1944 while in Alaska waters as obsolete and unneeded.
Tracing its organization back to 1810, Regimiento de Caballería N°3 “Húsares” of the Chilean army is one of the few horse-mounted cavalry units in the world.
And yes, they used to be comparable to Central/Eastern European hussars of the same era and one unit even sported an all-black uniform and wore the common Prussian skulls, calling themselves the Húsares de la Muerte. Check out this drawing of a Chilean Húsares de la gran Guardia, circa 1812.
Based in Angol along the Nahuelbuta Mountain range, the Chilean hussars’ special capability is still needed in the same way that the German and Austrian army to this day maintains pack horses for use with mountain troops in the Alps and the U.S. Marines and SOCOM still have horse riding/packing schools and courses– it still works.
Of course, even with 212 years of history under their saddles, their kit has been upgraded to reflect the times, even if they still have some Prussian/Hungarian throwbacks.
Formed originally in Salt Lake City around 1971 as the Rocky Mountain Arms Corp, the company that today is North American Arms was founded by Richard J. Casull, who was also the father of the .454 Casull cartridge.
A gunsmith gifted with both exceptional intellectual ability and creative productivity, Casull was the holder of more than 20 patents including several filed in the 70s for small, single-action revolvers with a floating firing pin and an improved cylinder lock system.
These things:
I’ve owned a ton of little 22 Mini Revolvers over the years, and they are nice to have in your pocket while hunting or fishing.
Rocky Mountain eventually changed its name to North American Arms around 1975 while Casull later went on to found Freedom Arms in Wyoming, with NAA concentrating their efforts on mini-revolvers while the newer FA went on to produce more full-sized guns.
For most of its modern existence, or at least the past 30 years of it, NAA has been owned by a top-shelf gentleman by the name of Sandy Chisholm.
Well, Sandy, looking to spend more of his time in Florida than Utah, has eschewed offers to sell out his mini-revolver biz to other players in the firearms industry– a move that would have likely seen it shift production to a Big Factory somewhere to save costs, leaving most of its current rank-and-file behind to look for another job– and instead has transferred ownership to a trust to make it employee-owned.
First, the flooding is at least being controlled and the ship is slowly dewatering after several hull patches have been applied. Her list is slowly correcting.
Next, a lot of irreplaceable relics– that did not get harmed– have been removed and safely stored ashore.
“At least 40 key artifacts have been removed safely from the ship completely unharmed, including a scale model of the ship, pictures of the Sullivan brothers, artifacts from the Sullivan family church in Waterloo, Iowa, historic flags, and the Sullivan family tree.”
U.S. Army paratroopers assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade fire an FIM-92 Stinger during an air defense live-fire exercise alongside soldiers with the Croatian Air Defense Regiment. This training is part of Exercise Shield 22 at Kamenjak near Medulin, Croatia on April 8, 2022 (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. John Yountz)
Air Defense Artillery has been a facet of the modern battlefield since at least 1911 when 2LT Giulio Gavotti of the Italian Air Flotilla, lobbed four small Cipelli grenades over an Ottoman camp in Libya, from his Taube monoplane during the Italo-Turkish War. In the U.S. Army, this meant the birth of AAA, moving from early 3-inch M1916/M1917 “balloon guns” in the Great War to the .50 cal in various mounts (M2, M16, M45), 37mm (M1), 40mm Chrysler Bofors (and its later M19 and M42 SPAAGs), and the 3-inch M3 in WWII.
By the Cold War, we had the radar-directed 120mm M1 Stratosphere, the 90mm M1/M2/M3, the 75mm M51 Skysweeper, and the 20mm M163/M167 VADS, with all but the latter replaced by missile systems evolving from the Nike family to Hawk (augmented by Redeye) and, finally, the Patriot.
The only late Cold War-era SPAAG on the chart was the disastrous Sgt. York system which was never fielded, and it was left to the M48 Chaparral, a stripped-down M113 APC chassis carrying four modified Sidewinders, to provide an umbrella over the immediate battlefield in what was termed Short-Range Air Defense (SHORAD) until it was withdrawn in the 1990s.
Since full-capability Patriot batteries are not small things that can be shlepped around easily, and are typically a division or corps-level asset except under special circumstances, this left brigades to make due in the SHORAD mission with light ADA battalions consisting of man-carried Stingers MANPADS or, in the case of mechanized units, the Avenger system which was just a Hummv with a few Stingers and a .50 cal M3P. The typical TOE for an ADA battalion since Chaparral was retired in the early 1990s was for 36 Avengers or 24 MANPADS teams to defend a brigade or about one system per 150 or so Joes.
The thing is, once the Cold War ended, the wheels fell off ADA in the U.S. Army.
Facing no realistic and immediate air threat since the IFOR/SFOR mission ended in 2004 and Saddam’s air power had been destroyed the year prior, ADA at least at the brigade level and below got the same treatment that the CBW guys have always had. Chaparral and Hawk had long been retired, even from the National Guard. VADS was gone as well. Of the more than 1,100 Avengers delivered, fewer than 400 remained in inventory by 2017, and a lot of these were dry rotting in Guard armories.
After all, South Korea can largely take care of its own air defense needs in the event of an all-out war with the stuck-in-the-1960s Norks, and if China went for Taiwan, that was clearly going to be a problem for the Navy, so why bother? I mean, the Air Force says there will always be air superiority, right?
In a more staggering bit of news, it was just detailed by Raytheon that the Army’s stockpile of Stingers is at least 18 years old for the newest models and, with a potential need to replace “over 1,400” Stingers sent to Ukraine courtesy of a drawdown from U.S. war reserves, the pipeline could take months if not years to reopen.
“We’re going to have to go out and redesign some of the electronics in the missile and the seeker head,” Raytheon Technologies CEO Greg Hayes told investment analysts Tuesday during the company’s quarterly earnings call. “That’s going to take us a little bit of time.”
Because time is always the thing you have the most of when suddenly needing air defense.
Minnesota inventors Louie and Harry Sherman founded a small shotgun shell business in 1920 and, as many small businesses do, it failed to thrive and was circling the drain less than two years later. Then, in April 1922, Charles L. Horn, backed with a little investor cash, bought the concern and named it the Federal Cartridge Corporation.
Trivia: the red-capped hunter on many of Federal’s old shotgun loads was based on the company’s first owner, Charles Horn
Growing from seven employees and a 9,000 sq. ft. facility, Federal soon went small but in a big way– opening relationships with barbershops, garages, and grocery stores for a bit of shelf space to showcase Federal’s shells and BBs, the latter a logical product for any shotgun shell company.
Over the years, they added the American Eagle, Dixie, Reliable, Monark, Favorite, and Hi-Power Oval branding, then expanded to make store-branded shells for Montgomery Ward and Sears.
WWII saw the company open, and run for 40 years, the Twin Cities Ammo Plant for the Army.
Then came more innovation and growth, adding centerfire rifle and handgun loads, introducing color-coded shotgun shells in 1965, and waterways-friendly steel shot in 1973.
In recent years, the company has introduced .327 Federal Magnum, .338 Federal, and .30 Federal Super Carry to the world.
Today, the modern Federal Ammunition factory in Anoka is 700,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility. Inside, over 1,400 employees– everybody from engineers and machine workers to plumbers and electricians– work three shifts, around the clock, to produce millions of rounds of centerfire, rimfire, and shotshell ammo per day.
U.S. National Archives Local Identifier 26-G-01-19-50
Here we see the U.S. Revenue Cutter U.S. Grant, in her original scheme, seen sometime late in the 1890s, likely off the coast of New York. With the Union general and 18th President’s birthday today– coincidentally falling on National Morse Code Day– you knew this was coming, and interestingly, the above cutter, which had served during the SpanAm War, was the first post-Civil War U.S. vessel named in honor of Ulysses S. Grant.
Built at Wilmington, Delaware at the yards of Pusey & Jones Corp in 1871, Grant was a one-off Barque-rigged iron-hulled steam cutter ordered for the Revenue Cutter Service at a cost of $92,500. With the Revenue Marine/Cutter Service one that typically ran quick little sloops and schooner-rigged vessels between 1790 and 1916 when it became part of the newly-formed U.S. Coast Guard, Grant was one of the few built for the seagoing service with three masts.
Some 163-feet in length (overall) the 350-ton ship was the largest of four new steam cutters– the other three were paddle-wheelers– authorized by Congress in 1870 as part of a plan by N. Broughton Devereux, head of the Revenue Marine Bureau, in an effort to revitalize the force that had languished in the days immediately after the Civil War despite having been the sole federal agency tasked with patrolling the broad and wild seas off Alaska.
Cutter Grant via the New York Historical Society
Despite the massive amounts of left-over Civil War ordnance being sold as surplus, Grant was given a battery of four bronze M1841 24-pounder muzzleloading howitzers– field guns that had been considered obsolete at Gettysburg– and a small arms locker made up of rare .46 caliber (rimfire) single-shot Ballard carbines. She was known to still have this armament into the early 1890s. Her crew consisted of about 35 officers, engineers, and men.
Her shakedown complete just after Christmas 1871, Grant was assigned to the New York station on 19 January 1872 a cruising ground that covered from Montauk Point to the Delaware.
For the next 20 years, she maintained a very workaday existence in the peacetime Revenue Service. This included going out on short patrols of coastal waters, assisting with the collection of the tariff, catching the occasional smuggler, responding to distress calls (helping to save the crew of the reefed Revenue Cutter Bronx in 1873, saving the schooner Ida L. Howard in 1882, the British steam-ship Pomona bound from this port for Jamaica in 1884, and the demasted three-masted schooner William H. Keeney in 1887), policing posh ocean yacht races (even hosting her namesake President aboard in July 1875 for the Cape May Regatta), taking President Rutherford B. Hayes’ Treasury Secretary John Sherman (Gen. William T. Sherman’s brother) for a tour of all Revenue Cutter stations along the east coast in 1877, searching for lost cargo (notably spending a week in December 1887 along with the sloop-of-war USS Enterprise on the hunt for a raft of logs towed from Nova Scotia hat had departed its line off New England), suppressing mutinies (the steamer Northern Light in November 1883), and getting in the occasional gunnery practice.
In 1877, Grant had the bad fortune of colliding with the schooner Dom Pedro off Boon Island on a hot July night. Standing by, the cutter rescued all nine souls aboard the sinking vessel and brought them safely into Boston. An inquiry board found the Dom Pedro, who had no lights set while in shipping lanes at night, at fault.
In July 1883, Grant inspected– and later seized under orders of the U.S. Attorney’s office and at the insistence of the Haitian government– the tugboat Mary N. Hogan, which had reportedly been fitting out in the East River as a privateer under finance from certain British subjects to carry arms to rebels in Haiti.
Grant would serve as a quarantine vessel hosting Siamese royalty, as well as Hawaiian Queen Kapiʻolani and Princess Liliʻuokalani, the latter royals stopping in New York on their way to attend the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria in London.
From November 1888 through April 1889, Grant had her steam plant replaced at the DeLamater Iron Works docks– the same plant that had constructed the steam boilers and machinery for the ironclad USS Monitor.
Shortly afterward, Grant landed her ancient Army surplus howitzers for a pair of brand-new rapid-fire Mark 1 Hotchkiss Light 1-pounders, from a lot of 25 ordered by the Revenue Cutter Service from a Navy contract issued to Pratt & Whitney of Hartford.
Unidentified officers around an early 1-pdr on the gunboat USS Nahant. Detroit Publishing Company Collection Photograph. Library of Congress Photograph ID LC-D4-20046.
Her skipper at the time, a man who would remain with Grant for the rest of her career, was Captain Dorr Francis Tozier. Something of a legend in the service already, the Georgia-born Tozier received his commission from Abraham Lincoln one month before the president’s assassination and was awarded a Gold Medal by the President of the French Republic “for gallant, courageous, and efficient services” in saving the French bark Peabody in 1877, while the latter was grounded on Horn Island in the Mississippi Sound.
Tozier, 1895
In July 1891, it was announced that the 11 large sea-going cutters of the RCS would switch to a white paint scheme– something that the modern Coast Guard has maintained ever since.
In October 1893, as part of beefing up the Bearing Sea Patrol which enforced a prohibitory season on pelagic sealing as well as protecting the Pac Northwest salmon fisheries, the East Coast-based cutters Perry (165 ft, 282 tons, four guns)– which had been based at Erie Pennsylvania to police the waters of Lake Ontario– along with our very own Grant, were ordered to make the 16,000-mile pre-Panama Canal cruise from New York to Puget Sound, where they would be based. The two vessels would join the cutters Rush, Corwin, Bear, and Wolcott, giving the RSC six vessels to cover Alaskan waters, even if they did so on deployments from Seattle.
The re-deployment from Atlantic to Pacific was rare at the time for the RSC, as vessels typically were built and served their entire careers in the same region. Sailing separately, the two cutters would call in St. Thomas, Pernambuco, Rio, Montevideo, Stanley, Valparaiso (which was under a revolutionary atmosphere), Callao, and San Diego along the way.
Leaving New York on 6 December, Grant arrived at Port Townsend on 23 April 1894, ending a voyage of 73 days and 20 hours, logging an average of 8.45 knots while underway, burning 358 pounds of coal per hour.
Late in her career, with an all-white scheme. University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections. Oliver S. Van Olinda Photographs and Ephemera Collection. PH Coll 376, no UW22223
1898!
Rather than chopping as a whole to the Navy as the Coast Guard would do in WWI and WWII, President McKinley’s Secretary of the Treasury, John D. Long, implemented a plan to transfer control of 20 cutters “ready for war” to the Army and Navy’s control during the conflict with Spain.
Supporting the Army, from Boston to New Orleans, were seven small cutters with a total of 10 guns, crewed by 33 officers and 163 men, engaged in patrolling, and guarding assorted Army-manned coastal forts and mine fields.
A force of 13 larger revenue cutters, carrying 61 guns, staffed by 98 officers and 562 enlisted, served with the Navy. Eight of these cutters, including the famed little Hudson, served under the command of ADM Simpson off Havanna while the cutter McCulloch served with Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron for the conquest of the Philippines. Meanwhile, four other cutters (ours included) served with the Navy on the Pacific coast, keeping an eye out for potential Spanish commerce raiders, and filling in for the lack of Navy vessels along the West Coast at the time.
The four cutters patrolling the Pacific:
Arriving at San Francisco from Seattle on 7 April 1898, U. S. Grant and her crew were placed under Navy control four days later, on 11 April, operating as such through June.
Dispatched northward once again to search for a rumored Spanish privateer thought seeking to prey on the U.S. whaling and sealing fleet in Alaskan waters ala CSS Shenandoah-style, Grant found no such sea wolf and returned to the Treasury Department on 16 August, arrived back in Seattle on 18 September.
Back to peace
Returning to her peacetime duties and stomping grounds, Grant ran hard aground on an uncharted rock off Saanich Inlet just northwest of Victoria on 22 May 1901. Abandoned, she languished until her fellow cutters Perry and Rush arrived to help pull her off, patch her up, and tow her to Seattle for repairs.
Portside view of Revenue Cutter Grant at anchor without her foremast, likey after her wreck in 1901. Port Angeles Public Library. SHIPPOWR206
Fresh off repairs, in December she was part of the search for the lost Royal Navy sloop HMS Condor, which had gone missing while steaming from Esquimalt to Hawaii. Never found, it is believed Condor’s crew perished to a man in a gale off Vancouver.Grant recovered one of her empty whaleboats, along with a sailor’s cap and a broom, from the locals on Flores Island, with Tozier, the cutter’s longtime skipper, trading his dress sword for the relics. The recovered boat was passed on to the British sloop HMS Egeria, and Tozier’s sword was later replaced by the Admiralty, a matter that required an act of Congress for Tozier to keep.
Switching back to her role as a law enforcer, Grant was busily interdicting the maritime smuggling of opium and Chinese migrants from British Columbia to the Washington Territory in the early 1900s.
She also was detailed to help look for one of the last of the Old West outlaws, Harry Tracy, “the last survivor of the Wild Bunch.” After a shootout that left six dead in 1902, Tracy was at large in the region, taking hostages and generally terrifying the citizenry.
The Seattle Star, Volume 4, Number 113, 6 July 1902
By early 1903, with Tracy dead, it was announced the aging cutter would be sold.
The San Juan islander February 19, 1903
To tame the airwaves!
Grant, mislabeled as “USS” at Discovery Bay off Washington’s Strait of Juan de Fuca, October 1903. NOAA photo
Nonetheless, as part of a maintenance period, Grant was fitted by the Pacific Wireless Company while berthed in Tacoma with experimental Slaby Arco equipment to receive wireless messages. Regular use of wireless telegraphy by the Revenue Cutter Service was inaugurated by Grant on 1 November 1903. This was an important achievement for the service, as the Navy had only three ships with wireless equipment installed at the time.
Tozier’s initial wireless tests proved successful, allowing the Grant to keep in contact with the Port Townsend Customs House throughout its patrol area—a 100-mile radius from the cutter’s homeport. After testing and adjustment of the new equipment, the Grant was ready for its first practical use of wireless for revenue cutter duties. On April 1, 1904, the Grant switched on its wireless set and began a new era of marine radio communication between ship and shore stations.
The new wireless radio technology proved very effective in directing revenue cutters and patrol boats in maritime interdiction operations. However, it took another three years to convince Congress of the importance of “radio” (which superseded the term “wireless telegraph” in 1906) to both its law enforcement and search-and-rescue missions. In March 1907, Congress finally appropriated the $35,000 needed to fund wireless installations on board 12 cruising cutters.
However, Grant would not get a chance to use her new radio equipment much, and by 1906 she was reported condemned, although still in service.
The San Juan Islander, Volume 15, Number 49, 6 January 1906
Grant’s last official government duty, in February 1906, was to solemnly transport bodies from the Valencia accident from Neah Bay to Seattle for burial. The affair, the worst maritime disaster in the “Graveyard of the Pacific” off Vancouver Island, left an estimated 181 dead.
Epilogue
Grant was sold from government service in 1906 to a Mr. A.A. Cragen for $16,300, and then further to the San Juan Fishing and Packing Co. who rebuilt her as a halibut fishing steamer. The old cutter was wrecked for the last time in 1911 on the rocks of Banks Island.
As for her longtime skipper Tozier, while stationed in Seattle he became a renowned collector of local artifacts. As related by the Summer 1992 issue of ColumbiaMagazine:
The assignment gave Tozier the opportunity to put Grant into remote rivers and harbors where natives were as eager to trade the things they made and used as their forefathers had been to trade fur pelts. He became imbued with collecting fever, realizing that his was a rare opportunity to bring out from the wilderness, to be seen, preserved, and appreciate, the elements of a civilization that was rapidly being superseded by that of the white settlers.
Captain Dorr F. Tozier, USRC Grant, top row right. He brought the cutter around the Horn from New York in the 1890s and remained in command for 14 years. Here he is visiting Numukamis Village on Barclay Sound, Vancouver Island, BC. Photograph by Samuel G. Morse. 21 Jan. 1902. Courtesy of the WA. State Historical Society. # 1917.115.217
In all, once retired from the RSC in 1907, Tozier sold his collection of some 10,000 artifacts including 2,500 baskets, 100 stone chisels and axes, carved jade pipes, harpoons, war clubs, knives of copper, ivory, shell and iron, a war canoe, and “12 mammoth totems, each weighing between 600 to 20,000 pounds.” In all, the collection weighed 60 tons and required 11 large horse-drawn vans to move to the Washington State Art Association’s Ferry Museum in 1908.
A fraction of Capt. Tozier’s artifacts, c. 1905. Model canoe, house posts, sculptures, part of a house front, masks, and a replica of a copper. The collection was first exhibited at the Ferry Museum (Tacoma,) then removed to Seattle in 1909, and finally to the National Museum of the American Indian under the Smithsonian, WA. DC. This photo c. 1905 courtesy of the WSHS #19543.19
When the Ferry Museum was dissolved in the 1930s, the collection was scattered and spread out across the world, with some pieces making their way to the Smithsonian.
Speaking of museums, the last pistol owned by the Outlaw Tracy is on display at the White River Valley Museum in Auburn, Washington. Bruce Dern portrayed him in the 1982 film Harry Tracy, Desperado.
As for Grant’s name, neither the RCS nor its follow-on USCG descendant reissued it.
The Navy only felt the need to bestow the moniker post-1865 to a successive pair of unarmed Great War-era transports before finally issuing it during the centennial of the Civil War to a James Madison-class FBM submarine, USS Ulysses S. Grant (SSBN-631), which served from 1964 to 1992.
The Coast Guard, however, did mention our old revenue cutter in its last HF CW transmission, sent by station NMN from Chesapeake, Virginia, at 0001Z on April 1, 1995. As an ode to the first wireless message transmitted in 1844, “What hath God wrought,” the message concluded with, “we bid you 73 [best regards]. What hath God wrought.”
Specs:
Displacement: 350 tons Length: 163’ Beam: 25’ Draft: 11’ 4” Machinery: Barque rigged steamer, vertical steam engine, two boilers, one screw, 11 knots max Complement: 35-45 Armament: 4 x M1841 24-pounder guns, small arms (1871) 2 x Hotchkiss MK 1 37mm 1-pdrs, small arms (1891)
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On this day in 1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio, Jesse Root Grant, a tanner and merchant, and Hannah Simpson Grant welcomed their first child to the planet. With his name chosen from ballots placed in a hat, the boy became Hiram Ulysses Grant, although the first name soon dropped out of common use by the family.
Speaking of names, by the time young Ulysses made it to West Point at age 17, his local Congressman had made a clerical error on his nomination to the military academy, enlisting him as U.S. Grant. Classmates soon bestowed him with a simple “Sam,” and he graduated almost dead center of his year, 21st of 39, in 1843.
Leaving the Army after 11 years, which included the Mexican War and the California Gold Rush, Grant went through a period of extreme stability and, in the end, found that civilian life did not suit him.
However, when the great war between the states erupted in 1861, Grant’s efforts to rejoin the U.S. Army were turned down by McClellan (ironically) and Nathaniel Lyon in turn, so he settled for a colonel’s appointment in the Illinois state militia. Before the autumn leaves fell, he was a Brigadier General of Volunteers.
Soon, the Western Campaigns through Missouri and Kentucky and then along the Mississippi called and Grant’s star rose meteorically, ending as the first four-star general in the nation’s history in 1866, then eventually as the Commander and Chief in 1869.
Good old Sam.
A mosaic of five photographic prints taken in Cairo, Illinois in October 1861, only 6 months into the Civil War. It shows Brig. Gen. Grant (Commander of the District of Southeastern Missouri), in the middle, with his staff officers Clark B. Lagow, William S. Hillyer, John Aaron Rawlins, and James Simons. This photo image is from Library of Congress DIG-ppmsca-55864.
The wreck of a British warship has been found off the west coast of Scotland, almost 105 years to the day she sank
Commissioned in 1893, the 800-ton Alarm-class torpedo gunboat HMS Jason was the 11th warship to carry that name for the Royal Navy going back to 1673. Capable of just 18 knots when new and outclassed by later destroyer classes, the Alarms were paid off or converted to other purposes in the 1900s. As such, this saw Jason turn into a minesweeper in 1909. It was in such a role that, on 3 April 1917, Jason struck a mine laid by the German submarine U-78 off the Island of Coll in the Inner Hebrides, sending the little vessel and 30 of her crew to the bottom.
They found the warship in surprisingly good condition – but minus her bow, blown off when she struck the mine… ironically during a minesweeping operation in company with HMS Circe.
The depth, weather and water conditions, the undulating seabed, and the fact that dives are only possible at certain times of year have meant the wreck had not been found – despite Jason’s loss being accurately documented, even photographed, at the time.
The discovery is the work of historians Wendy Sadler and Kevin Heath from Lost in Waters Deep, who research contemporary records and the personal history of crew, and a team from Orkney-based SULA Diving led by Steve Mortimer and their support boat MV Clasina, skippered by Bob Anderson.
A sonar scan earlier this year suggested HMS Jason had been found – no other wrecks were known in the area – but it needed visual confirmation.
At 93 meters down, divers had just 20 minutes to inspect the wreck before returning to the surface.
They found tell-tale features of a warship: a pointed stern, a distinctive propeller, two 4.7in guns, and Admiralty crockery.
In the great image below, recently released by the Royal Canadian Navy, you see the 5,000-ton Halifax-class patrol frigate HMCS Montréal (FFH 336) flanked by her embarked CH-148 Cyclone helicopter (Sikorsky S-92) while on NATO Op Reassurance.
You gotta love a great “bone in the teeth” shot
Commissioned in 1994 and based at CFB Halifax in Nova Scotia, Montreal and her companion Cyclone are currently assigned to Standing NATO Maritime Group 1 along with a single shore-based Royal Canadian Air Force CP-140 Aurora (P-3C Orion with the ASW gear of an S-3A Viking) detached from No. 405 Squadron RCAF out of CFB Greenwood.
