Formerly known as Facility 825 GTS, the top-secret military facility was used as an underground submarine base in the Crimea near Balaclava during the Cold War. Built in the 1950s hollowed out mountain lair was turned over to the Ukrainians in 2000. It could house upto 14 submarines in its galleries and some 3,500 personnel.
These things are used for oceanography data collection and have even crossed the Atlantic (in 221 days, no one said they were fast!). They work by adjusting their buoyancy to create forward movement but usually have a set of wings. Kind of like one of those cereal-box submarines that you had as a kid, but without the need for baking soda. Their commo is via satellite.
But the funny thing is, it took the Chinese 3 years to figure out its not theirs…or at least three years to make the statement known.
According to Chinese news sources:
When Huang Yunlai from Hainan province found a one-meter-long, torpedo-like device while fishing 3 years ago, he took photos of it and informed the province’s National Security Bureau immediately. Experts preliminarily concluded it was suspicious and brought it back for further analysis.
It is now confirmed that the unmanned underwater machine, disguised to look like a torpedo, is an intelligence device capable of taking pictures with fiber-optic and satellite communication. It was secretly placed in the water by a foreign country to obtain information on the Chinese navy fleet’s operations at sea.
The Coast Guard Cutter Stratton crew seizes cocaine bales from a self-propelled semi-submersible (SPSS, a/k/a/ sneaky dope sub, a/k/a narco nautilus) interdicted in international waters off the coast of Central America, July 19, 2015. The Coast Guard recovered more than 6 tons of cocaine from the 40-foot vessel.
Interesting footage of the Stratton‘s 35 foot LRI-II notching in the rear ramp of the big 418-foot National Security Cutter. I’ve done it on a 17 footer in the back of a WPB and it was a blast so I can only imagine the scale involved here.
More on Stratton‘s epic 8.4 ton seizure here.
Video shows Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine USS Pennsylvania (SSBN 735) underway in the vicinity of Hawaii. Video by Petty Officer 1st Class Jason Swink | Commander Submarine Forces Pacific | Date: 06.28.2015
The fourth ship of the United States Navy to be named for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (1837 140-gun ship of the line, 1863 screw steamer, 1903 armored cruiser, and the famous BB-38 of the World Wars), SSBN-735 was commissioned in 1989 and is home ported at Bangor.
She just completed her Engineered Refueling Overhaul (ERO) at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in 2012 and is expected to serve well into the 2030s at which point she will be pushing a half-century with the dolphins.
You may remember a few months back when the Swedish coastal artillery and naval forces went ape shit on a possible non-NATO (read= Russki) midget sub in their territorial waters– and reportedly dropped a good number of ASW weapons on active contacts. Well, it seems like they have found a 20m (66 foot) long 3m (10 foot) abeam submarine in their waters with Cyrillic letters on its hull.
Note the groovy Steampunk hatch
As reported by The Express, a Swedish newspaper, the submarine is just under two miles off the coast of Sweden, although Ocean X, the team that discovered it, are not disclosing its exact location.
It was discovered last week, and the Swedish armed forces confirmed to the paper that the images of the craft are currently being analyzed.
HI Sutton over at Covert Shores thinks it could be an unknown Russian midget, possibly a variant of the Piranha-M.
While Per Andersson, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Swedish Coastal Artillery, says he is “sure” it is a much older submarine, and says he has been in touch with former military colleagues who agree with him.
Electric Boat built the Fulton (renamed the Som/Catfish) in the U.S. then disassembled her in 1904 and shipped the craft to Russia
They feel it could be the old Tsarist Navy’s Som, the 66-foot long, 11-foot abeam craft built originally as the private submarine Fulton by the Electric Boat Company in 1901 and sold to the Tsar during the Russo-Japanese war.
Som at dock. Note the Cyrillic letters on her hull (big up)
Som ensnared in fishing nets, DOH! Note the Cyrillic on the hull (Click to big up)
The humble Som was lost in the Baltic in 1916 but her grave has been lost to history.
Either way, its going to be interesting to find out just which one it is.
UPDATE:
It looks like its the Som.
This a Wildcat firing a torpedo for the first time.
825 Naval Air Squadron spent two days over Falmouth Bay practicing torpedo attacks, culminating in the launch of a Sting Rant dummy weapon.
The Wildcat HMA Mk2 is beginning to enter front-line service – the first is currently on deployment with HMS Lancaster in the Atlantic – and although it’s undergone extensive trials and testing over the past five years, until now it’s not dropped a torpedo.
Some 62 Wildcats are set to replace the RN’s and RAF’s aging fleet of Lynx helicopters over the next few years.
Swimmer Deliver Vehicles (SDVs) are the unsung heroes of littoral covert naval action. Its that “covert” part that keeps them that way. News of them rarely eeks out and when it does its normally bad as most of the “good” stuff is classified.
Well about that.
HII recently put out a presser on their prototype Proteus dual-mode underwater vehicle (DMUV). That’s a submersible able to operate as a conventional manned swimmer delivery vehicle (SDV) and as an unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV), which gives the warfighter a bunch of neato options that the old X-boat and Chariot drivers of WWII would have loved.
The news is that two females, Chloe Mallet, an ocean engineer, and Andrea Raff, a mechanical engineer, have now been certed to drive Proteus.
Mallet and Raff are the only two women on the seven-person dive team that works with Proteus.
When in use in the manned mode, the vehicle is flooded with water and can submerge to depths up to 150 feet, weighs 8,240 pounds, is 25.8 feet long (the Navy’s DSS has an inside dimension of 26 feet) can carry almost 2-tons of cargo and uses a 300kHz Multi-Beam Sonar to keep her steady and away from undersea collisions while traveling at 10 knots.
So if you are around Panama City where all the small boat secret squirrels live, and see a 25.8 foot whale in the water, now you know.
.
Here we see at least 20 inactivated boats of the WWII-era Salmon/Sargo, Gato, and Balao classes at rest at Mare Island, California on 3 January 1946.
Click to bigup USN photo # 17-46, courtesy of Darryl L. Baker. Text courtesy of David Johnston, USNR. Photo via Navsource
Front row left to right: Sand Lance (SS-381), next two could be Sealion (SS-315) and Seahorse (SS-304), Searaven (SS-196), Pampanito (SS-383), Gurnard (SS-254), Mingo (SS-261), Guitarro (SS-363), Bashaw (SS-241).
Back row left to right: Unknown, Tunny (SS-282), next three could be Sargo (SS-188), Spearfish (SS-190), and Saury (SS-189), Macabi (SS-375), Sunfish (SS-281), Guavina (SS-362), Lionfish (SS-298),Piranha (SS-389).
The Scabbardfish (SS-397) is docked in ARD-11 on the other side of the causeway.
Although out of commission, most of these boats remained in pier-side service as classroom for Naval Reserve units for years and many returned to active duty in either the U.S. or allied fleets– in fact, two are still afloat today.
USS Guavina (AGSS-362), refueling a P5M-1 Marlin flying boat off Norfolk, Virginia (USA), in 1955. Prior to World War II several submarines were fitted to refuel seaplanes. During the war, Germany and Japan used this technique with some success. After the war this technique was experimented with within the US Navy. It was planned to use submarines to refuel the new jet powered P6M Seamaster flying boats. As part of this program Guavina was converted to carry 160,000 gallons for aviation fuel. To do this blisters were added to her sides and two stern torpedo tubes were removed. When the P6M project was canceled, there was no further need for submarine tankers. This concept was never used operationally in the US Navy.
When World War II came to the Philippines on Dec. 8, 1941, the U.S./Philippine forces under Gen. MacArthur (land and air) and the Navy’s Asiatic Fleet under ADM Thomas C. Hart seemed mighty enough for regional defense. Hart’s fleet, however, was a paper tiger, consisting of a couple dozen seaplanes, two cruisers, 13 destroyers, and a number of gunboats and auxiliaries.
What Hart did have was 29 submarines–, which would have been deadly effective had their torpedoes actually run straight at the correct depths and detonated on impact.
As McArthur’s land and air forces were overwhelmed and pushed back, Hart was directed to fall back with the fleet to the comparatively safer waters of Australia and the Dutch East Indies. With the Japanese largely controlling the sea lanes around Luzon and the skies above it, it was suicide to maintain surface ships in those waters.
Yet, with MacArthur’s troops cut off, Hart endeavored to attempt a force of blockade-runners to bring in vital food, ammunition, and medicine to the PI. While huge cash bounties offered to civilian sailors brought a few desperate souls to attempt the voyage in small freighters and coasters, these attempts inevitably either ended with mutinous mariners turning around short of the islands or with burnt-out hulks adrift and riddled with Japanese shrapnel.
But what about those 29 submarines?
Well, a lot of these were small, cramped old boats including a half-dozen aging S-boats, slow 800-ton submersibles that dated to the First World War and were arguably obsolete even then. However, there were also a number of large and comparatively modern fleet boats of the Sargo, Salmon, and Porpoise classes. These went some 2,000 tons and could range up to 10,000 nautical miles on their economical diesels.
USS_Seawolf; Portside view of the Seawolf (SS-197) underway off the Mare Island Navy Yard, California, 7 March 1943. Official U.S. Navy Photograph, from the collections of the Naval Historical Center. US Navy photo # NH 99549.
It was with this in mind that the Asiatic Fleet’s subs started to run the Japanese gauntlet from Australia and Java into the Philippine archipelago. Over a 45-day period, at least nine made it all the way to Manila and the last U.S. stronghold in Luzon at the “Rock” of Corregidor.
Carrying antimalarial drugs, small arms and anti-aircraft ammunition, diesel for the island fortresses generators, and tons of all-important food, they unloaded these under cover of night and then evacuated the Philippines national treasury, 185 key personnel, codes, and vital records that could not fall into Japanese hands. On both the entry and exit they had to evade destroyer and aerial patrols, weave through minefields and navigate using primitive tools and often inaccurate charts, typically just surfacing at night.
Here is a brief rundown of those missions:
USS Seawolf (SS-197) a Sargo-class submarine, left Australia with 40 tons of ammo that consisted of 700 boxes of 50-caliber machine-gun bullets and 72 3-inch anti-aircraft shells. Arriving at Corregidor on January 17, she left with a cargo of submarine spare parts along with 25 Navy and Army evacuees.
USS Trout (SS-202) a Tambor-class submarine barely in service a year before the war started, left Pearl for Manila with 3500 rounds of 3″ AAA ammunition for the Army gunners and unloaded them in Manila in early February. She then took on 20 tons of gold bars and silver pesos (all the paper money in the islands had already been burned), securities, mail, and United States Department of State dispatches, which she brought back to Pearl.
USS Trout (SS-202) unloads gold to USS Detroit (CL-8), March 1942 Photo #: 80-G-45971 USS Trout (SS-202) At Pearl Harbor in early March 1942, unloading gold bars which she had evacuated from Corregidor. Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives.
USS Sargo (SS-188), head of her class, offloaded her torpedoes (keeping only the war shots in her tubes) and took on 1 million rounds of .30 caliber ammunition which she landed in Polloc Harbor on Valentine’s Day 1942. On her return trip, she evacuated 24 B-17 specialists from Clark Field.
Swordfish (SS-193), entering Pearl Harbor prior to WW II. USN photo by Tai Sing Loo, courtesy of Scott Koen & ussnewyork.com.
USS Swordfish (SS-193), this Sargo-class sub took the Submarine Asiatic Command Staff at Manila and headed for Soerabaja, Java, at the end of December, the last submarine to evacuate the Philippines with the fleet. She then returned to the islands with supplies and evacuated the President of the Philippines, his family, and select high-ranking officers as well as some Navy codebreakers in late February. She was on her way back with 40 tons of food crammed into every space when Manila fell and was ordered to abort.
USS Permit (SS-178), a Porpoise-class submarine, in December, embarked members of Hart’s staff at Mariveles Harbor and brought them to Java. On a blockade run return trip, she surfaced off Corregidor on the night of 15–16 March, took on board 40 officers and enlisted men (including 36 precious code breakers from the vital cryptanalysts and traffic analysts intelligence station, CAST), and landed her cargo of ammunition. She endured a 22-hour depth-charge attack from three Japanese destroyers on her way back.
USS Seadragon (SS-194), a Sargo, on the night of 4/5 Feb in Manila Bay offloaded her cargo of vital radio gear and spare parts, as well as a portion of 34 tons of rations and almost 12,000 gallons of petroleum, then settled on the harbor floor during the day, then surfaced the next night and took aboard 25 high-value passengers including 17 CAST members, as well as 3,000 pounds of crypto gear to include a vital “Purple” machine capable of deciphering the Japanese diplomatic code and made her getaway.
USS Sailfish (formerly the lost submarine USS Squalus) (SS-192), another Sargo-class boat, landed 1,856 rounds of 3-inch anti-aircraft ammunition while taking a moment out to pump four torpedoes into the 6,440-ton Japanese aircraft ferry Kamogawa Maru, who she mistook for the carrier Kaga.
USS Snapper (SS-185), a Salmon-class boat, brought 46 tons of food and 29,000 gallons of diesel oil into Corregidor on April 4, evacuated 27 personnel, and weaved her way back through the blockade, the last successful cargo landed on the besieged fort.
USS Spearfish (SS-190) another Sargo-class boat, unable to reach Corregidor proper to offload anything, surfaced in Mariveles Bay on May 3, just two days before the Rock fell. She took on the last Americans evacuated from that doomed fortress: 25 personnel, including 12 Army nurses. She was the last U.S. ship out of the Bay.
As an honorable mention, USS Searaven (SS-196), a Sargo-class boat, left Fremantle in Australia on 2 April with 1,500 rounds of 3-inch antiaircraft ammunition but was also diverted and failed to deliver any of the shells to Corregidor.
For more detail on this chapter in U.S. military history, try the U.S. Naval Historical Center and the U.S. Army Center for Military History.
The Soviets have always had a penchant for oddball weapons systems. Determined to never lose the underwater battlespace for lack of heavily armed frogmen, they have some of the most neat-o waterguns.
I’ve covered these in the past for gun sites to include the the Avtomat Podvodnyj Spetsialnyj better known in the west as the APS underwater assault rifle and the Spetsialnyj Podvodnyj Pistolet (Russian for ‘Special Underwater Pistol,’ apparently to differentiate it from the plain underwater pistol) model 1, its moniker is commonly shortened to SPP-1 when written.
With that being said, the below video, posted by Russian media in the Crimea (which is now being beefed up to remain a hard Putin enclave in a very anti-Russki Ukraine), showing Russian Naval Spetsnaz getting down with both of the above weapon platforms, made me squeal like a prepubescent girl at a One Direction concert.
“Combat Swimmers from Russia’s Black Sea Fleet took part in drills in Sevastopol, Thursday, focused on defending the fleet from underwater saboteurs.”
Watch out for those guys, they are pretty hardcore.
Seals dressed in military uniforms swim during a show marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War Two, at an aquatic park in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, Russia, May 9, 2015. (Photo by Evgeny Kozyrev/Reuters)