Apparently, there were several (at least three) very nice scale models made of U.S. S-class submarines and German Type VII U-boats produced for the forgettable Matthew McConaughey, Bill Paxton, Harvey Keitel U-571 flick made in 2000.
Lot of plot holes in that movie…
We have one at the Maritime & Seafood Industry Museum in Biloxi that is about 40 feet long and has since been made up to mimic U-166, which is sunk about 50 miles south of there as the crow flies. It used to be RC and capable of floating. I call it Model #1.
The Biloxi-based model. An image I took in 2008. It was recently refirbed by local volunteer Seebees and submarine vets
A very near to scale floating set is still in Grand Harbor, Malta (Google Earth N 35 52’46.00/ E 14 29’49.92). I call it Model #2.
Formerly used as the USS S-33 in the film U-571, she has since been used at least twice since then as U.S. and Brit boats
At least two TV movies, one in 2001 about the USS Sailfish, and another “Ghostboat” a 2006 British horror film about a lost HM submarine popping back up sans crew have been made using U-571‘s models and sets.
Well, a guy in Granite Falls, just outside of Seattle is trying to give away (!) a 40-foot model from U-571 that actually submerges (!) for free (!). I call it, Model #3.
This is a 1/5th scale Type VIIc German WWII U-boat model Submarine. It is a movie effects miniature from the movie U-571. It was made as a functioning model with working ballast tanks so it could really dive and surface. It is approx 40 feet long and weighs several tons.
The outer skin is fiberglass and inside it has a metal frame and tanks for compressed air and ballast. What you see in the pictures is everything I have for it. there is no conning tower or deck plates etc.
It is mounted on a metal frame that has wheels but has sat for so long it has sank into the dirt a bit. It’s going to take a fair effort to get it rolling and move it so make sure you are prepared for that.
With a little dressing up it could be a great business promo or just cool yard art. I would hate to see it go to scrap.
I am offering it for free but I do expect that it be picked up immediately and professionally.
Sadly no conning tower
The interesting part of this rig is that is submerges– note the ballast tanks
Now that’s not something you see every day
I emailed the Naval Undersea Museum in Washington to make them aware this is out there, so maybe it will get put on public display sometime soon. It’s a shame to let it go to waste.
Warship Wednesday (on a Thursday!): The dazzling President of the Royal Navy
IWM SP 1650
Here we see a “warship-Q” of the World War I Royal Navy, the Flower/Anchusa-class sloop HMS Saxifrage masquerading as a seemingly innocent British merchantman in dazzle camouflage, circa 1918. Should one of the Kaiser’s U-boats come close enough to get a good look, two matching sets of QF 4.7 inch and 12-pounder guns would plaster the poor bugger, sucker punch style.
With Kaiser Willy’s unterseeboot armada strangling the British Isles in the Great War, the RN needed a set of convoy escorts that were cheap to make and could relieve regular warships for duty with the fleet.
This led to a class of some 120 supped-up freighters which, when given a triple hull to allow them to soak up mines and torpedoes and equipped with a battery of 4 or 4.7-inch main guns and 3 or 12 pounder secondaries augmented with depth charges, could bust a submarine when needed. Just 1,200-tons and 267-feet overall, they could blend in with the rest of the “merchies” in which they were charged with protecting. Classified as sloops of war, they could make 17 knots with both boilers glowing, making them fast enough to keep up.
Built to merchant specs, they could be made in a variety of commercial yards very quickly, and were all named after various flowers, which brought them the class nickname of “cabbage boats.” Ordered under the Emergency War Programme for the Royal Navy, class leader HMS Acacia ordered in January 1915 and delivered just five months later.
The hero of our story, HMS Saxifrage, was named after a pretty little perennial plant also known as a rockfoil or London Pride.
Laid down by Lobnitz & Co Limited, Renfrew, Scotland, who specialized in dredges, trawlers and tugs and endures as a marine engineering company, she was completed 29 January 1918 as a Q-ship– a job that the last 40 of her class were designed to perform.
The concept, the Q-ship (their codename referred to the vessels’ homeport, Queenstown, in Ireland) was to have a lone merchantman plod along until a German U-boat approached, and, due to the small size of the prize, sent over a demo team to blow her bottom out or assembled her deck gun crew to poke holes in her waterline. At that point, the “merchantman” which was actually a warship equipped with a few deck guns hidden behind fake bulkheads and filled with “unsinkable” cargo such as pine boards to help keep her afloat if holed, would smoke said U-boat.
In all the Brits used 366 Q-ships, of which 61 were lost in action while they only took down 14 U-boats, a rather unsuccessful showing. One storied slayer, Mary B Mitchell, claimed 2-3 U-boats sunk and her crew was even granted the DSO, but post-war analysis quashed her record back down to zero.
As for Saxifrage, commissioned with just nine months and change left in the war, did not see a lot of hot action, escorting convoys around British waters. While she reported nine U-boat contacts, she was never able to bag one.
Soon after the Great War ended, the Flower-class vessels were liquidated, with 18 being lost during the conflict (as well as Gentian and Myrtle lost in the Baltic to mines in 1919). The Royal Navy underwent a great constriction inside of a year. At the date of the Armistice, the fleet enumerated 415,162 officers and men. By the following November, 162,000, a figure less than when the war began in 1914, though the Empire had grown significantly after picking up a number of German and Ottoman colonies.
Saxifrage was one of the few ships of her class retained.
Her engines removed, she was tapped to become the training establishment HMS President (replacing the former HMS Buzzard, a Nymphe-class composite screw sloop, shown above) when her sistership Marjoram, originally intended for that task, was wrecked in January 1921 off Flintstone Head while en route to fit out at Hawlbowline.
Moored on the River Thames, Saxifrage by 1922 became used as a drill ship by Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.
Alterations to her physical fabric included fitting square windows on the lower decks and adding a top deck for parade, drilling, and small arms gunnery practice. After her change of use to a training vessel, she boasted four decks, with internal spaces including the Captain’s Quarters, Drill Hall and adjacent Gunroom, Quarter Deck and Ward Room.
HMS President moored on the Thames at high tide in 1929. Photograph Planet News Archive.
By the time WWII came, just a handful of Flower-class sloops remained afloat.
HMS Laburnum, like her a RNVR drill ship, was lost to the Japanese at Singapore then later raised and scrapped.
HMS Cornflower, a drill ship at Hong Kong, suffered a similar fate.
HMS Chrysanthemum, used as a target-towing vessel in Home Waters, was transferred to the RNVR 1938 and stationed on the Embankment in London next to President where she would remain until scrapped in 1995.
HMS Foxglove served on China station and returned to Britain, later becoming a guard ship at Londonderry in Northern Ireland before being scrapped in 1946.
Ex-HMS Buttercup, ironically serving in the Italian Navy as Teseo, was sunk at Trapani 11 April 1943.
Two of the class, ex- HMS Jonquil and ex- HMS Gladiolus, remained in service in the Portuguese Navy classified as the cruisers (!) Carvalho Araújo and Republic, respectively, until as late as 1961.
Saxifrage/President continued her role as a stationary training ship. One of President‘s main roles during the war was to train men of the Maritime Royal Artillery, soldiers sent to sea and serve with naval ratings as gunners on board defensively equipped merchant ships (DEMS).
After the war, President was the last of her class in British service and reverted to her role as HQ of the RNVR London Division, which she held until 1987, remaining the whole time at her traditional mooring next to Blackfriars Bridge.
The name HMS President is retained as a “stone frigate” or shore establishment of the Royal Naval Reserve, based on the northern bank of the River Thames near Tower Bridge in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.
In 1987, the old girl was donated to the HMS President (London) Limited non-profit who has extensively refitted her for use in hosting private parties, weddings, receptions, etc. while somewhat restoring her appearance.
In 2014, as part of the First World War commemorations, her hull was covered once more in a distinctive ‘dazzle’ design, courtesy of artist Tobias Rehberger.
Today President is on the National Register of Historic Vessels, is the last Q-ship, last of her class and last RN ship to have fought as an anti-submarine vessel in the Great War.
She is nothing if not historic.
However, due to the upcoming construction of the Thames Tideway Tunnel to tackle sewage discharges into the River Thames, President had to leave Blackfriars Bridge this February.
Her funnel and deckhouse was removed for the tow downriver and she is in limbo, with the current management team trying to raise money to secure a new mooring along the Thames but without much luck.
The HMS President, one of the UK’s last remaining WWI ships, has been unsuccessful in its bid to secure Libor funding in today’s Autumn Statement from the Chancellor.
The funding bid that had seen support in national newspapers and a parliamentary motion, with more than 20 signatories, has failed to secure vital restoration funding – this could now see the country’s last remaining submarine hunter of the Atlantic campaign scrapped.
Paul Williams, Director of the HMS President Preservation Trust, said; “The lack of recognition for this worthy cause if hugely disappointing. The HMS President Preservation Trust, and our friends in Parliament and elsewhere, has been working extremely hard to secure the future of this wonderful war heritage site.
“Her hull is only a few millimetres thick now in some places. Therefore, if restoration funding is not found soon she will be consigned to the scrap heap – as her sister ship the HMS Chrysanthemum was in 1995. As we mark the centenary commemorations of WWI it seems an absolute travesty that we will potentially be saying goodbye to one of only three remaining warships from that era. What a loss to our heritage that will be.”
Writing in the Sunday Telegraph MPs and Peers, including the Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Boyce, and Chairman of the Defence Select Committee, Dr Julian Lewis MP, had called for the ship to be rescued. The parliamentarians had urged the Chancellor to look favourably on the bid, or risk losing her forever, stating “This would be an irreplaceable loss to our war heritage, and a sorry way to mark the country’s First World War centenary commemorations.”
Hopefully she will be saved, as she is literally one of a kind.
1,290 long tons (1,311 t)
Length:
250 ft. (76.2 m) p/p
262 ft. 3 in (79.93 m) o/a
Beam: 35 ft. (10.7 m)
Draught:
11 ft. 6 in (3.51 m) mean
12 ft. 6 in (3.81 m) – 13 ft. 8 in (4.17 m) deep
Propulsion: 4-cylinder triple expansion engine, 2 boilers, 2,500 hp (1,864 kW), 1 screw
Speed: 16 knots (29.6 km/h; 18.4 mph)
Range: Coal: 260 tons
Complement: 93
Armament:
Designed to mount :
2 × 12-pounder gun
1 × 7.5 inch howitzer or 1 × 200 lb. stick-bomb howitzer
4 × Depth charge throwers
As built:
2 × 4 in (102 mm) guns
1 or 2 × 12-pounder guns
Depth charge throwers
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The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.
Nearing their 50th Anniversary, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.
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Navy Seaman Raymond Chavez is now 104 years old but he remembers one of the first sightings of a Japanese midget submarine hours before the attack and racing back to his ship once the fight was on.
Chavez was one of just 13 men on the crew of the 85-foot long converted wooden-hulled purse seiner USS Condor, pressed into service as a Coast Guard-manned coastal minesweeper (AMc-14).
USS Condor (AMc-14) Photographed in 1941, probably off San Diego, California. Bureau of Ships Collection in the U.S. National Archives – http://www.history.navy.mil Photo #: 19-N-24615
While conducting routine sweeps outside the harbor, the crew spotted what is is thought to have been the first enemy contact at 0350– more than four hours before the air attack began– when they saw what they felt to be an enemy submarine.
“He said, Mr.McCoy, we got company,” recalled Chavez, who was at the minesweeper’s helm, remembering the lookout saying to the officer of the deck.
The contact was handed over to the crew of the destroyer USS Ward, who would later fire the first American shot of the Pacific War on the submarine around 0630, while Chavez’s ship was ordered to return to Pearl.
He had only just returned home and gotten asleep when his wife awoke him to the news of the air attack.
“You could see the black smoke from one end to the other,” said Chavez. “The ships were on fire, and burning their oil.”
Rushing back to his ship, he spent the next 10 days underway, first fighting the Japanese, then helping with the recovery.
“I started crying,” said Chavez. “I’m not ashamed to admit it…all the Sailors who were trying to save themselves, and all the dead bodies, and the oil.
As reported by the San Diego Tribune, Chavez is working out regularly and has flown back to Pearl Harbor for the 75th anniversary of the attack on Wednesday.
In the small world of top-notch military commentary, there were a handful of legitimate experts. That pool has grown smaller with the untimely passing of John D. Gresham.
If you ever thumbed through Tom Clancy’s his best-selling series of non-fiction “guided tour” books about military units published in the 1990s: Submarine, Armored Cav, Fighter Wing, Marine, Airborne, Carrier, and Special Forces, it was Clancy’s name that sold the book– but the insides were all made possible by the hard work of Gresham.
In all, he had some 15 books of his own in circulation as well as the annual The Year in Special Operations and a lot of the best open-source defense analysis in circulation. I corresponded with Mr. Gresham on a number of occasions.
When SMS U-31 of the Kaiserliche Marine‘s IV Flotilla sailed from Wilhelmshaven on 13 January 1915, and disappeared shortly thereafter, it was assumed, she had struck a mine and sunk with all hands, somewhere in the North Sea.
Well, it turned out they were right.
Now, 101 years after her disappearance, her final resting place is known. In 2012 an engineering team plotting the site of a new offshore wind farm about 55 nautical miles off the coast of East Anglia found a wreck on the ocean floor.
Digital scan of the sunken U boat, which has been found off the East Anglian coast. The wreckage of a First World War German submarine has been found by divers 90km off the East Anglian coast. Video footage shows the sunken U-boat, which went missing 1915, on the sea bed under about 100 feet of water. The 58 metre long wreck was found by a survey team from energy companies Scottish Power Renewables and Vattenfall, who are currently drawing up plans for the new East Anglia ONE wind farm.
Initial investigation thought it to be a lost Dutch sub from the WWII-era, so the Dutch Lamlash wreck-diving team was called in last year and they have identified the vessel as U-31.
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday, Dec.2, 2015: The Brass Tiger Fish of the Lifeguard Service
Photo via Navsource. Courtesy of John Hummel.
Here we see the Tench-class diesel-electric submarine USS Tigrone (SS-419/SSR-419/AGSS-419), at the Philadelphia Navy Yard sometime circa 1964 as she is preparing for her next role in the fleet after her first two had proved remarkably different.
With the brilliant success of the Gato-class fleet boats in the first part of the war in the Pacific, the Navy soon ordered 84 follow-on Tench-class boats to an improved design starting in 1944. The same 311-feet long overall as the Gatos, the Tenches were slightly heavier and had longer legs, being able to cover 16,000 nautical miles over their predecessor’s paltry 11,000. This meant they could roam further and stay away longer if needed.
While the Gatos were finished in time to bloody the Japanese fleet, few craft worthy of a torpedo were still around when the Tench class began to reach the Pacific. In fact, just 10 of the class were completed during the war and a further 55 were canceled just after.
Of the 10 that made it to the fight, one is the hero of our little tale.
Named after a species of the tiger shark, USS Tigrone (SS-419) was laid down at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Kittery, Maine just a month before D-Day. Her crew nicknamed her the Tiger Fish and she is the only ship on the Naval List to have carried the moniker.
Commissioned on 25 October 1944, she got her first combat patrol underway from Guam on March 21, 1945, with three other U.S. fleet boats in a Yankee wolf pack. Although they spent the better part of two months in Japanese waters, they found few targets and her only brush with combat was to bombard a reef with her rear 5″/25 deck gun (she had a 40mm Bofors single forward).
Her second patrol was more exciting.
On May 25, she took up a lifeguard station off the coast of Honshu, Japan, and by end of the week had a full house, picking up the crews of two B-29s that had ditched as well as three fighter pilots. U.S. submarines rescued 504 downed airmen– to include future President George Bush– during WWII lifeguard duty.
“TIGRONE has saved the Air Force and is now returning to Iwo Jima with 28 rescued zoomies,” radioed her skipper, CDR. Hiram Cassedy, USN.
Back on station by June 26 and then soon had to set course for Guam, arriving on 3 July to disembark another 23 waterlogged aircrews plucked from the water. These 52 airmen Tigrone returned to land throughout the patrol constituted a new submarine-force record.
The Commander Submarine Force, Pacific Fleet extended his congratulations to, “the commanding officer, officers, and crew for this outstanding patrol” and commended them for “the excellent judgment, splendid navigation, and determination displayed by the TIGRONE in effecting these rescues….”
The Tigrone‘s lifeguard service patrol was so inspiring that she received her own episode of the 1950’s documentary series The Silent Service (season 1, episode 8) “Tigrone Sets a Record” which aired on 06 May 1957 and is below in its entirety.
On her third patrol, she came within sight of the Japanese home islands on lifeguard duty and saved an aviator as well as breaking out her big gun again on Aug. 13 when she bombarded Mikomoto Island (Pearl Island), scoring 11 hits on a radio station and lighthouse tower in one of the last exchanges of hate in the war as the Empire sued for peace on the 15th.
When peace came, she was part of the massive armada in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945, and received two battle stars for her service.
There she is, all the way to the end…
Soon after, she found herself in red lead row in Philadelphia.
Dusted off in 1948, Tigrone was designated SSR-419 (radar picket submarine) and given the MIGRAINE I conversion that included AN/BPS-2 search radar sprouting from the after portion of the sail, and the height finder mounted on a freestanding tower just abaft it.
Tigrone, left, after refitting as SSR. Her sister ship USS Thornback has been GUPPY’d. Thornback would later serve 28 years in the Turkish Navy and is preserved there as a museum ship today.
This put the 15-foot search antenna some 40 feet above the water, with the height finder only a little below. Also came a below deck CIC for the radar, an extra generator to help push the volts needed to run it all, and guidance equipment for mid-course control of Regulus cruise missiles. In exchange, the boat sacrificed her stern tubes and surface armament.
Tigrone (SSR-419), underway in Grand Harbour, Valetta, Malta, c1952.
Between 1948-56 no less than 13 SSRs– including several Tench-class boats– were put into service, roughly split between Atlantic and Pacific with Tigrone spending her time as a picket boat with the Second Fleet in the Caribbean and North Atlantic, with regular participation in NATO exercises and periodic deployments to the Mediterranean as part of the Sixth Fleet.
By 1 November 1957, a decade as a radar boat had ended, replaced by more modern vessels, and Tigrone again found herself a member of the Atlantic Reserve Fleet, Philadelphia.
However, the Navy wasn’t through with her by a long shot.
The Tigrone (AGSS-419) is underway in a channel, between conversions
Recommissioned 10 March 1962 and reclassified Auxiliary Research Submarine (AGSS-419), for the next decade Tigrone operated in conjunction with the Navy Underwater Sound Laboratory (part of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center at Newport), conducting underwater systems tests, and evaluating new equipment. The information provided by these tests, utilizing experimental transducers, would prove invaluable in sonar development.
In late 1963, the Bottom Reflected Active Sonar System (BRASS) II Transducer and system were installed on Tigrone, and, after 1965, the much-upgraded BRASS III system was installed.
Note the unique side-facing rear sonar rack near the sail that came with the BRASS III conversion
While conducting her tests, she was often trailed by Soviet intelligence collection ships, which on at least one occasion felt the full force of the BRASS rig.
I cannot tell you how many watts the BRASS was capable of transmitting into the water, but suffice it to say it far exceeded anything else in anybody’s Navy at that time and maybe even today’s Navies for all I know. To give you an idea of the sound level it produced, all hands forward of the engine rooms were required to wear enginemen’s hearing protection when it was operating!
The overhead of that boat was festooned with enginemen’s earmuffs, hanging from every possible location to be readily available when the word was passed: “Now rig for BRASS Ops!” There were no torpedo tubes on the Tigrone at that time.
The after room had been turned into a bunkroom and held tier after tier of racks for the crew. The forward room was dedicated to the sonar system including its very own MG set to power that monster. The sonar men stood their watches on standard AN/BQR-2B passive sonar set which was in a little corner up forward where the tubes used to be. The Port half of the forward room was all the equipment the civilian USN/USL personnel used to operate the BRASS. It was a very sophisticated system, capable of varying both the amplitude and duration of the pulses it generated and if I can attach the picture, you will note a huge “shit can” mounted where the bow should be. Inside that huge and cumbersome protrusion was a transducer which looked like a huge log lying on it’s side atop a round table. The round table could be rotated, thereby presenting the horizontal length of the “log” in whatever direction was desired. In addition to the horizontal training, this transducer “log” was constructed in staves (like a barrel) and the operators could select which staves were to be used, giving them the ability to direct the transmitted beam in whatever direction they would like it to go.
We would go to test depth off the Azores and transmit a pulse in a South Westerly direction so that it could be received by the USS Baya [SS/AGSS-318, a Balao-class submarine modified in 1958 to accomidate LORAD, an experimental long-range sonar and 12 scientists] who would be operating off the Tongue of the Ocean in the Bahamas!!!!
Like I said, BRASS put a LOT of power into the water. Needless to say our activities drew the attention of the Russians and one of those ‘fishing boats’ brisling with antenna, would follow us around, undoubtedly listening to and recording every transmission we made. Well one day we were pounding away with the BRASS when one of the civilians asked me where the Russian fishing boat was. I was standing a regular passive sonar watch and I need to explain that whenever the BRASS transmitted a relay in my sonar set would cut out my audio for the duration of the pulse and then cut back in. When the audio returned, I could hear the reverberations from the transmission bouncing off the bottom, off waves, off thermoclines and maybe off the Azores themselves for several minutes, it was deafening!
I reported that the ‘fishing boat’ was dead astern making 80 RPM’s, just enough to keep up with our three knot submerged speed. “Keep us posted if anything changes.” I was told and I sat up to pay closer attention. Pretty soon I noticed a decrease in the amplitude (power) of the transmitted pulses from the BRASS. The same was true of the pulses following that and so on, until the BRASS was barely making a ‘b-e-e-p’ for each transmission. “He’s picking up speed and closing,” I announced to the civilians who were twisting the dials on the BRASS equipment and watching me to see if their efforts were producing the desired results. “Tell us when he’s directly overhead,” was the request as the pulses became weaker still. Evidently, the Russian figured that we had sped up and were leaving him behind; as the very loud transmissions we had been making were now so weak, he could hardly hear them. “He’s making 220 turns and coming right up our stern,” I reported. The USN/USL boys made some more adjustments to their equipment, “Is he overhead yet?” they asked, “Almost”, I said, wondering what in hell they were going to do. Just then, he came out of our baffles and I could hear his diesel engine roaring above the sound of his cavitating propeller blades, as he picked up speed.
“HE’S OVERHEAD NOW NOW NOW!!” I shouted and just then, the relay in my audio circuit cut my sound. It didn’t matter, I could hear the prolonged blast of a BRASS transmission coming right through our hull, it seemed that it would never end. I didn’t realize they could extend the pulse length so long! The operators had turned the transducer table until the ‘log’ was crosswise to the length of our hull, then they had selected just the top staves so that all that transmitted energy went straight up to the Russian Trawler who listening equipment was undoubtedly turned up has far as it would go in an effort to hear our previously weaken signals over their own ships noise. You guys know what test depth was in those old boats, so you know just how far away his receiver was from probably a million or more watts being aimed directly at him. We fried his sonar system . . . cooked it . .. blew every transistor . . . toasted every tube . . . Probably rendered the operator deaf for life. You’ve heard the old saying, “That noise was ten dB above the threshold of pain” well can you imagine what sound level BRASS could produce at that short a distance? It was a wonder we didn’t blow a hole in his hull and sink him.
For the next week, the only time that ‘Fishing Trawler’ caught up with us was when we surfaced after a day’s work. He could still pick us up when we were on the surface with his radar, but he couldn’t find us when we were submerged and BRASS was transmitting. After about six or seven days, a second trawler showed up and relieved him. They would follow us, but never got real close to us. Once burned, twice shy….
USS Tigrone (AGSS-419) with experimental bow sonar, off Ponta Delgada, Azores, 1967
April 1970 USS Tigrone (419) leaving Halifax after Exercise Steel Ring
Tigrone continued her quiet Cold War service until 27 June 1975 when she was decommissioned after more than 30 years with the fleet– all but about six of those in active service.
She was the last active submarine in the Navy that had served in WWII, which is something of a record in and of its own right.
USS Tigrone by William H. RaVell III
While she was expended as a torpedo test target on 25 October 1976 in deep water off the North Carolina coast at 36deg. 05.2′ N x 71deg. 15.3′ w, she is remembered at Submarine Force Museum and the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum as well as by an active veterans group.
Of her sisters, 14 were transferred to 9 foreign navies and one, ex-USS Cutlass (SS-478) remains semi-active in Taiwan’s Republic of China Navy as Hai Shih (meaning “sea lion”) at age 70.
Three are maintained as museum ships:
USS Requin as a museum ship is about as close as you can get to Tigrone. Image via Wiki.
-USS Requin (SS-481) at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, PA. This ship was also converted to an SSR in the late 1940s and served with Tigrone in the Second and Sixth fleets during the 1950s.
-USS Torsk (SS-423), moored at Pier Three, Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, (alongside the National Aquarium in Baltimore) in Maryland.
-TCG Uluçalireis (S 338) (ex-USS Thornback (SS-418)), on display at Rahmi M. Koç Museum, Golden Horn in Istanbul. She is shown above in the comparison shot next to sister Tigrone.
The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.
Nearing their 50th Anniversary, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.
– Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday July 2 Helen’s daughter
Here we see the British Dido-class light cruiser HMS Hermione (Pennant 74) of the Royal Navy slicing through the Italian coastal submarine Tembien like butter on 2 August 1941, west of Malta. The (gouache on board) artwork is entitled, “A British cruiser ramming an Italian submarine” by Marc Stone. It is in the collection of the UK National Archives.
The 16 ships of the Dido-class, built to a prewar design, were some of the most modern fleet escorts in the Royal Navy and found themselves at the sharp end of the spear throughout World War Two. Originally designed to be a svelte 5700 tons, with a 1:10 length to beam ration (512-feet oal, 50-foot abeam), they were fast (33-knots) but lightly armored ships capable of swatting away aircraft, light combatants, and submarines from the fleet proper. Armed with ten rapid-fire 5.25-inch (133mm) guns in five dual-mounted turrets, as well as two sets of triple torpedo tubes, they were basically just really big destroyers– with a little bit of armor.
Where they had an advantage was in a 4000-nm cruising range of 16-knots, which enabled them to cross the Atlantic at a fair clip. This made them perfect for escorting convoys to places like Malta, Cyprus, or across the big pond.
The Dido‘s were all named after classical history and legend (e.g Black Prince, Bonaventure, Charybdis, Naiad, Spartan, et al) which made cruiser number 74’s name after Hermione, the daughter of Menelaus and Helen in Greek mythology, logical. As such, she was the Royal Navy’s third ship to carry that moniker, the first a Napoleonic war 32-gun frigate, and the second being a WWI-era Astraea-class protected cruiser, both with somewhat unlucky histories. The frigate’s crew had mutinied and surrendered to the Spanish while the old cruiser had grounded herself at least twice and was too obsolete to take an active part in the Great War.
The third would be the unluckiest of all.
Laid down at Alexander Stephen and Sons in Glasgow, Scotland in 1937, the war started before Hermione was commissioned on 25 March 1941. With just a few weeks in service, she was part of the Bismarck hunt, and served on the Northern Patrol in the Atlantic for two months. Rushed to the Med where the Royal Navy was fighting for its very life alone against the Italian, Vichy French and German forces there, she joined 1st Cruiser Squadron Force H, protecting the lifeline convoys running from Gibraltar to Malta and back, then convoys from Malta to Alexandria.
The (Town class) cruisers HMS Edinburgh, along with the Dido-class sisters HMS Hermione (center), and HMS Euryalus, steaming in line abreast whilst they escort a convoy as part of Operation Halberd, at the time the largest resupply effort to Malta, to which the entire Italian navy sortied to attempt to stop.
These runs carried fighters to Malta, oil and supplies to Montgomery’s troops fighting Rommel in North Africa, and other valuable commodities. As such, Hermione shot down attacking dive bombers, endured endless hours on alert for U-boats and fast attack craft, and had her ‘turn in the barrel’ everyday for over a year running this gauntlet.
The ship’s good luck charm “Convoy“, Hermione‘s ship’s cat, sleeps in his own hammock whilst members of the crew look on
On the night of Aug 2, 1941 Hermione encountered the Italian Adua-class submarine Tembien on the surface preparing to send a brace of torpedoes into the precious carrier HMS Ark Royal. Had the Ark been sunk, British naval power in the Med would have changed for the worse. It was on that evening the daughter of Menelaus sliced the Roman shark in two, sending her to the bottom.
*Sidebar on the unlucky Adua-class boats of the Regia Marina: These plucky 800-ton, 200-foot long vessels were well-designed but their crews were unprepared for war against the Royal Navy, which had a long tradition of killing submarines operating close to their ships. Of the 17 Adula’s operational during World War II, 16 were lost, almost all to the RN. The class did not chalk up many kills for all of their reckless bravado.*
For her role in sinking the Italian submarine, the cruiser Hermione was immortalized in wartime martial art, which was soon turned into war propaganda posters. Tragically, the cruiser had already met her own fate before the ink was dry on these posters.
Assigned to the 15th Cruiser squadron in the eastern Med, she came face to face with a boat who had already tried to sink her once the previous winter. On 16 June 1942, she was sunk after being torpedoed just off Alexandria by the German U-boat U-205 with a loss of some 85 of her crew.
Commanded by Kptlt. Franz-Georg Reschke, U-205 herself the subject of a blood vendetta by the Royal Navy, who sent her to the bottom near the coast of Libya 17 Feb, 1943, with the destroyer HMS Paladin finishing her off.
The Hermione‘s name was issued to a Leander-class frigate (F58) in 1967, a ship that by all accounts had a lucky and safe thirty-year life and whose crew share a reunion and remembrance association with that of the lost WWII cruiser. Specs:
Displacement: 5,600 tons standard
6,850 tons full load, wartime overload, 7700-tons.
Length: 485 ft (148 m) pp
512 ft (156 m) oa
Beam: 50.5 ft (15.4 m)
Draught: 14 ft (4.3 m)
Propulsion: Parsons geared turbines
Four shafts
Four Admiralty 3-drum boilers
62,000 shp (46 MW)
Speed: 32.25 knots (60 km/h)
Range: 1,500 nautical miles (2,780 km) at 30 knots
4,240 nautical miles (7,850 km) at 16 knots
1,100 tons fuel oil
Complement: 480 (more added in 1941 to man additional AAA guns)
Armament: Original configuration:
10 x 5.25 in (133 mm) guns,
2 x 0.5 in MG quadruple guns,
3 x 2 pdr (37 mm/40 mm) pom-pom quad guns,
6 x 21 in (533 mm) torpedo tubes (2×3).
1941 – 1943 configuration:
10 x 5.25 in (133 mm) dual-purpose guns (5×2),
5 x 20 mm (0.8 in) single guns,
8 x 2 pdr (37 mm/40 mm) pom-pom guns (2×4),
6 x 21 in (533 mm) torpedo tubes (2×3).
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Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steampunk navies of the 1866-1938 time period and will profile a different ship each week.
– Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday, Aug 1
Here we have the classic old experimental submarine (submersible) USS Plunger SS-2. The tiny ship, only 64-feet long, was only the second official submarine that the US Navy owned. She was commissioned 19 September 1903 and served as an experimental boat. In 1905 she had the distinction of visiting former Secretary of the Navy and then-current President Teddy Roosevelt at Oyster Bay. The Bully Teddy spent three hours aboard, taking the wheel and even submerging five times in the shallow water, the first President to submerge while in office.
Roosevelt wrote from Oyster Bay to Hermann Speck von Steinberg: “I myself am both amused and interested as to what you say about the interest excited about my trip in the Plunger. I went down in it chiefly because I did not like to have the officers and enlisted men think I wanted them to try things I was reluctant to try myself. I believe a good deal can be done with these submarines, although there is always the danger of people getting carried away with the idea and thinking that they can be of more use than they possibly could be.” To another correspondent he declared that never in his life had he experienced “such a diverting day … nor so much enjoyment in so few hours.”
In 1909 she was under the command of one very young and very wet Ensign Chester Nimitz who lead a huge crew of one Chief and five sailors. The small but hearty young boat served for ten years in more or less active duty , then spend almost another ten in mothballs as a target before she was scrapped in 1922. She spent WWI hoisted aboard the hulk of the former Civil War monitor Puritan, then more than 50-years old, a blend of the Navy’s past and future if there ever were one.
Specs:
Displacement: 107 long tons (109 t)
Length: 64 ft (20 m)
Beam: 12 ft (3.7 m)
Draft: 11 ft (3.4 m)
Speed: 8 kn (9.2 mph; 15 km/h) surfaced
7 kn (8.1 mph; 13 km/h) submerged
Complement: 7
Armament: 1 × 18 in (460 mm) torpedo tube
![USS Tigrone (AGSS-419) with experimental bow sonar, off Ponta Delgada, Azores, 1967 [1400×843]](https://i0.wp.com/laststandonzombieisland.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/uss-tigrone-agss-419-with-experimental-bow-sonar-off-ponta-delgada-azores-1967-1400c397843.jpg?resize=519%2C313&ssl=1)
