DISASTER! The sinking of the RMS REPUBLIC

The Royal Mail Steamer REPUBLIC was a gorgeous White Star Liner.



The ship was originally built in Belfast, for the International Mercantile Marine's Dominion Line (a sister company to the White Star Line) and was named SS Columbus. After two voyages with Dominion, she was sold to White Star and renamed Republic (the White Star's original Republic of 1872 had been sold over a decade earlier).

Superstitious sailors will tell you that changing the keel name of a ship is an unwise thing to do.

Collision with SS Florida

In early morning of January 23, 1909, while sailing from New York City to Gibraltar and Mediterranean ports with 742 passengers and crew, Captain Inman Sealby in command, the Royal Mail Steamer Republic entered a thick fog off the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, inamous for whaling ship disasters I shall cover here in the fullness of time

Among the passengers were any amount of the great and the good, illustrious people such as Mrs. Sophie Curtis, wife of George M. Curtis, Mrs. Mary Severance, wife of Cordenio A. Severance, Professor John M. Coulter, and Lady Katherine Van Loo. Travelling in first class were also Mr. Leonard L. McMurray, who, in 1915, would survive the sinking of the Cunard liner Lusitania, and Mrs. John T. Davis, daughter-in-law of senator Henry G. Davis of West Virginia with two children.

The steamer reduced speed and regularly signalled its presence by whistle. At 5:47 a.m., another whistle was heard and the Republic's engines were ordered to full reverse, and the helm put "hard-a-port". Out of the fog, the Lloyd Italiano liner Florida appeared and hit Republic amidships, at about ninety degrees. Two passengers asleep in their cabins on Republic were killed when Florida's bow sliced into her, including liquor wholesale manager Eugene Lynch's wife Mary and banker W. J. Mooney.

Eugene Lynch was critically injured and died as a result of his injuries at Long Island College Hospital, Brooklyn, January 26, 1909. On the Florida, three black crewmen were also killed when the bow was crushed back to a collision bulkhead.

The engine and boiler rooms on RMS Republic began to flood, and the ship listed. Captain Sealby led the crew in calmly organizing the passengers on deck for evacuation. RMS Republic was equipped with the new Marconi wireless telegraph system, and became......

the first ship in history to issue a CQD distress signal.

Florida came about to rescue Republic's complement, and the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Gresham responded to the distress signal. Passengers were distributed between the two ships, with Florida taking the bulk of them, but with 900 Italian immigrants already on board, this left the ship dangerously overloaded.

The White Star liner Baltic, commanded by Captain J. B. Ranson, also responded to the CQD call, but due to the persistent fog, it was not until the evening that Baltic was able to locate the drifting RMS Republic. Once on-scene, the rescued passengers were transferred from Gresham and Florida to Baltic. Because of the damage to Florida, that ship's immigrant passengers were also transferred to Baltic, but a riot nearly broke out when they had to wait until first-class Republic passengers were transferred. Once everyone was on board, Baltic sailed for New York.

Captain Sealby and a skeleton crew remained on board Republic to make an effort to save her. Crewmen from the Gresham tried using collision mats to stem the flooding, but to no avail. By this time the steamers New York and Lucania (from Cunard) had also arrived, and waited while an attempt was made by Gresham to take Republic under tow. This effort, too was futile, and on January 24, the mighty Royal Mail Steamer REPUBLIC sank.

At 15,378 tons, she was the largest ship to have sunk up to that time. The remaining crew were evacuated before she sank.

The Republic sank on January 24th, 1909 when she collided in a dense fog with an immigrant ship named SS Florida. The approximate location of her sinking is about 50 miles south of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. The RMS Republic was reportedly carrying a fortune of 5 tons of newly minted American Gold Eagle coins valued at $3 million in 1909, 15 tons of gold bars, a Navy payroll with estimated current value around $70 million and several tons of silver, as well as passengers' jewelry. Additionally, it was reported to have on board JP Morgan's rare library of documents and books.

"A DATE WHICH WILL LIVE IN INFAMY" The sinking of USS ARIZONA

Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives: yesterday, December 7th, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The USS Arizona (BB-39) was a Pennsylvania-class battleship of the United States Navy.

The vessel was the third to be named in honour of the 48th state, though the first since its statehood was actually achieved. She was commissioned in 1916 and saw action in World War I. The USS Arizona is best known for her cataclysmic and dramatic sinking, with the loss of 1,177 lives, during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941, the event that brought about U.S. involvement in World War II. The wreck was not salvaged, and continues to lie at the floor of the harbour. It is the site of a memorial to those who perished on that day.


Captain Isaac Kidd, USN, pictured prior to his promotion to Rear Admiral.

Acts of heroism on the part of Arizona's officers and men were many, headed by those of Lieutenant Commander Samuel G. Fuqua, the ship's damage control officer, whose coolness in attempting to quell the fires and get survivors off the ship earned him the Medal of Honour. Posthumous awards of the Medal of Honour also went to Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, the first flag officer killed in the Pacific war, and to Captain Franklin Van Valkenburgh, who reached the bridge and was attempting to defend his ship when the bomb hit on the magazines destroyed her.

The blast that destroyed Arizona and sank her at her berth alongside of Ford Island took a total of 1,177 lives of the 1,400 crewmen on board at the time—over half of the casualties suffered by the entire fleet in the attack.

"No, there is no boat here." The Sinking of the Ferry ESTONIA.

"NO, THERE IS NO BOAT HERE."
These are the haunting words uttered by the captain of the Mariella, the lead rescue ship, one of many, who raced to the last reported position of the massive Ferry Estonia, on a cold night on the Baltic in late September of 1994.

MS Estonia, previously MS Viking Sally (1980–1990), MS Silja Star (–1991), and MS Wasa King (–1993), was a cruiseferry built in 1980 at the German shipyard Meyer Werft in Papenburg. The ship sank in the Baltic Sea on September 28, 1994, claiming 852 lives and was one of the deadliest maritime disasters in the late 20th century. Superstitious sailors will tell you that changing the keel name of a ship is an unwise thing to do.

Here's what this beautiful ship looked like in happier times.


The loss of the Estonia was a terrible accident, and one which would have implications for open-bow ferries for the rest of time. The story is best told in moving pictures.






Here is a startling video demonstrating the physics of what happened to the ramp housing of the bow visor of the ESTONIA, the failure of which lead to her sinking.


Unusually, here are the actual recordings of bridge communications between the ESTONIA and the Finnish Coast she was communicating with during her transit of the Baltic on that fateful night. They are chilling.

Anatoly Babkin and the day naval warfare changed forever.

INTRODUCING THE SHKVAL.



Anatoly Babkin, brilliant Russian scientist and most recently head of the rocket engine faculty at the Bauman Technical University in Moscow, designed a weapon the Russians called Shkval. The Shkval is a supercavitation torpedo, which is capable of being fired by air, surface or underwater, and is known to achieve underwater speeds of at least 300 knots, or aproximately 330 miles per hour, and possibly even more. It achieves this by bleeding some of the gasses produced by its rocket powered propulsion device, expelling these gasses through special apertures on the nose of the torpedo, thus enveloping it in a bubble of gas enabling it to 'fly' underwater.

In this way, the torpedo behaves more like a missile, rather than a conventional torpedo. For those of you who recall your high school physics, force equals mass times acceleration. Since acceleration is a square function, the speed squared is reflected in the resultant force. Thus, any object weighing around 3 tonnes, travelling underwater at 330 mph, will cause catastrophic damage to any ship or submarine it impacts with, without the need for a conventional warhead. Were such a weapon conventionally, or even nuclear armed, the SHKVAL represents a fundamental shift in the balance of power within the context of Naval Warfare, and will change the playing field forever.

The Russian SHKVAL weighs 2700 kilograms, is 8.5 meters in length, has an effective operational range of between 7 and 13 kilometers and costs twelve million US dollars each, if able to locate a compliant source.

Naval strategy has changed dramatically over the past one hundred years, with capitol ship importance passing from Battleships, to Aircraft Carriers and then onto Nuclear submarines, but all are in grave danger before the threat represented by the SHKVAL supercavitation torpedo.

First of all, what is cavitation?
Cavitation is defined as the formation of an empty space within a solid object or body. In the underwater case, It is the phenomena whereby rotating underwater machinery, like propellors, release the gasses contained within the molecular structure of water, beyond a certain speed of rotation, angular displacement of propellor blades, temperature, salinity and pressure, by virtue of its rotation through the water. This is important in the submarine world, because cavitation is a hugely noisy phenomenon and can easily betray the location of a previously undetected submarine.

Here is a brief video demonstrating the phenomena of cavitation.

Typical of the Russians, though, they took this unwanted aspect of underwater operations, this potential liability, and experimented with it in order to obtain a tactical advantage. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in the development of SHKVAL.

Below is a rather longwinded video, of tabloid instincts in large parts, but one which has some important tactical information about SHKVAL along with some background information on the submarine KURSK and her tragic loss. This is a Canadian production, rather tedious in the beginning, and I recommend you commence viewing at minute 16. It advances the theory that it was a SHKVAL explosion in the Torpedo room of the Kursk, possibly whilst within a firing tube, which lead to her sinking. There is no firm evidence in support of this, as there is for the involvement of USS Toledo and USS Memphis, particularly the protracted visit of the former to a sealed dry dock in Bergen for 3 days immediately following the loss of the Kursk, but information as it pertains to the weapon itself, is somewhat valuable.


In case there is any doubt as to the effectiveness of torpedoes, here is a brief demonstration of what old technology torpedoes can do. This is the handiwork of a Mark 48, conventional torpedo, fired at conventional speeds with a conventional warhead. the SHKVAL is anything but conventional, in every imaginable way.

The Oceans Most Wicked Tragedy: Russian Submarine KURSK

K-141 Kursk was an Oscar II class nuclear cruise missile submarine of the Russian Navy, lost with all hands when it sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000.



Kursk, full name Атомная подводная лодка "Курск" [АПЛ "Курск"] in Russian, was a Project 949A Антей (Antey, Antaeus but was also known by its NATO reporting name of Oscar II). It was named after the Russian city Kursk, around which the largest tank battle in military history, the Battle of Kursk, took place in 1943. One of the first vessels built after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was commissioned into the Russian Navy's Northern Fleet.

Despite all information to the contrary, this submarine was lost because it was involved in the test firing of a previously TOP SECRET weapon, know in the west as SQWALA. Submarine units of the USN and RN were in close proximity when the test firing took place. As you will see from the video below, US Submarines USS Toledo and USS Memphis have a lot to answer for. In some circles, it has been suggested that the test weapon struck its launch ship KURSK, and although not fatally damaged, the Russian Navy forbade any and all attempts to save her surviving sailors. These men sat in frozen darkness for hours, dying one by one, hour after frozen hour, because of the weapon that I shall reveal here on my site very shortly, in the coming days.

This excellent video describes it detail the events of that dreadful day. For those of you limited in time, begin at minute 23.

"SINK THE BELGRANO"

The warship was built as USS Phoenix (CL-46), the sixth of the Brooklyn-class cruisers, in New Jersey by the New York Shipbuilding Corporation starting in 1935, and launched in March 1938. She survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and was decommissioned from the US Navy after World War II in July 1946. The former USS Phoenix was sold, with another of her class USS Boise (CL-47) renamed ARA Nueve de Julio (C-5)), to Argentina in October 1951, for $7.8 million.



She was renamed 17 de Octubre after an important date for the political party of the then president Juan Perón. Ironically, she was one of the main units which joined the coup against Peronism. Perón was subsequently overthrown in 1955, and in 1956 the ship was renamed General Belgrano (C-4) after General Manuel Belgrano, who had fought for Argentine independence from 1811 to 1819. Several years before becoming General, as a colonial officer, he founded the Escuela de Naútica (School of Navigation) in 1799. The cruiser was outfitted with Sea Cat missiles between 1967-1968.


It is the only ship ever to have been sunk by a nuclear-powered submarine and only the second sunk by any type of submarine since the end of World War II. The Royal Navy submarine HMS Conqueror used three Mk 8 mod 4 torpedoes, two of which found their deadly mark. She sank on May 2nd, 1982 with the loss of 323 men. 770 sailors who survived the sinking were rescued from the South Atlantic between May 3rd and 5th of that year.

Pecking the Lobes: The sinking of HMS Sheffield.

HMS Sheffield was another Type 42 guided missle destroyer of the Royal Navy. She was attacked by the Argentine Air Force during the late morning of May 4th, 1982. The attack upon her was in retaliation for the sinking of the Cruiser Belgrano.


The attack was unique in that it was an attack upon a guided missile destroyer, bristling with radar, and neither the approaching aircraft or its deployed Exocet missile was detected by radar. HMS Sheffield was severely damaged by fire and abandoned. Whilst waiting for rescue, the crew sang "always look on the bright side of life", after Monty Python.

The burnt-out hulk was taken in tow by the Rothesay class frigate HMS Yarmouth but sank at 53°04'S, 56°56' W on 10 May 1982; high seas led to slow flooding through the hole in the ships side which eventually took her to the bottom. This made her the first Royal Navy vessel sunk in action in almost forty years. Twenty of her crew (mainly on duty in the Galley-area) died during the attack. The wreck is a war grave and designated as a protected place under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986.