Depth Charge Hydrostatic Pistols: Getting That Sinking Feeling
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 พ.ค. 2024
- Developed during the First World War, depth charges remained the primary means of attacking submarines well into the Second, before being largely replaced by antisubmarine mortars and later missiles and torpedoes. Essentially large drums filled with explosives, depth charges were set off at a predetermined depth by special fuzes known as hydrostatic pistols.
0:00 Introduction
2:10 British Commonwealth Depth Charges of WWII
4:42 Hydrostatic Pistol Mk.VII** - Introduction
6:06 Hydrostatic Pistol Mk.VII** - Design and Operation
11:09 Hydrostatic Pistols Mk. XIV, XVI, XIX, and XX
13:29 Booster Placer/Extender Safety Mechanisms
15:15 US Depth Charges of WWII
16:30 US Hydrostatic Pistol Mk.6 - Design and Operation
19:13 Outro
SOURCES:
michaelhiske.de/Allierte/USA/U...
maritime.org/doc/depthcharge6...
www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WAMBR...
www.bulletpicker.com/pdf/OP-1...
www.maritimequest.com/library/...
I work aboard a restored WW2 US PT Boat and we have a couple of the Mark 6 Depth Charges that are mounted on our stern for display. I found a willing volunteer machinist who manufactured a couple of sets of non-functioning "replica" faceplates for the depth pistol and the Booster Charge Extender Safety Clip and plate. In researching these parts, I came across an interesting little known backstory for why the USN was compelled to invent the Booster Charge Safety Feature for the Mk6 Depth Charge. During the Battle of Midway on June 7th 1942, a Japanese submarine was able to sink the already damaged Aircraft Carrier USS Yorktown with 3 submarine torpedoes. Almost by accident, a 4th torpedo meant for Yorktown hit a nearby tending Destroyer USS Hamann which almost immediately broke in half and sank. As the Hamann sank, almost half of her crew managed to jump overboard and were swimming in the ocean awaiting rescue. That is until the 2 full stern roll off racks of Mark 6 Depth Charges started to detonate and killed the majority of the survivors in the water. These Depth charges were all set to minimum depth (30ft) or Safe setting, but when the ships sinking stern section reached 30 feet deep, they all began exploding, with the survivors swimming just above. Had the booster extender safety device been invented, it would have saved all of those crewmen. The newly invented safety fork worked to prevent the booster charge from extending, and even if the pistol detonates, it will not be able to set off the main charge, since the booster charge is physically separated from the pistol detonator. I learned that this disaster was the impetus for the weapon designers to figure out how to prevent the same thing from happening in the future. Jerry G. PT658 Portland OR
Thank you for the valuable contribution to this conversation!
How's it go? Safety is written in blood
@@techno_tuna Sad bad true. A lot of forward thinking is done to prevent hypothetical situations, but the majority of safety items in any procedure are the result of case studies on accidents and near misses.
That was interesting. I knew about the tragedy of the USS Hamann, but I'd never come across any mention of it spurring the development of additional safety features for depth charges.
Excellent description of a real issue.
I swear your openings just keep getting better and better
This one is great!
If you like the opening, just wait for the “closing” at 15:05 . (Sorry; I can’t resist bad puns. And your comment is the best on this video!)
Loved it! Soo funny. Thx for good laugh.
Das Boot + Battleship. Doesn't get any better than this!
Thats what i told my girlfriend
Drachinifel went over the the history of anti sub warfare in WWI which is worth watching. I love his description of the first depth charge requested by Admiral Jellicoe as “the crushing hand of God”, since Jellicoe simply told the ordnance men to stick a hydrostatic pistol onto a 1,500 pound naval mine set to detonate at 45 feet.
Ramming.
Pretty sure there's a b-ship that rammed a uboat once or twice
@@tomarmadiyer2698HMS Dreadnought, the first modern battleships only kill was a successful ramming attack on a U boat during WW1
@@gherkinisgreat thank you! I can't believe I forgot it was. HER.
I mean
She's THE bship
@@tomarmadiyer2698battleship pronouns LOL
@FartGas-xe4yk I suspect if a soldier gets kicked out of the Navy it's because the Navy has sailors and Marines, not soldiers.
Munitions design is interesting. It's straightforward to make a device that will readily explode, or that will never explode, but in order to make a device that sits on a ship for months, possibly while the ship is being shot at, and may be handled somewhat roughly, without exploding, but will very likely explode when actually desired, is a design goal that produces its own odd expedients.
This was what cost the Japanese fleet one of its aircraft carriers: munitions mismanagement
Turns out that having **all** of your munitions stored on the decks - though great for quickly rearming your planes - is the dumbest thing in the world.
They didn't even need to hit a magazine. It was a simple hit scored on the deck and the entire ship was lost.
@@nsahandler They learned the hard way that they needed to jettison the depth charges and often their torpedoes before they went into battle with surface ships.
Don't remember which carrier at Midway blew up because of fuel vapors. The USN was using CO2 to purge fuel vapors from the internal fuel distribution system.
That saved at least 1 US carrier later in the war.
Mechanical engineering is so fascinating. While I have zero interest in designing submarine explosives I do enjoy learning about how engineers solves such problems. The fun thing about sciences is that you never know how discoveries can be applied beyond their initial uses. Please keep being such a cool person slinging knowledge. Thank you for doing what you do.
Depth charges are a lot of fun outside of war time.
The mind boggles at the complexity and the thinking behind it all and Gilles impresses with his delivery.
Guy pushing a depth charge across a wooden plank at 15:30 had a job I don't envy.
The engineering alone in this fuse arrangement is incredible. I've been a powder monkey for 20 years now, I use electrical tape to connect the progressive charges. These depth fuses are brilliant.
As usual detailed and thorough. Love your intros and this one is certainly a new one in the top ten.
Das Boot is a favorite of mine.
Now it all makes sense! For those of you who have watched the excellent "Dambusters" movie, one thing that always bothered me was how a bomb designed to "bounce" on the surface of the water (that filled the Ruhr dams) could possibly NOT detonate prematurely. Now, with the deep dive into the mechanism of Hydrostatic Pistols, we now know there were multiple safety mechanisms, to prevent detonation by shock, (even the shock of another depth charge exploding nearby!) making the mechanism of the "bouncing bomb" used in the raid understandable. 😮 Genius! 🤓🧐
Ordnance fuzing is a fascinating subject and an example of an always/never situation. You want your ordnance to always work but never detonate prematurely, but if you have to choose you’d prefer the odd weapon that fails safe rather than detonate prematurely.
Time delay fuse probably makes more sense for dams. It's what they do with bunkerbusters, and APHE and similar munitions.
@@immikeurnot unless cracks in the casing lets water in and ruin the fuzes and fuses. I'm sure that was a consideration, besides the inadvisability of having time delayed bombs stuck on the still experimental rotating release mechanism. 😳🫣
As a crew chief on fighter bombers, I get a close up view of the munitions loaded on aircraft, most are pretty simple but cluster munitions, CBU, are very complex, and huge.
Who knew there could be so much depth (sorry) on this. Thank you for all the time it takes to put these together.
Wow I really love how much depth you go into on these videos.
It is right at my level.
The _pressure_ to come up with these clever puns is going to make me _explode._ Clearly I'm way out of my _depth._
It really hits the spot.
Close but no cigar...
You might even say you get a real charge out of it.
I see what you did there..😂
Excellent video with superb detail. Looking forward to "The Developmental History and Tactical Use of Depth Charges". 😁
Thanks for this, your in depth description distracted me right when I needed it.
I recently tracked down and bought a vintage electronic battleships with my neighbour, love the intro!
Cheers from down under
Another Aussie, it's all Commonwealth allies up in here
@@kingcosworth2643 I'm from Italy.
The E6b was sweeeeet.
Your humor is absolutely top notch.
🤣🤣
Sly, but funny.
Kinda amazing way to get at the scale of the manufacturing base needed to keep up with the war. Every single detonator has how many pounds of brass, which needs to be carefully machined to spec, hand-assembled and later soldered, only to be part of a salvo of dozens or hundreds of charges dropped in a scattershot attempt to take out a single submarine.
For every ship full of people, there were huge factories supporting them with ordinance. A group effort of a scale we haven't seen since the moon shot.
Good point. Behind every submarine, ship or aircraft they must have been 1000s of people working on lathes in workshops to fabricate theses devices. I think the same about ww2 bombers with all their cockpit dials and gauges. An entire cottage industry making instruments.
@@notmenotme614 Did those use radium dials in WW2?
I’m loving those orthographic projections
Really great backdrop, well researched and presented, thanks
This was utterly fascinating. Thanks for such a well put together exploration into this subject!
My first U. S. Coast Guard “High Endurance” Cutter still had a Hedgehog launcher when I joined her in late 1970. (Soon replaced with direct fire 81mm mortars for close-in anti surface.) There was a lot of Navy Surplus involved, including the 5”/38 main gun, probably from a decommissioned Fletcher class or the like.
Main ASW was the Mark 46 homing torpedo, with two triple launchers.
Some cutters actually had 5”/38s from the start, since they were basically just slow destroyers used for convoy escort duties.
@@FS2K4Pilot Boutwell started out with a 5”/38 (commissioned in ~1966). Traded it in for a 76mm Oto Melara soon after I left in 1972. Definitely a good trade, we could not even track Skyhawks in refresher training. But sad, the 5”/38 is a classic.
And down she goes!
Once again. An excellent explanation for a 'rather complicated ' unit/ units.
Well done indeed sir.
Great video. Amazing the amount of engineering that goes into the little things that we don't think about as much as the more glamorous instruments of war like planes, tanks, etc.
Awesome presentation.. my father served on a Destroyer Escort in the Pacific during WWII. The Japanese sub I-32 went down due to one of those combinations you described.
Really stepping up the special effects on these!!!
Just love your videos. Being bit of a gear head , and armchair historian. I find your videos fascinating. Look forward to your next installment.
Thank you and a suggestion. Maybe you can put more emphasis Summarizing the pros and cons of a design and its improvement than just naming almost all modules produced.
Great presentation - well done!
Great video...rare to find such interesting information these days on youtube.
Excellent explanation!
Nice work.
Best episode yet, very very good!
Damn. First time watcher and I was not ready for that opening
Who'd have thought ?. I've been watching war/navy movies since childhood and never really thought about these pistols, so complicated !. Great description on the inner workings, well done.
Great video, Gilles...👍
Such genius engineering.
Deep dive into depth charges at a later date
Very Nice - Thanks!
😎👍
I appreciate the humor you’re throwing around
Very interesting! I always wondered how depth charges were set off, thank you!
brilliance in the choice of subject matter with finger in hand .
Fascinating!
But the second section of the video was essentially reading tabular information, which would be more easily understood if you just put the table on screen during that section.
Love your work. Thanks from VT USA!
Great video and I whilst as an engineer I can admire both the clever design and manufacturing of these devices it does sadden me that one of our greatest talents is in designing more and better ways to kill each other.
Very interesting and cool info. I often wondered how those things would work.
TIL: there's a naval museum in Manitoba.
what a fantastic channel! like those ww2 magazines with the eyewatering prices i remember as a child.
edit: 15:32 😬
Good. Thanks.
Newbie here.
You definitely get a like button push from me.
75% of German submariners never came back. Here's why.
Chemistry, physics, history and culture; Gilles' channel has it all!
Good stuff, Bubs.
Sorry. your gesture brought back fond memories. Ah, the good old days.
My guess is in less than a week this channel will have 100,000 subscribers. Kudos in advance!
Very clever bit of engineering!
17:05 Are we sure that is a rubber bellows and not a metal bellows? That drawing shows what appears to be a metal bellows
@davidgenie-ci5zl I'd say that it is highly unlikely that metal was used for the bellows. The hydrostatic fuse needs the capability of being reset multiple times. A ship may abort an attack because the target is sunk, or has moved to a different depth. Metal without expensive, complicated, heat treatments lacks the flexibility of rubber.
@@richardhoare9963 Metal bellows can be actuated many tens of thousands of times. Rubber is however very suspectable to being degraded over time, even if never flexed. The drawing shows what appears to be a metal bellows shape. For long term reliability, I highly suspect it is indeed a metal bellows.
@@davidgenie-ci5zlI'm inclined to change my initial thought and agree with you. I was looking at my barometer and realised the working parts are metal.
The Gatwick Aviation Museum has an Avro Shackleton which was used for submarine hunting.
If you're lucky, one of the guides will be one of the original crew and they can tell you how they used to be equipped with a limited number of nuclear depth charges (as well as their sonar bouys and other equipment.
It is interesting to hear their stories, especially because their sorties used to be very slow, so there was an endurance element we'd struggle to appreciate in that tin-can.
Interesting and well done video, particularly hilarious use of hands whilst showing operation of detonator extender.
I’ve always wondered why the Navy was so late adopting the use of the proximity fused detonators on depth charges ?
Very well done, Gilles.
I did not know that the British depth charge pistols were in fact a special case of "time fuse", as opposed to really hydrostatic, i.e. driven by water pressure.
You do explain that the American were in fact hydrostatic. It would be cool to compare with the German, Japanese & Italian variety?
I have read that some of the german aircraft bomb fuses were electric, and used a capacitor charged before release, to effect the time delay.
Many thanks for the hard work you put into creating theses videos., and I love your humor too!
It’s true that most German aircraft bomb fuzes were ECR (electro capacitor resistance).
That’s gotta be the funniest opening I’ve ever seen of any video XD
From my reading on submarine warfare there was 1 thing that always intrigued me... Japanese depth charges would emit a "click" then the main charge would detonate. The time interval between the click and the wham was an indicator of how close it was.
Along delay meant is was a safe distance. A short delay meant it was close.
Anything within 5 m was enough to breach the pressure hull.
Success rates were about 5%, that improved to around 25% after hedgehog was introduced
Neat
Goddamit!!!! I couldnt remember the name of ur channel, for 4 weeks or so and couldnt find it till just now, pheww!!!!! I knew it had devices in the name but couldn't get it recommended.
Hadn't heard about this before.
My dear Sir, thank you for the fascinating deep dive* into these mechanical marvels!
___
* pun intended
Das Boot... A movie VERY worth watching!
I have worked with quicklime (CaO) .When it comes in contact with water it expands violently . I was told that it had applications in depth charges .I don't know how it was used .
@Our Own Devices I recently watched a WW2 British Admiralty training film on a TH-cam channel (if you're interested, I can look through my history and reply/edit with the channel & film name). The film appeared to be geared towards the Fleet Air Arm and covered torpedo, strafing and depth charge attacks. It advised the attacker on how far away from the pressure hull the depth charge had to be when it exploded in order to breach the pressure hull to sink it or, if it were outside that distance, damage the 'casing' in order to force the submarine to the surface. It is definitely worth a watch!
Neat.
forbidden espresso brew head
i used to work in the oil industry based in Aberdeen, i worked as a seismic survey engineer, we used (Hydrostatic Pistols/ compressed air guns) air guns to generate a pulse wave which passed through the sea into the earth , in the oil pipe we places monitors to measure the wave from the guns, they were abt 1m length, abt 30mm diameter, very heavy, when in use it was just like depth charging for subs, lol
At University (NMSU 1972) we played submarine game on the department’s IBM1401 computer. Slow but it was fun.❤❤
Fun fact.
The little boat (2hit) in the game battleship is said to be the PT boat.
What .. no test ? :p
I found a big shell i found, and looked up its markings and its from the limbo system. Found some footage here of it on yt.
My sons friends took some small arm shelll casings to school for show n tell. The next day my son lugged in the big limbo depth charge throwing shell, lol.
Well that's my childhood ruined right there in the intro 😀
Keeping up the reputation for creative openings.
15:03 you know, i wouldn't have even noticed if you didn't say anything about it. but thanks i needed a laugh
I'm starting to think that you might know what you're talking about. Keep them coming.
Well I really learnt something from this video..an I always thought hedgehog was set off by depth not contact
How did hedgehog not exploding force special homosexual rights ?
@@benjurqunov At the time, nobody cared either way.
Now i now what was the use of these black boxes my grandfather kept in the barn
Nice corvette in the background.
For years, I’ve always wondered how depth charges worked.
Im surprised it technically works on water leakage rate and not hydro pressure.
RIP to all the soldiers, sailors, pilots & civilians who perished in WW2. Being in a sub while being attacked by depth charges has to be one of the most terrifying things to go through & perishing underwater is horrific. We can only hope that the submariners who died didn’t suffer long. You’d think they wouldn’t with the water pressure & explosion but you never know. It’s awful even contemplating it.
The USS West Virgina was a ship that capsized at Pearl Harbor. A few sailors got trapped in an air pocket & crossed off 16 days in a calendar which was discovered after it was salvaged 6months later. Their banging was heard but apparently it was impossible to rescue them at the time. I cannot imagine the horrific death those men died. I just recently read about this & apparently none of the families knew until recently.😕😔
Can a depth charge 5m away from a merchant ship damage its hull?
Gotta love the past. Some guy just yeets dept charges thru a plane window. Thats your release mechanism.
Some of these fuse/lock mechanisms you're playing with give me LockPickingLawyer vibes.
...do you have a spare depth-charge fuse you could mail to him to pick for a video? :D
"Nothing on one. Nice click on two ... oh, CRAP!"
I wonder how reliable these are. I'd like to see statistics for detonations during handling, failure to detonate, and how accurate the depth settings are. They seem overly simple yet overly complex at the same time.
PS excellent video again.
Didn’t the US have a politician who told the Japanese that they weren’t setting their depth charges low enough?
Like outright said it in a newspaper.
“Hahah no our captains just go right unde them without a scratch, hahah , hehehe”- some idiot politician.
Pretty cool. It would’ve been cool to see a video graphic of how the mechanisms function. I get the overall concept it’s just a bit difficult to see in your head.
Incredibly interesting. Gonna have to slow it down for my Cro-magnon brain to absorb it all. A serious issue blew through my head…what about all those fish? Did anybody bother to make a second run through for dinner?
lol, for a moment I thought you were having a 'Catcher in the rye - taxi driver moment'.
...I'm having that moment though. How many thousands of fish would die every time those charges went off?
Also, seagulls are always quick to learn which ships are likely to provide them free food. Were warships constantly swarmed by birds? Were the first radars affected? What about the uniforms of the sailors?
War movies and books about submarine warfare often use a trope of depth charges failing to be set to safe when an escort is hit and sinking and the depth charges going off as the ship sinks, killing men in the water. Was that a risk? It seems that your discussion about the safeties on the depth charges would prevent it. Dramatic artistic license?
And, your "Das Boot" / Battleship mash-up was brilliant.
👍
The box say: MK VII*. What looks as second star is a little part of a faded 2.
The new haircut looks sharp. 👍
This guy is like Ian with a shorter beard. That is meant a sincere compliment.
How about Weapon Alpha?
props for remembering u571
what a sad reason to cheer