HMS Poseidon explained

HMS Poseidon (P99) was a designed and built by Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering in Barrow-in-Furness, England for the Royal Navy, launched on 22 August 1929. She spent most of her short career assigned to the Yellow Sea region, based at the Royal Navy's Weihai naval base in mainland China. In 1931, the submarine sank after a collision with the steamship Yuta north of Weihai. The submarine was later secretly salvaged by the Chinese in 1972.

Service history

At about 12:12 on 9 June 1931, while exercising on the surface with the submarine tender 20miles north of the vessels' base at Weihai, and despite excellent visibility, Poseidon collided with the Chinese merchant vessel SS Yuta.[1] [2]

Thirty-one of the submarine's crew managed to scramble into the water before the submarine sank to the seabed 130feet below within a few minutes.[3] The aircraft carrier, heavy cruiser and sister submarine led the rescue operations.[4] Poseidon was equipped with Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus which had come into service two years earlier. This was a closed circuit underwater breathing system which provided the wearer with a supply of pure oxygen and a canvas drogue to slow the rate of ascent. Despite the submarine not being equipped with specialised escape compartments or flooding valves, eight of the crew managed to leave the forward end of the boat, although two failed to reach the surface and one died later. Twenty-one crew died in total.

A consequence of the successful escape of part of the crew was to change Admiralty policy from advising crews to wait for the arrival of assistance to attempting to escape from the submarine as soon as possible. This policy was announced in the House of Commons in March 1934.[5]

Salvage

The secret salvaging of the submarine in 1972 by China's then newly formed underwater recovery units was described in 2002 in an article in the popular Chinese magazine Modern Ships .This was not known about in the West until the researcher and journalist Steven Schwankert discovered that article with a Google web search and later read it in a Hong Kong library.[6]

In the former British naval cemetery on the island of Liugong, gravestones, bearing clearly legible names, dates and epitaphs of the lost sailors were found in haphazard stacks by historians looking into the sinking of HMS Poseidon and its salvage by the Chinese.[7] The British government asked the Chinese government for an explanation. Results of this research are told in Schwankert's book Poseidon: China's Secret Salvage of Britain's Lost Submarine[8] and the documentary film The Poseidon Project.

See also

External links

37.8333°N 136°W

Notes and References

  1. Submarine Casualties Booklet . U.S. Naval Submarine School . 1966 . 8 September 2009 . 27 July 2011 . https://web.archive.org/web/20110727224438/http://archive.rubicon-foundation.org/8200 . usurped .
  2. Book: Lloyd's Register of Ships. 1931. Lloyd's Register of Shipping. Yuta was a 1,753 GRT cargo ship, built at Aberdeen in 1889 as Yuen Sang and owned in 1931 by Pao Yu Tzai of Newchwang, China
  3. Book: Gray, Edwyn . Disasters of the Deep A Comprehensive Survey of Submarine Accidents & Disasters . Edwyn Gray . 2003. Leo Cooper. 0-85052-987-5 . 130–131.
  4. Web site: HMS Poseidon. 2 December 2006 . Battleships-Cruisers.co.uk .
  5. Book: The T-Class submarine - The Classic British Design . 0-85368-958-X . Arms and Armour . Paul Kemp . 1990 . 105.
  6. News: China accused of secretly salvaging sunken British submarine containing 18 lost sailors . The Telegraph . 12 June 2009 . London . Julian . Ryall . 4 May 2010 . subscription .
  7. News: Families of HMS Poseidon victims angry at 'desecration' of graves. The Telegraph . 3 June 2013 . Julian . Ryall . 11 June 2013 . subscription.
  8. Book: Schwankert, Steven R. Poseidon: China's Secret Salvage of Britain's Lost Submarine. 2013. Hong Kong University Press . Hong Kong. 9789888208180 . 15 October 2013 . https://web.archive.org/web/20131231120545/http://books.google.com/books?id=cZThAAAAQBAJ . 31 December 2013 .

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