Article: Confederate sub's weapon killed its own crew, researchers find Concussion from sub's torpedo, a bomb on a stick, killed Confederate crew.
Sean Gallagher - 8/24/2017, 1:50 PM
The Confederate submarine CSS H. L. Hunley bears the distinction of being the first submarine to ever sink an enemy ship. But the Hunley, a work of state-of-the-art engineering for its time, never returned from that mission on February 17, 1864. Instead, after exploding a "torpedo" below the waterline of the Union sloop-of-war USS Housatonic in Charleston Harbor, the sub was lost at sea.
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Prior theories that the sub had been sunk by shots from the Housatonic were dispelled. Some speculated that the air supply had gone foul, and the crew had suffocated. But theories rapidly shifted when it was discovered exactly how the Hunley delivered its attack against the Housatonic. Now researchers from Duke University have provided historians with some more confidence in the probable reason the Hunley never returned from its mission: the crew was likely killed by the sub's own weapon: what amounted to a bomb on a stick.
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In a recently published paper, Naval Surface Warfare Center biomedical engineer Rachel M. Lance and her colleagues recounted how they recreated (in small-scale) the conditions as the Hunley delivered its torpedo to the Housatonic's hull. Using a scale model of the submarine, dubbed the "CSS Tiny," the researchers performed a series of tests to determine how much of a pressure wave would have been transmitted through the hull of the submarine.
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Lance and her fellow researchers determined that, based on the pressure wave generated by the explosion, the crew of the Hunley likely died from the effects of the blast within their tight confines. "The blast produced likely caused flexion of the ship hull to transmit the blast wave," Lance and her co-authors wrote, "[and] the secondary wave transmitted inside the crew compartment was of sufficient magnitude that the calculated chances of survival were less than 16% for each crew member."
Based upon their model, the CSS Hudley's own torpedo acted as a massive, black powder depth charge. Since combat submarines had never been successful before, they didn't realize how suicidal it was to have the torpedo detonate 16-ft away from your own sub.
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