After this book was published, I returned to type (!) and in quick succession put out Great British Shipwrecks – A Personal Adventure in 2012, followed by Force Z Shipwrecks of the South China Sea – HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse in 2013. In 2015 Dive Truk Lagoon – the Japanese World War II Pacific Shipwrecks was published, followed by Dive Palau – the Shipwrecks in 2016, and then in 2017, Shipwrecks of Truk Lagoon, which my daughter Nicola designed and produced.
In the intervening years since The Darkness Below was published in 2011, I had spent a lot of time exploring the Pacific War shipwrecks of Truk Lagoon and Palau for my two manuals about diving the wrecks there. Of necessity, my descriptions of the wrecks there had to be regimented, clinical and almost dispassionate. But, as ever with my diving, there had been many adventures along the way as I explored and researched the wrecks – and I had seen so many things that simply couldn’t go in the wreck manuals. In The Darkness Below I wrote a chapter about the SS Creemuir and the subsequent friendship I had developed with Noel Blacklock, the former Royal Navy radio officer on the ship when it was torpedoed off north-east Scotland in 1940. A couple of years after the book was published there was another exciting development to that story which I felt really needed to go into print. Read Chapter 14 to learn what it was – I won’t spoil it here for you!
So gradually, as my head was bursting with all these stories, I decided to write a follow-on to Into the Abyss and The Darkness Below – a third volume in the story of my diving career, which by complete chance, mirrors and charts the development of our sport of technical diving from its origins in the dangerous deep air days of the late 1980s, through concepts such as extended range diving, the use of decompression gases such as nitrox, the use of deep diving trimix gases using helium, through open-circuit trimix diving and on to the present day, when we use amazingly complicated closed-circuit rebreathers that greatly extend the time you can spend on the bottom and the depth you can go to with ease, whilst minimising as far as possible the length of time it takes to ascend safely and decompress.
Of necessity, reading about diving, and particularly technical diving, means grappling with a number of specialist concepts and pieces of kit that can seem confusing and daunting to the non-diver to begin with. Rather than providing a dull glossary, each time something specialist comes up for the first time I’ve tried to explain it in simple terms so that as you progress through the book, these concepts and pieces of kit will become more familiar. Don’t worry if you don’t understand something at a first reading; you will by the end of the book!
So here is my humble effort – an originally unintended trilogy is now formed. I hope you enjoy it.
Fair winds and following seas
Rod Macdonald
2018
Author’s note: For the last 10 years or so I have been using an underwater video camera to record the ship wrecks I dive. I now have my own YouTube channel on which I post short videos of the wrecks. Throughout this book, where there is a video of the particular wreck being described available on my channel I have inserted a QR Code to allow you to go straight to the channel and dive with me on the wreck.
If you don’t use a QR reader then simply go to YouTube and type in my name and the wreck you wish to dive with me – e.g. “Rod Macdonald Aikoku Maru” (using double quote marks helps google find the correct site). You will then be whisked magically to the bottom of Truk Lagoon. If you wish to be notified of future videos as they are posted please subscribe to the channel.
BOOK ONE
WORLD WAR I NAVAL WRECKS AROUND THE UK
Author’s note
At the time of writing this book we were in the midst of a number of important 100th anniversaries of the momentous events of World War I. The great land battles were being remembered at a number of ceremonies as the dates occurred. The great clash of steel titans at sea, the Battle of Jutland, was poignantly remembered, as were the individual sinkings of some famous ships such as HMS Hampshire and HMS Vanguard. But for many ships and their crews, sent to the bottom by mine, torpedo or collision, there was no such act of remembrance. Now, therefore, as these great 100th anniversaries passed, it seemed an appropriate time to write about some of the famous World War I naval shipwrecks that lie around our British coastline, in my own act of remembrance to those who perished.
1
5 September 1914 – the first warship sunk by a torpedo fired by a submarine
The British scout cruiser HMS Pathfinder had the misfortune of being the first ship sunk by a locomotive torpedo fired from a submarine in warfare. To be clear, she was not the first ship sunk by a submarine in combat – which, as history records, was the 1,240-ton American Civil War three-masted screw sloop USS Housatonic. She was blockading the Confederate-held port of Charleston when, on the night of 17 February 1864, she was attacked by the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley. The small 40ft-long Hunley carried a crew of eight: seven to turn the hand-cranked propeller and an officer to navigate and steer. The Hunley made a stealth approach just under the surface towards the Union ship, and although she was spotted on her final approach, was able to ram a spar torpedo attached to her bow into the starboard beam of the Union ship. The Hunley then withdrew, and the torpedo exploded and sent the Housatonic to the bottom. Then the Hunley herself sank with the loss of all hands, for unknown reasons, shortly after the attack.
The 2,940-ton scout cruiser HMS Pathfinder – the first warship to be sunk by a torpedo fired by a submarine.
HMS Pathfinder was launched on 16 July 1904 at Cammell Laird’s yard in Birkenhead, on the River Mersey at Liverpool. (Cammell Laird is one of the most famous names in British shipping, and a massive, vibrant industrial firm today.) After fitting out afloat, Pathfinder was completed on 18 July 1905.
She was to be the lead ship of the Pathfinder class of four pairs of scout cruisers. Scout cruisers were smaller, faster and more lightly armed than armoured cruisers and light cruisers. They were intended to range far ahead of the fleet, as the name suggests, scouting for the enemy but not engaging heavier vessels. A second group of seven scout cruisers was ordered under the 1907–1910 government shipbuilding programmes; these would be more heavily armed. Scout cruisers were however an evolutionary dead end, and although all these ships served during World War I, they quickly became obsolete as faster and more heavily armed classes of destroyers and light cruisers were developed.
Pathfinder displaced 2,940 tons fully loaded and was 385 feet long overall, with a beam of 38 feet 9 inches and a deep load draught of 15 feet 2 inches. She was driven by two screws that were powered by two 4-cylinder triple expansion engines – steam being generated by 12 water tube boilers. This gave her a top speed of 25 knots, fast at the time of her construction – but by the beginning of World War I, the new classes of light cruisers, destroyers and torpedo boats could make 27 knots. The scout cruisers were only marginally quicker than the battleships they were meant to scout for, which could make 21 knots, and the scout cruisers could be matched in speed by battlecruisers.
The three-funnel scout cruisers such as Pathfinder were also intended to operate as the lead ships of destroyer flotillas – but it was found in practice that the scout cruisers had poor range. They only carried 160 tons of bunker coal to feed their 12 boilers and power their two 4-cylinder triple expansion engines. With a limited range, and now being outrun by the newer classes of destroyers and light cruisers, they were relegated to secondary duties.
Scout cruisers were lightly