Weaponology (2007–…): Season 1, Episode 4 - Submarines - full transcript

light of the pineapple tree in front of your worlds of

runs obscenely, you are.

As the old Interpol plane poof, connect by trafficker

crashing in direction.

Your

troops are

heading into battle area aftersi.

Today's subs are among the most sophisticated weapons platforms in existence.

Modern submarines are the most complex machines built by man.

Concentrate torpedo in the water.

Prepare for action stations as we go back through generations of technology



to reveal how submarines became the most destructive weapons delivery system on
Earth.

It's time to go ballistic.

The most advanced sub in the world today is the U.S. Navy's Virginia class.

With a price tag of 2.6 billion dollars, these boats aren't cheap.

But they are the complete marine warfare package.

These subs can dominate the battle on land or at sea with heavy weight
torpedoes,

tomahawk missiles, and their capability to insert Navy SEAL teams for special
operations.

They can spy on the enemy using photonics masks, infrared image enhancement, and
laser range finding.

In result of more than two centuries of world conflicts and scientific
breakthroughs,

they hail from a long line of submersible craft designed with one thing in mind,

to silently take the war to the enemy.

Now weaponology will unlock its family tree, going back through generations of
technology

to reveal how torpedoes, nuclear missiles, and state-of-the-art propulsion
systems

evolved into the world's deadliest weapons platform, the submarines of the U.S.
Navy's Virginia class.



The development of the naval submarine began in the Revolutionary War.

Outgunned by Britain's huge naval superiority, the colonists desperately needed
a weapon

that could give them an advantage in the war at sea.

A young Yale student, David Bushnell, would be the man to design the first
offensive submarine in history.

In the years prior to the Revolution in 1776, Bushnell applied himself to the
problem of underwater propulsion.

But when war rocked North America, Bushnell had an opportunity to put his
theories into practice.

During the Revolutionary War, he decides that the cause of the Americans must be
aided

by creating something to combat the overwhelmingly powerful Royal Navy.

Bushnell starts work on designing a submarine with the capability to attack the
British at sea.

But restricted by the technology of the day, he was faced with overcoming major
problems.

He was living in a time when there were no batteries, there were no engines,

and it is, as you can see, a wooden hull with a pilot who is also the engine
room,

who is also the fire control computer, who is also the navigation system.

It is powered by a foot-operated crank, driving this propeller at the front of
the submarine.

Vertical motion is controlled firstly by flooding water into this tank through
this lever here,

and then to surface again, there's a pump on each side to empty the ballast
tank.

None of this is very efficient. The maximum speed that this thing could achieve
would probably be a lot less than one knot,

so he was completely at the mercy of the tide or current in the river.

Bushnell finalised his plans. With input from Benjamin Franklin, he built his
craft and gave it a name, Turtle.

Now he and his fellow patriots needed to select a suitable target.

They had no difficulty in finding one. A major thorn in the colonists' side, the
British fleet blockading New York harbour.

The plan was to attack the Royal Navy flagship, HMS Eagle, anchored near Staten
Island.

And the idea was quite simple, that a bomb could be attached to the bottom of
HMS Eagle from the dive Turtle

using the auger with the rope coming to this watertight box inside which was a
charge of gunpowder.

The man chosen to be the first naval submariner in history was Sergeant Ezra
Lee.

On the night of September 6th, 1776, Lee set off from the coast with HMS Eagle
firmly in his sights.

After hours of exhausting legwork, pumping the foot pedals that power the front
propeller, Lee was in striking distance of the enemy.

Now for the second phase of the attack, to attach the explosives to the
underside of HMS Eagle.

Flooding the ballast tanks, Lee submerged.

Once in position, he began the task of boring a hole into the HMS Eagle by hand
using the auger on the top of Turtle.

But there's a problem, the screw will not bite and his oxygen supplies are
running dangerously low after hours of grueling work.

The mission is now in serious jeopardy and the colonists hope of lifting the
blockade hanging the balance.

Unknown to Lee, the hull of HMS Eagle was clad with metal plates.

Instead of drilling wood, Turtle's screw had just been grinding metal.

The bottom of the ship was covered in copper plates to prevent the attack of the
Toredo worm, which also prevented the attack of the Turtle.

Lee makes another attempt, but again he cannot penetrate the hull of HMS Eagle.

With daylight fast approaching, Lee decides to abort the attack.

Fortunately he's unable to get the screw that he wanted to use to implant the
charge into the hull of the Eagle and in the end has to give up detonating the
charge on his way home and causing quite a stir in New York Harbor.

Tactically the mission had failed, but shaken by the threat of being attacked
from underwater, the British lifted their blockade just as the colonists had
hoped.

The strategic victory they were looking for was won.

With Turtle, Bushnell had signaled the shape of things to come.

It's interesting to reflect that in this crude wooden barrel is everything that
exists in a modern submarine.

You have a system for propelling it, you have a system for diving and a system
for surfacing, a system for controlling it while you're underway and perhaps
most importantly, which makes it a weapon, something to deliver to make your
effort worthwhile.

Despite their potential, submarines like Turtle had to get up close and personal
with the target to make an attack.

To evolve to the next level, they would need a weapon system that would allow
them to strike at range.

Well you don't know we're there until the explosion rips the hull right out from
underneath.

To make an attack, the subs of the 18th and 19th centuries had to get within
touching distance of the enemy.

They don't have a weapon system that they can shoot at the enemy.

They literally have to propel themselves next to a warship and leave an
explosive charge behind to sink the enemy vessel.

This tactic was very dangerous as there was a good chance the sub would be
spotted and blown out of the water.

A better system of delivering a payload of explosives to the target was needed
if the submarine had any chance of developing another generation into a fully
capable weapon of war.

But submarines would have to wait until the mid 19th century before the crucial
technological breakthrough was made.

In the 1860s, British engineer Robert Whitehead devised the armament that has
been the primary weapon of the submarine ever since.

The self-propelled torpedo.

Torpedo used to mean any sort of underwater explosive and in this case what he
does is he comes up with a way of attaching a motor to that underwater explosive
so that it can steer itself towards a target and sink it.

He invented a machine which was capable of operating independently and to carry
a large enough charge that it would do lethal damage to the target.

A visionary, Whitehead married his design with another landmark invention.

Dynamite.

Developed by the Swede Alfred Nobel, dynamite could deliver a bigger bang than a
smaller package and is what would give Whitehead's torpedoes their punch.

This is one of Whitehead's torpedoes. It's small, it's old and it's made of
brass and copper and essentially it consists of a warhead and the early
torpedoes it was really quite small, no more than 20 or 25 pounds.

A device for setting it off, simply a percussion device, a cylinder full of air
which was its propulsion medium and then a simple reciprocating engine which
used the compressed air to drive the counter-rotating propellers.

The secret was how he got it to stay on depth and it essentially had a very
simple pressure switch which sensed water pressure and then controlled the
vertical rudders here.

So it would stay on depth to within a few feet, certainly close enough to the
intended depth that it would strike the most vulnerable part of the ship.

Whitehead's invention was a success. In the 19th century most navies bought into
it.

But torpedoes would have to wait until World War I before being used wholesale
in combat.

One engagement in September 1914 was to demonstrate the torpedoes potential
beyond any doubt and go down as one of the blackest days in the history of
Britain's Royal Navy.

Early on the morning of September 22nd, German U-boat commander Otto Wettigen
spotted three slow-moving Royal Navy ships.

Not quite believing his luck, he closed for the attack.

Launching a single torpedo at the middle ship, Wettigen ordered his boat, U-9,
to periscope depth to watch the drama unfold.

The torpedo ran straight and true, slammed into the hull of the ship and
exploded in a massive fountain of water.

The two remaining ships rushed to help pick up the survivors. Sensing further
opportunity, Wettigen attacked and sank them also.

In the space of less than an hour, the Royal Navy had lost three ships, 62
officers and 1,397 ratings, the worst losses ever suffered in British waters.

This disaster convinces the Royal Navy they must take submarines seriously.

But having a potentially devastating weapons system at your disposal is nothing
unless you know how to use it.

When in battle, the submarine skipper has a choice about the best way to use his
torpedoes against the enemy.

Hitting the side of a surface ship will probably sink it.

Detonating underneath will certainly break its back, make it impossible to tow
home, to repair, and will almost certainly sink it.

If you imagine that my hands together like this, or my arms, are the hull of a
ship, as the torpedo passes underneath it and explodes,

you'll get certainly the shock lifting the ship, and then you get this large
bubble formed of all the explosive gases.

Then the ship falls back into the bubble and breaks in two.

And given that most ships are moving targets, aiming the torpedoes is crucial.

Just like you do when you're hunting and you're trying to maybe shoot a bird,

you have to not only see where the bird's at, but to predict where that bird is
going and then to lead the shot.

And that's exactly what you have to do with a torpedo, because a torpedo is
relatively slow. It's not like a rifle shot.

It's going out there, and you have to predict where that boat's going to be in
the future to accurately place a weapon on that target.

Get the predictions right, and the enemy won't know what's hit them.

Well, you don't know we're there until the explosion rips the hull right off
them underneath.

Despite advances in torpedo propulsion and guidance during the 1920s and 30s,

by the dawn of World War II, torpedoes were by no means perfect.

For the first half of the 20th century, torpedoes are the most complicated
weapons invented.

During the early stages of the Second World War, both the German and American
navies had trouble with their torpedoes.

The one malfunction every submariner feared was the circular running torpedo.

Also, these did not always run hot, straight, and true, which tragically sank
Commander O'Kane's ship, the Tang.

Within 20 seconds of the torpedo being fired, the last one that were firing on
that enemy ship, it circled around and struck the side of our own ship.

The problems were eventually ironed out, and American torpedoes went on to
ravage the Japanese navy in World War II.

With the arrival of the Cold War, combat at sea changed.

Subs would need to attack not only surface ships, but other subs as well.

Gyroscope-guided torpedoes were not going to be accurate enough.

Initially developed by German scientists in World War II,

wire guidance allows the pilot of a fighter or attack helicopter to guide an
airborne missile to its target.

Adapted for use under the sea, next-generation torpedoes would be electronically
guided in real time by a long wire attached from the torpedo to the sub.

Now submarines could hit any moving target above or below the sea.

The wire, which might be several tens of kilometers long, runs from the
electronics in the torpedo into the fire control system of the submarine,

so that it can tell you what it is doing.

So you can tell the torpedo to go left, go right, go and search over here, and
the torpedo can then come back and say,

well, I found something, is this the target? You then have the ability to say,
yeah or nay.

Today's most advanced torpedoes have a wireless option.

Mark 48 ad-cap torpedoes can be fired without a wire and home in on the target
by themselves.

Since the end of World War II, only a handful of torpedoes have been fired in
anger at the enemy.

The most recent was by HMS Conqueror when she attacked the Argentine cruiser
General Belgrano during the Falklands War in 1982.

Jonti Pauas was the navigation officer on board Conqueror on the day of the
attack.

Now the Belgrano was the ex-USS Phoenix, which had actually survived the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

And she was, as you might imagine, large, armored, with a great deal of
watertight subdivision.

And we then fell into a brief discussion. What would we fire against such a
ship?

Conqueror was equipped with both the tried and tested 800-pound World War II
Mark VIII's and lighter weight wire-guided torpedoes.

Given the size and strength of the target, there was only one viable option.

The Mark VIII torpedo has an 800-pound warhead, and firing against an old but
armored ship with a lot of watertight subdivision, you wanted to make big holes
in it.

And so this was the obvious torpedo to fire, which is appropriate really because
there was a World War II ship attacked by World War II torpedoes fired by a Cold
War submarine.

Having shadowed her overnight and got permission to fire, we closed to what was
actually an ideal firing position at a range of probably around 1400 yards,
which is rather less than a mile.

And we fired three of these torpedoes, of which two hit.

For the first 45 years of the 20th century, torpedoes had proved their worth
time and again.

But with the dawn of the Cold War, they would be overshadowed by a new
generation of weapons with unimaginable destructive power.

That weapon is so powerful, it makes them think twice before taking any type of
aggressive action.

After 1945, the world plunged into Cold War.

During these years of icy tension, submarines went through a radical evolution.

Now they are on the front line of nuclear Armageddon.

The Cold War is a 45-year-long confrontation between East and West, and
submarines are the one way that confrontation is played out at sea.

Both sides submarines are playing a long-term cat-and-mouse game with one
another, trailing and following one another's boats in a game that is a
preparation for a war that they hope to prevent.

With the advent of nuclear fusion, torpedoes would be overtaken by larger, more
powerful weapons, nuclear ballistic missiles.

Given their size and the need to launch them vertically into the air, a new
generation of subs would need to be designed and built specifically to carry
them.

The ancestry of these missile-carrying submarines goes back to World War II.

With the war going badly for Germany, Hitler ordered the development of revenge
weapons to reverse Germany's fortunes.

Designed by genius engineer Wernher von Braun, one of these weapons was the
long-range E-2 rocket.

With this new technology, the Nazis planned a daring attack.

Well, one of the problems for the Germans was that they couldn't threaten the
Americans.

And so the idea was that if they had this wonderful weapon, the V-2, by putting
it inside a towed body behind a submarine, they could sneak it across the
Atlantic.

And with perhaps not particularly precise navigational accuracy, but they could
certainly attack an American city.

The war ended before the Nazis could put their plan into action.

Wernher von Braun joined NASA and developed larger rockets that would ultimately
carry men to the moon.

After World War II, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union
cooled fast.

The two former allies competed in an arms race, with each side trying to get the
upper hand.

The Americans took an early lead.

By reverse engineering captured German rocket technology, the U.S. developed the
first practical submarine-based rocket system.

Fired from the deck of a submarine, the Regulus missile had a long range and
packed a nuclear punch.

The development of the Regulus missile was originally envisioned as a nuclear-
tipped missile.

She was a cruise missile that could be launched from submarines.

Basically what would happen is a submarine would have to surface, they would
then, in these two compartments which were watertight,

remove the missile, do some final assembly and then launch the missile.

The Regulus missile was basically what the cruise missile is today.

It was a guided missile. In other words, we fired it, but either we would guide
it to the target electronically,

or if we fired the Regulus missile to a very long range target, there would be
another submarine that had the capability of picking up that missile and guiding
it.

The submarine would have to surface and ready the Regulus missile on the deck.

All this took time and made the sub a sitting duck.

When we surfaced we had seven minutes to fire and then submerge.

But that seven minutes, you're vulnerable to attack.

The line that links Nazi rockets with the Regulus is still with us today.

Tomahawk missiles fired from submarines are now a major part of the U.S.
military arsenal.

We can basically go off somebody's coast and at a moment's notice launch a
series of Tomahawk cruise missiles,

taking out key communication centers, command and control nodes, all those
things to basically pave the way for the rest of our Navy to come in and do what
they need to do.

It didn't take the Soviets long to respond to Regulus.

They put to sea submarines that fired ballistic missiles from inside their
hulls.

They had to surface to fire.

But theoretically the Soviets could park their subs next to American cities and
attack without warning.

These missiles could not be fired from a dive submarine.

You had to surface and jack the thing up and then fire it from the top of the
fin.

But nevertheless they did it.

The new Soviet ballistic missile firing submarines were a serious threat.

And by the late 1950s the Cold War looked set to go into deep freeze.

The U.S. had to respond to the threat.

They needed to find a way to deter the Soviets from launching a devastating
first strike.

Their solution?

To put nuclear missiles to sea on a nuclear-powered platform that could fire
them while submerged.

Undetectable and therefore indestructible.

With these boomers off their coast, the Soviets knew that a retaliatory strike
was guaranteed.

Now a hot war would result in mutually assured destruction.

The fact that that weapon is so powerful is a major deterrent.

It kind of bottles up your enemy.

Makes them think twice before taking any type of aggressive action.

A new, larger family of submarines needed to be built to accommodate nuclear
missiles.

U.S. Navy designers stepped up to the plate and began work on the first
submarine to carry the Polaris nuclear missile.

The USS George Washington.

Designed and built in just three years, the George Washington-Polaris
combination was a miracle of engineering.

It is remarkable that this weapon system was conceived, designed, built, tested
and entered into service in a really remarkably short time.

The breakthrough was how George Washington fired its missiles while submerged.

Using pressurized gas, the missile was ejected vertically from its firing tube
to the surface.

Then the solid fuel propulsion system fired, using the surface of the water as
its launch pad.

The George Washington fired the first Polaris nuclear missile from under the
surface of the ocean in 1960.

Two years later, it proved its worth in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

George Washington-class submarines were deployed in the Caribbean.

Their presence helped persuade the Soviets to back down.

The purpose of the submarine was the same as its purpose is now, to dissuade
attack.

You are the ultimate demonstration of the political will of the country to be
defended.

Some say that nuclear missile-carrying subs are the most successful submarines
in history.

They fulfilled their brief to the letter.

Nuclear war never broke out between the superpowers.

Experts put that down to the deterrent effect of the nuclear sub.

If we can win a war by never having to fire a single shot, then we've done our
job.

And for ballistic missile boats, that is the ultimate measure of success.

That we go to sea and we come back with all our missiles still on board.

Nuclear technology delivers one hell of a punch.

But harnessing nuclear power to propel the submarine would also enhance its
capabilities beyond anything that had gone before.

Fleet exercise after fleet exercise, Nautilus was just dominating those
exercises.

And it really proved the tactical advantage that they provided.

No matter how deadly the sub, it can only be effective if it can get to its
target quickly and quietly.

The first submarines had to be powered by the men inside.

Earliest submersibles are propelled only by human muscle power. And this creates
severe problems.

It's very demanding work indeed. The air becomes increasingly foul and they are
very slow-moving vessels indeed.

A new form of propulsion was needed that could keep the sub fast on the surface,
but also had the legs to make it effective underwater.

It would take a hundred years before someone married the greatest inventions of
the 19th century with the submarine.

His name was John Philip Holland.

John Holland was born in a period of great technical change.

He was surrounded by people who had produced the key elements of a submarine.

The battery had been known about for some time.

The electric motor had been invented some 40 years beforehand by Michael
Faraday.

And the idea of a torpedo, a usable weapon, had been invented by Weissach.

The final thing to be invented really was the internal combustion engine.

And so in John Holland we have the first practical war-fighting submarine.

John Holland's breakthrough was combining all these inventions in one practical
and reliable design.

His sub used the internal combustion engine for power on the surface.

And then switched to battery power to stealthily creep beneath the waves and
attack undetected.

John Holland's submarine is actually the first really modern submarine.

It's remarkably fish-like in appearance. It's got a hydrodynamic hull. It's
streamlined.

But it is actually equipped with a dynamite gun that gives it a weapon that it
can fire at a distance.

A very useful thing indeed for a warship.

The brilliance of Holland's design was recognized by the design of the

energy signature of the Captain's heavy cruiser occupant John Holland.

power to stealthily creep beneath the waves and attack undetected.

John Holland's submarine is actually the first really modern submarine.

It's remarkably fish-like in appearance.

It's got a hydrodynamic hull.

It's streamlined, but it is actually equipped with a dynamite gun that gives it
a weapon

that it can fire at a distance, a very useful thing indeed for a warship.

The brilliance of Holland's design was recognized and commissioned into the U.S.
Navy in 1900

as the USS Holland.

It became the blueprint for all subsequent combustion engine electric subs.

But a submarine with a combustion engine has an Achilles heel that compromises
its greatest

strength, stealth.

The key liability for a diesel electric submarine is that the batteries are only
really useful

for about a day.

After that, they've lost their charge and can no longer power the submarine.

That forces a submarine to surface, giving up its advantages of concealment and
run on

the top of the water so that it can charge its batteries for further submerged
cruising.

It would be another 50 years before the problem was solved and the connection
made to the

next part of the submarine's family tree.

The solution was developed by Nazi scientists in World War II using technology
they plundered

from the Netherlands.

During the Second World War, the German Army conquers the Netherlands.

And at that time, the German Navy gets a very important invention known as the
Schnorkel.

The Schnorkel is designed to allow a submarine to draw air while submerged.

It's essentially a tube that runs up from the top of the submarine into the air
above

with a valve on top to make sure that no water comes in.

That allows the submarine's diesel engines to get some air to run the diesels
and also

refresh the air inside the boat, which allows the submarine to charge its
batteries while

submerged.

Developed in secrecy, the Nazis hoped that by fitting their submarines with
Schnorkels,

they could again threaten Allied shipping and turn the tide of the war.

But in the end, Nazi Germany fell before their Schnorkel-equipped U-boats could
affect the

outcome of World War II.

Even so, the technology they pioneered has been an integral part of diesel-
electric submarine

design ever since.

The development of submarine propulsion has not all been clear sailing.

The history of submarines is littered with dangerous dead ends.

During the Second World War, in an effort to come up with a more powerful
propellant,

the Germans experimented with hydrogen peroxide.

As it turns out, hydrogen peroxide propulsion is a dead end.

It is too volatile a mixture, and putting something that explosive inside a
submarine

hull is very dangerous.

The instability of this dangerous chemical almost certainly destroyed the
Russian submarine

Kursk in a terrible accident in 2000.

A hydrogen peroxide-powered torpedo exploded inside our hull, splitting it open
and killing

118 submariners.

Attempts were made to use steam boilers to propel submarines, but ultimately
they proved

unsuccessful.

The steam engine had been used by several nations.

The problem was that in order to dive, you had to douse the boilers, you had to
remove

this huge source of heat, you had to shut the intakes and outtakes, i.e. the
funnels,

and they took something of the order of half an hour to dive.

Clearly not a successful design.

But steam power was to hold the key to the most dramatic advance in submarine
propulsion

and would usher in a new age.

Not through coal heating a boiler, but through nuclear power.

A nuclear-powered submarine uses the reactor on board to generate a great deal
of heat

to turn water into steam.

That steam is then pressurized and pushed through turbines that provide the
power both

for propulsion and for lighting and air conditioning and heating on board the
submarine.

At the end of the 1940s, the U.S. Navy embarked on a project to shrink a nuclear
reactor and

put it inside the hull of a submarine.

A strong, motivated team leader was needed if the project had any chance of
success.

Hyman Rickover was the man for the job.

Well, Admiral Rickover truly is the father of the nuclear Navy.

This man was singularly driven, had a vision, and aggressively pursued it.

The fact that we were able to put a nuclear power plant in the small, cramped
confines

of a submarine is truly an engineering marvel, and the man made it happen.

Once built, Lola, as she was affectionately known, was commissioned into the
U.S. Navy

as USS Nautilus in 1954.

And it didn't take long for Nautilus and her nuclear power plant to prove their
worth.

Nautilus was a major paradigm shift in submarine design, submarine operations,
submarine tactics.

Fleet exercise after fleet exercise, Nautilus was just dominating those
exercises, and it

really proved the tactical advantage that they provided.

A diesel-electric sub with slow could only stay submerged for a few days and
needed refueling.

Nuke subs like Nautilus were fast, could stay under the waves for months, and
travel for

hundreds of thousands of miles on one tank.

In a warfare scenario, their advantage would be huge.

Nuclear power really provided us an enormous advantage that we never had before.

It basically gave the initiative back to the submarine force.

Even after we conducted our initial attack, we still maintained that advantage
because

we could run away, disengage, and then reengage at a moment of our choosing.

With a nuclear power plant, submarines could become almost invisible.

They could dive deeper and go faster than ever before.

For surface ships hunting them, they'd be much harder to catch.

All the debt charges, all the mines, all the surface ships, all the aircraft in
the world

don't do you any good if you don't know where the submarine is, and all you end
up doing

is killing a bunch of fish.

The nuclear sub is so threatening that anyone trying to hunt it down is going to
pull out

all the stops.

The threat posed by a submarine creates a whole series of problems for any
surface navy

that it's attacking.

Just the mere presence of a submarine forces that fleet to fundamentally change
how it's

going to operate at sea, to adopt all sorts of measures designed to defeat the
submarine,

and to allocate forces to protect itself from those submarines while at sea.

These measures designed to detect and defeat the undersea menace, sonar, radar,
debt charges,

and hunter killer subs, mean that in wartime, submarine fleets are infamous for
being some

of the most dangerous branches of any armed forces.

In World War II, the US Navy lost 52 submarines and over 3,600 men.

In the same war, the German submarine force suffered 75% casualties, losing
30,000 submariners

and over 1,000 U-boats, making it the second most dangerous branch of any armed
forces

in modern warfare, after the Japanese kamikaze units.

Subkilling technology began a hundred years ago, and ranged from the ridiculous
to the

sublime.

In World War I, the Royal Navy turned to animals to help counter the threat.

The hope was that marine mammals and birds could be trained to locate enemy
submarines

and alert surface ships to their presence.

There were a variety of eccentric ideas as to how to deal with this.

For example, ships would tow a small model of a submarine which was stuffed with
fish,

and then a propeller operated knife would cut up the fish and distribute it,
encouraging

seagulls to cluster around a submarine or a periscope.

When training animals to find the enemy proved a dead end, the Royal Navy
decided to change

tack.

Instead of going to the enemy, why not bring the enemy to you?

Decoy ships, called Q-ships, were sent to patrol waters where U-boats were known
to

operate.

Usually converted merchant vessels, the Q-ships bristled with hidden weapons and
were crewed

by Royal Navy sailors.

Someone came up with the idea of disguising merchant vessels who would then
attract the

attention of a U-boat.

And the U-boat would then come in on the surface to take it out by gunfire, at
which point

all the heavily disguised guns, which could be disguised as funnels or sheet
pens, all

sorts of things would fall away.

There's the gun, bang.

Despite the ingenious idea, the Q-ships were not very successful.

In World War I, for 38 Q-ships lost, they only managed to destroy 19 U-boats.

It was obvious that semi-trained animals and decoys were not going to be enough
to combat

the submarine.

Reliable methods of detecting submarines whilst under the water desperately
needed to be found.

The first generation of effective anti-submarine technology came online during
World War I.

Sonar.

There are two types of sonar, active and passive.

Passive sonar, you simply listen.

Everything in the sea makes a noise to some degree and if you've got a sensitive
enough

receiver you can hear that noise and deduce the bearing, but not the range of
the target.

Active is the one that everybody thinks about, the one that makes the ping into
the water.

You simply transmit this pulse and then listen for the echo and the echo will
give you a

range and a bearing of the target.

Sonar made the submarine's environment its enemy.

Any sounds coming from the sub's engine or crew could now be picked up and the
sub's

position calculated.

Detecting the submarine is just the first step.

Once located, it must be destroyed.

And a technology for doing that was developed by the Royal Navy in 1916.

Depth charges are invented during the First World War.

When the Royal Navy creates a weapon that they will consider a sort of droppable
mine

that they can sort of roll off the back end of a ship, typically the size of a
barrel

filled with explosives and with a depth gauge on it so you can set at which
depth they're

going to detonate.

Together, sonar and depth charges were the bane of the submarine in World War I
and World

War II.

An accurate depth charge attack would rip open the submarine's hull or do so
much damage

that it would be forced to the surface and face the guns of a waiting destroyer.

To those on the receiving end of a sustained depth charge attack, it was an
unforgettable

experience.

We were down in the southern part of the Philippines where we sighted a convoy
with two destroyers

and two mercenaries and we fired at them.

As soon as we hit that first one, one of these two destroyers came after us.

We were in 130 feet of water and we were laying on the bottom and you could hear
the screws

of the destroyers running over us.

When the depth charge was in the water, you would hear a loud click, not with
the igniter,

and as soon as the igniter went off, then you heard the boom and then the boat
would

rock and it'd shake you.

It's like going over a bump in the road.

You'd bounce like.

Lights were blowing out, the clock had come off the bulkheads.

I think it was at nine or ten hours we took a total of 98 depth charges.

You perspired a lot.

It was hot.

Of course, I suppose everybody's saying they're pressed.

We finally brought the boat up to periscope depth and we looked around and we
didn't see

anything.

So we hightailed it out of there.

The huge numbers of depth charges required to kill a submarine made them very
inefficient.

Any miscalculation meant that the charges would detonate in the wrong place and
an enemy

sub could survive, slip away and live to fight another day.

And evolution in depth charge technology created a ruthless sub-killer.

Called Hedgehog, this weapon system was a prickly problem for any submarine that
encountered

it.

The Hedgehog consists of about 30 small bomblets.

Each bomblet about 30 pounds.

30 pounds against the hull of a submarine is lethal.

It will punch a hole.

So the aim here is you're replacing one big charge with 30 little ones.

During the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II, Hedgehog increased submarine
kill

rate from 7% to 25%.

No submarine has ever been known to survive a direct hit from a Hedgehog attack.

From 1943 onwards, the combination of sonar and depth charges smashed the Axis
submarine

forces.

Together with the cracking of the top secret enigma codes the Germans used to
communicate

with their subs at sea, the U-boat threat had finally been tamed.

But just when submarines looked down and out, a technological landmark turned
the tables

completely.

With the arrival of nuclear power, submarines could stay submerged longer, go
faster, and

were much harder to detect.

Nuclear propulsion for submarines makes it infinitely harder for warships to try
and

attack them successfully.

They're fast and they are much more difficult to attack.

Never again would the partnership of sonar and depth charges play such a major
role in

combating the menace under the waves.

All the depth charges, all the mines, all the surface ships, all the aircraft in
the

world don't do you any good if you don't know where the submarine is and all you
end up

doing is killing a bunch of fish.

The solution for those hunting the submarine was simple.

Build subs to hunt subs.

Turning on their own kind, the next generation of attack submarines would now be
built with

one brief, to find and destroy other enemy subs.

The idea of sub versus sub was developed soon after World War II.

We realized that submarines were going to become a much greater threat than they
were

during World War II.

Today, the best anti-submarine weapon we still have in our arsenal is another
submarine.

Since the Cold War, dedicated hunter-killer subs called SSNs have covertly
roamed the

oceans sniffing out enemy ballistic missile subs.

It's only with the Cold War that submarines have sophisticated enough technology
to really

become true hunter-killers, allowing them to pursue, track, and if need be, sink
one

another.

Now in the 21st century, there is little that can touch the submarine.

But the threats to Western democracies are still very real, and they are
multiplying

fast.

What is needed post-Cold War is a class of submarines with the flexibility to
handle

any mission that is thrown at them.

Eavesdropping, rapid insertion, anti-submarine warfare, and land attack.

Those subs are the Virginia class.

Now you find submarines getting in close, delivering special forces, shadowing
and gathering

intelligence on surface ships and things like that.

And the Virginia are the first submarines to be completely designed post the
Cold War.

So they reflect this new emphasis.

Today's submarines are truly a sum of their parts.

Drawn together, the branches on its family tree reflect its unique genesis.

Chemical explosives gave birth to torpedoes.

Rocket technology spawned ballistic missile submarines.

Stealthy nuclear-propelled subs evolved into the world's deadliest weapons
platforms, the

USS Virginia class.

Weaponologically, it's top of the tree.