Sunday, November 5, 2023
A British sailor throwing a lance bomb from a Royal Navy Drifter. The lance bomb is exactly what it looks like. roughly 15 kilos of explosives on the end of a stick, to be thrown directly at a submarine that has surfaced alongside a ship. Apparently one thrown from the small auxiliary ship the HMS Gleaner of the Sea (a repurposed fishing boat) hit the German submarine UB-13 and sank it in April 1916.
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30 years later the Royal Navy changed the wooden handle for a steel tube, stuck a couple dozen on spigots full of propellant and called it the hedgehog.
ReplyDeleteAl_in_Ottawa
The advantage over the depth charge is that the depth charge always exploded and degraded the sonar contact for many minutes. The hedgehog only exploded on direct contact and the sub rarely survived.
ReplyDeleteA detail I did not know.
DeleteBtw, what became of the once world-leading British yearning for innovation?
Same thing that happened to it in the US?
unlikely
ReplyDeleteDE USS Buckley v. U66 in May 1944 could have used one of these. At one point the Buckley tried to ram the sub and ended up across top of the sub’s foredeck. The crews engaged in hand-to-hand combat with small arms, empty brass shell casings, coffee mugs, and fists. Some German sailors boarded the Buckley. After the ships broke free a Buckley crewmember dropped a hand grenade down the sub’s conning tower as it passed by. The sub, possibly out of control, later rammed the Buckley before sinking. The Buckley returned to port to repair a bent bow, twisted stern, hole in an engine room, and sheared off starboard propeller.
ReplyDeleteWow.
Delete