Depth Charging

Anybody know the real accounts.?
You know how, in a movie, when a sub is getting DC, and all the actors are quiet and Looking Up to the top of the sub.....Is that what people naturally tended to do...wait and look up, like they can see the charges floating down their way.?
Thank You

 

The looking up is most likely for dramatic purposes...but a natural reaction nontheless...they are certainly quiet! Id be looking at the sensor operators...they are the ones who can tell whats going on.

 

Yeah...no doubt I would be doing the same thing (looking up). I almost find myself doing it during the movie
Kind of like the ..."no atheists in foxholes"...phenomenon.
No doubt there is all kinds of soul searching comments during a DC Attack.....Mom...God...Help me...Please...etc etc etc.
I would much rather be caught in a heavy infantry shelling than to go through a DC assault in a sub.
Just wondering if that really is what guys do...especially as the are waiting for the DC to reach their altitude of ignition.
Thanks

 

The commander would be changing his settings continually...depth, course, speed...The DCs cant change their settings once dropped. I wouldnt like to be caught in either heavy bombardment or depth charging! : )
People are different, so their thoughts may vary...but a "learned" outward reaction would be taken....Look to the old man as to whether to worry or not...The Cammander had to be strong.
He carried a pistol in case anyone DIDNT hold firm.

 

"Silent running" was standard practice aboard any submarine that was about to attack or be attacked, so the crew being silent is no surprise.

Given that water serves as a good sound transmission medium, most, if not all of the crew will know when a destroyer is overhead. Not to mention,, that most first-hand accounts of depth charge attacks almost always mention hearing the "click" of the detonator activating right before the "Wham!" of the explosion.


The same would likely occur in the interior of any US warship that was undergoing air attack. Since most of the crew could not "see" the action, they listened for the sound of the guns. 5-inchers meant that the enemy was approaching, on hearing the 40mms, the enemy was getting close. When the 20mms opened up, the fecal matter was about to hit the rotating and oscillating device.

 

Holy Cow.!
Did not know you could hear the click of a DC before it goes off.
That makes it even more frightening.

I suppose the German sub guys had something in common with the B-17 crews. They survived those massive attacks...and then had to crawl into their subs/planes and "do it" all over again.
I can see how a guy might snap all of a sudden...and say No...I am not going again.

Being on the loosing end of battle is a brutal thing. It really adds to who you are...or are not as the case may be.

 

I wonder what the hedgehogs sounded like. There wouldn't be as big of splash when they entered the water, probably no detonations for ones that missed either.

 

From War Damage Report 58,
Submarine Report: Depth Charge, Bomb, Mine, Torpedo and Gunfire Damage


"The metallic "click", "thud", or "ping" may be interpreted as the mechanical response of the hull structure to the arrival of the pressure pulse from an explosion and should have been distinguishable from the subsequent audible frequencies generated by the explosion, i.e., the "bang" or "boom", only for an explosion relatively distant from the hull. The increment of time between the arrival of the pressure wave and the audible frequencies will not be perceptible at very close ranges, the two arriving practically simultaneously. That this is so is evidenced by the fact that submarine personnel considered themselves safe if the "click" preceding the "boom" was distinguishable, since they found by experience that the depth charge would then detonate at a range which would not cause much, if any, damage. Contrary to the general impression, the pistols of Japanese depth charges contained no mechanism which could cause a "detonator click". "

http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/rep/WDR/WDR58/WDR58-15.html

 

Interesting...makes sense.
Same reason that Crap Music is so much louder/boomier for people in other cars and buildings.
Bass Frequencies have a VERY long wave...so we hear much more of them than do the "people" in the cars that blast the crap music.
best

 

Aw, c'mon Denny, if you want to put "music" in quotation marks go ahead. That's debatable. The crap/music the so called "kids these days" listen to is generally not to my taste either. (I'd call it music, personally, just . . . music that bears little if any interest to me. But then I'd call lots of things music most casual listeners would quite literally believe to be noise, and not in an insulting way, so don't take that to mean much.) However, the folks in the cars that you put in quotation marks are assuredly people. No question there. You can debate the music. You can debate their taste. You can even debate whether or not their parents taught them anything at all. But none of us can debate that they're people, just because they happen to listen to music we don't like, wear clothes we don't like, speak in ways we don't like, etc. Ill bred people? Maybe. Assanine people? Possibly. Rather foolish people that will regret it when the're sixty and can't hear jack? Probably.

Further, the bass frequencies their subs are producing don't have wavelengths all that long. The average car sub goes down to perhaps 40 Hz, which has a wavelength of around thirty feet. Long, but not obscene. What you hear outside will be decidedly bass heavy since the body of the car will reflect the majority of the mids and highs back into the car. (Since the lows more closely approximate the fundamental wavelengths of the car body itself they will excite the body and thus the exterior air much more than the higher frequencies. This has the dual function of attenuating them somewhat inside the car and making them seem louder outside relative to the rest of the audio spectrum. I can stick a meter on one for you if you wish, but there's essentially no way that the sound system would be louder outside the car than in, save installing mids and tweeters on the outside of the carbody. (And even then, the sound level inside the car might well be higher at some distances and frequencies, since the interior sound will suffer less volumetric attenuation.)

 

Have you experienced both? Being under heavy artillery shelling is pretty scary.

 

I have not experienced either.
Confined spaces are not my thing.
I would rather be shelled than be IN a submarine.....

 

Oh, subs aren't so bad to tour. They're mostly not even that confining, well, relatively speaking. If you're used to crawling around in tight spaces, anyway. Of course tour groups tend to be a lot smaller than submarine crews . . .

I hear a good shelling can make a man downright agoraphobic. (Some of the people whom I know that have been shelled still sleep under the bed every now and then to get away from the big scary open spaces.) Don't know anyone who's been depth charged. I'm inclined to think I'd go the same way as you, Denny, for the simple reason that it seems almost like you have better odds of living through a shelling than a peacetime tour of duty on a sub, let alone a DC attack. But given my druthers I'd just as soon not be shot at at all.

 

I believe my grandfather was depth charged a couple of times while serving in HMS Tiptoe, thrice by surface vessels and once by aircraft. I only remember him talking of it in passing once as they were obviously harrowing times he did not want to revisit but anecdotally i do remember him saying it was "very tense" and that your eyes did "drift toward the ceiling" as the engine noise overheard grew. That was many years ago though so maybe take that recollection with a pinch of salt.

I have since been led to believe that one of these incidents was in just 40ft of water. His boat's draught was 16ft so i cant imagine there was much room to spare when the attacking craft ran straight over the top of their grounded boat.

The RN Submarine museum sent me a summary of his service. Extremely dry and understated it notes two of the incidents as:

The excellent uboat.net has further details which i assume are from Tiptoe's log but if anyone more familiar with the site could confirm that or not it would be great as i cant actually see any attribution on their site. The detail it gives make me shudder when i ponder the phrases fairly close and very close..

The irony of the last quote is that Tiptoe was the first all welded T-Class and therefore was a deeper diver than most T-classes. Thought id add that in to your discussion as i'm about to start an information request thread regarding Tiptoe and i had that info to hand.

In the R.N tradition of massive understatement i would add that i think my tolerance toward shellfire or DC'ing would be "rather low".

 

Thanks for adding to the discussion.
Best of with you hunt.....

 

I have two T-class subs. I'll put Tiptoe on my list as a third. That's a heck of a story Jimmytwohand. Lovely boats and brave men who went to sea in them.


HMS Maidstone with Trident and Turbulent

 

No problem Denny, it was a little off topic but thought it might be worth it for (the the very thin anecdotal) evidence. As a slight postscript i had a chat with my mother about the incidents and she remembered my grandfather telling her that while at 40ft HMS Tiptoe was actually grounded on rocks and was stuck fast. The depth charge which was "way too close for comfort" actually shook them loose and allowed them to evade.

Thanks for that picture of your models SymphonicPoet its really nice to see these vessels and the brave chaps who took them out commemorated. I think that would give you one from each of the 3 groups of T-classes. I was also interested to note the depot ship you have there as she seems to have been operating out of Freemantle at the same time as Tiptoe and i'm guessing they would have rubbed shoulders. Its something ill definitely look into! Thanks. The added benefit if you do choose Tiptoe is she seems to have been dented by just about everything its possible to run into in an aquatic environment so any knocks or faults from construction can be considered added realism.

Considering Churchill had to fight to get the name through the admiralty (i think), its a little ironic that the boat associated with ballerinas spent a lot of its career slamming into things. I don't want to sidetrack Denny's thread too much so i might drop you a PM about the modelling as it might be nice to make one myself.

Thanks again,
J

 

Go ahead and post it here IF you want to.
I think my question(s) have been answered.
Usually the longer a topic runs ...the more the post expands into other arenas.
You have my blessing

 

I know I've seen modeling threads on the forum. They can be quite informative and interesting to some so PLS consider posting them here although I think there may be a modeling subforum which would be the ideal place to put them.

 

Thanks, both. Ill have a poke around when it hits the top of the to-do list.