Silent Service by Philip Kaplan

Author:Philip Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2015-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

In the control room of the U-995, now a museum ship near Kiel, Germany. This is the distributor panel for high and low pressure.

A U-boat captain at Saint Nazaire in March 1941;

Another U-boat just back from an Atlantic patrol.

A U.S. Navy ballistic missile submarine near its base at Bangor, Washington.

IT HAPPENS

A student and instructor enter a diving bell at the U.S. Navy Submarine Base, New London, Connecticut, in summer 1943. The bell enables the instructors to make 100-foot ascents with students and teach them the proper way to come up to the surface. Other students are wearing Momsen Lung submarine escape gear.

AT 11:38 IN THE MORNING, SATURDAY, 12 August 2000, the first of two enormous explosions ripped through the forward hull of the Russian Oscar II class nuclear submarine Kursk, K-141, sending her to the bottom of the Barents Sea. Nearly two hours later, Lieutenant-Captain Dmitry Kolesnikov lay huddled with twenty-two other members of the Kursk crew who had survived the explosions. In the frigid darkness of the broken five-year-old boat, which lay listing 356 feet down on the seabed, the injured officer scribbled a note which began: “I am writing blind. It is 13:15. All personnel from sections six, seven, and eight have moved to section nine. There are twenty-three people here. We have made the decision as a result of the accident. None of us can escape to the surface … Hello to everyone. It seems there is no chance.”

Vice-Admiral Mikhail Motsak, Chief of Staff of the Russian Navy: “The note is of a very private nature and will be passed on to his relatives, but it also gave us a lot of operational information.”

Twenty-one-year-old Gleb Lyachin, a Russian Naval Academy cadet, was about to join the crew of the Kursk just before the submarine left on what was supposed to be a three-day Barents Sea exercise. Then his orders were changed and he was sent off to another exercise. By sheer chance his life had been saved, but tragedy still struck his family that August morning when the Kursk went down. It was under the command of Gleb’s father.

In Vidyayevo, the naval community in Northern Russia where the Kursk was based, the tearful wives of her crewmen gathered on Saturday, 19 August, knowing that the last shred of hope for their husbands’ lives was now gone, replaced by the realization that they would never see their men alive again. In a televised message that night, Vice-Admiral Motsak had said that any survivors of the Kursk disaster had probably drowned as the submarine was flooded. Anatoli Safonov, the father of a Kursk crewman, and himself a former naval captain said, “What has my son died for? I don’t understand.” Some of the villagers did understand how little chance the men of Kursk had had. “It was clear from the beginning of last week that they had all died,” said one young sailor, and another submariner told reporters, “We wanted to hang on. Everyone wanted there to be survivors, but you have to be realistic.

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