HMS ''Poseidon'' (P99) was a designed and built by

Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Limited (VSEL) was a shipbuilding company based at Barrow-in-Furness, England that built warships, civilian ships, submarines and armaments. The company was historically the Naval Construction Works of Vicke ...

Barrow-in-Furness Barrow-in-Furness is a port town and civil parish (as just "Barrow") in the Westmorland and Furness district of Cumbria, England. Historic counties of England, Historically in the county of Lancashire, it was incorporated as a municipal borou ...

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for the

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, launched on 22 August 1929. She spent most of her short career assigned to the

Yellow Sea The Yellow Sea, also known as the North Sea, is a marginal sea of the Western Pacific Ocean located between mainland China and the Korean Peninsula, and can be considered the northwestern part of the East China Sea. Names It is one of four ...

region, based at the Royal Navy's Weihai naval base in mainland

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

. In 1931, the submarine sank after a collision with the steamship ''Yuta'' north of Weihai. The submarine was later secretly salvaged by the Chinese in 1972.

Service history

At about 12:12 on 9 June 1931, while exercising on the surface with the

submarine tender A submarine tender, in British English a submarine depot ship, is a type of depot ship that supplies and supports submarines. Development Submarines are small compared to most oceangoing vessels, and generally cannot carry large amounts of foo ...

north of the vessels' base at Weihai, and despite excellent visibility, ''Poseidon'' collided with the Chinese merchant vessel SS ''Yuta''. Thirty-one of the submarine's crew managed to scramble into the water before the submarine sank to the seabed below within a few minutes. The

aircraft carrier An aircraft carrier is a warship that serves as a seagoing airbase, equipped with a full-length flight deck and hangar facilities for supporting, arming, deploying and recovering carrier-based aircraft, shipborne aircraft. Typically it is the ...

heavy cruiser A heavy cruiser was a type of cruiser, a naval warship designed for long range and high speed, armed generally with naval guns of roughly 203 mm (8 inches) in calibre, whose design parameters were dictated by the Washington Naval Treat ...

and

sister A sister is a woman or a girl who shares parents or a parent with another individual; a female sibling. The male counterpart is a brother. Although the term typically refers to a familial relationship, it is sometimes used endearingly to ref ...

submarine led the rescue operations. ''Poseidon'' was equipped with

Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus The Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus (also referred to as DSEA), was an early type of oxygen rebreather invented in 1910 by Robert Davis (inventor), Sir Robert Davis, head of Siebe Gorman, Siebe Gorman and Co. Ltd., inspired by the earlier Fleuss ...

which had come into service two years earlier. This was a closed circuit underwater breathing system which provided the wearer with a supply of pure oxygen and a

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drogue A drogue or storm drogue is a device trailed behind a boat on a long line attached to the stern. A drogue is used to slow the boat down in a storm and to prevent the hull (watercraft), hull from becoming side-on to the water waves, waves. A boa ...

to slow the rate of ascent. Despite the submarine not being equipped with specialised escape compartments or flooding valves, eight of the crew managed to leave the forward end of the boat, although two failed to reach the surface and one died later. Twenty-one crew died in total. A consequence of the successful escape of part of the crew was to change

Admiralty Admiralty most often refers to: *Admiralty, Hong Kong * Admiralty (United Kingdom), military department in command of the Royal Navy from 1707 to 1964 *The rank of admiral *Admiralty law Admiralty can also refer to: Buildings * Admiralty, Tra ...

policy from advising crews to wait for the arrival of assistance to attempting to escape from the submarine as soon as possible. This policy was announced in the

House of Commons The House of Commons is the name for the elected lower house of the Bicameralism, bicameral parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada. In both of these countries, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the nominally upper house of ...

in March 1934.

Salvage

The secret salvaging of the submarine in 1972 by China's then newly formed underwater recovery units was described in 2002 in an article in the popular Chinese magazine ''Modern Ships'' (). This was not known about in the West until the researcher and journalist Steven Schwankert discovered that article with a Google web search and later read it in a Hong Kong library. In the former British naval cemetery on the island of

Liugong LiuGong, officially Guangxi LiuGong Machinery Co., Ltd., is a Chinese multinational construction machinery manufacturing company headquartered in Liuzhou, China. It is the world's 10th-largest construction equipment manufacturer by market share ...

, gravestones, bearing clearly legible names, dates and epitaphs of the lost sailors were found in haphazard stacks by historians looking into the sinking of HMS ''Poseidon'' and its salvage by the Chinese. The British government asked the Chinese government for an explanation. Results of this research are told in Schwankert's book ''Poseidon: China's Secret Salvage of Britain's Lost Submarine'' and the documentary film '' The Poseidon Project''.

References

External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Poseidon (P99) Parthian-class submarines Ships built in Barrow-in-Furness 1929 ships British submarine accidents Maritime incidents in 1931 Shipwrecks in the Yellow Sea Submarines sunk in collisions

Service history

Salvage

See also

References

External links