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

Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering, Ltd (VSEL) was a shipbuilding company based at Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria in northwest England that built warships, civilian ships, submarines and armaments. The company was historically the Naval Construct ...

Barrow-in-Furness Barrow-in-Furness is a port town in Cumbria, England. Historic counties of England, Historically in Lancashire, it was incorporated as a municipal borough in 1867 and merged with Dalton-in-Furness Urban District in 1974 to form the Borough of B ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

for the

Royal Navy The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by English and Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years' War against ...

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

Yellow Sea The Yellow 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. It is one of four seas named after common colour ter ...

region, based at the Royal Navy's Weihai naval base in mainland China. 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 is a type of depot ship that supplies and supports submarines. Development Submarines are small compared to most oceangoing vessels, and generally do not have the ability to carry large amounts of food, fuel, torpedoes, and ...

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 ,

heavy cruiser The 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 caliber, whose design parameters were dictated by the Washington Naval T ...

and

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

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 Sir Robert Davis, head of Siebe Gorman and Co. Ltd., inspired by the earlier Fleuss system, and adopted by the Royal Na ...

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 canvas

drogue A drogue (also known as a 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 from becoming side-on to the waves. A boat that has deploye ...

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, Traf ...

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 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 parliament. T ...

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, 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