Trip to Under Sea Warfare Musium

This last weekend I took a trip up North to the Seattle region and was able to stop at the Kitsap Naval Underwater Museum. This museum is dedicated to undersea activities and mostly related to submarines. The main display area has quite a lot of artifacts and outside there are two research subs, one is the Trieste 1, which was the first sub to dive to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, off the Marianas. This sub had large tanks filled with gas so it would float but would not be crushed by the pressure of the deep dive. The ship descended seven miles to the bottom of the Challenger Deep on 23 January 1960 with Lt. Don Walsh, USN, and Jacques Piccard.

I was surprised at the size the craft and of the compartment where the crew sat. Most of the ship was just the gas tanks, the crew were in a small sphere at the bottom and it looked very uncomfortable to say the least.

Once inside, there were many items showing old diving hard hats and diving gear, but also some more modern deep sea suits. The newer ones had hard shells and they looked more like space suits than diving suits. These hard shelled suits allowed divers to work in very deep water, but still move around by walking on the sea floor, I can only imagine what the Navy used them for.

 Another major group of items were WWII era torpedoes and equipment. A number of old design torpedoes were on display, some cut away so you could see the insides and how they were built, others were not. A description of the evolution of torpedoes and mines with different types, starting with Civil War era mines and explosive lances to modern torpedoes were explained.

 

 

One of the most interesting and sad displays was the WWII Japanese kamikaze sub. These modified torpedoes have a pilot who was to guide the torpedo to the target ship. The idea was that the pilot could make sure the torpedo would not be diverted or miss the target and guaranteeing a hit. These human guided bombs never worked and only two ships were sunk out of 80 that were launched. It showed how desperate the Japanese became at the end of the war. The torpedo is cut away so you can see how small the compartment was, most of the craft was fuel tanks and engine, the pilot was just stuck in and had limited control, they actually were not very accurate and hard to control. The pilot was locked inside so he had no means of getting out once he entered.