Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 34- The Accidental Confederate Suicide Submarine

Episode Date: January 14, 2019

On this episode Joe and Nick talk about the CSS Hunley, the first submarine to ever sink an enemy ship in combat. Via suicide bombing. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Buy some merch: https://teespring.com/stores/lions-led-by-donkeys-store Sources: https://web.archive.org/web/20121016165452/http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_32/hunley.html https://books.google.com/books?id=txP7dIf1fEkC&pg=PA10#v=onepage&q&f=false https://web.archive.org/web/20030806182729/http://www.hunley.org/index.asp

Today, we got our first look inside the crew's compartment, which is now becoming visible, part of a lengthy preservation project. Researchers are closer to understanding how it sank. Here's News 2's Laura Smith with more. The Hunley is an extreme mystery because it's a unique vessel. There was no other boat or submarine like it. This mystery has gone on for over a century. Hello. Welcome to another episode of Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.

Nick is back. Yes. Let's get weird. Nick is back from the land of the rising sun. How is Japan? Dude. The area we were in, I won't say what city or what camp we were in, but if Japan had an alabama you were off like that was it you were like off the main island yeah yeah mill and nowhere type stuff pretty much yeah but uh

honestly really good food yeah some some of the stuff i'm not gonna say everything but fried oysters shouldn't be a thing we have oysters here. They're not good here either. Exactly. So I was like, maybe they're different. No, still the same. Terrible consistency, gooey inside. You know, I like regular oysters. Yeah, they're really good. I love it.

Even though they have the consistency of snot, they're pretty good. And I don't think we've ever done this before where I wrote an entire script and you're coming in totally cold. Like you don't even know the topic. No, I don't think we've ever done this before where I wrote an entire script and you're coming in totally cold. Like you don't even know the topic. No, I don't. And I did this because I think it's probably one of the weirder subjects we've ever done. And it's also our first time ever going to the Civil War. And I know I kind of don't like talking about the Civil War because it's one of those.

The Civil War to me is a lot like World war two where you have so many armchair generals. And if you get somebody who's like jacket color wrong in a description, they're going to light up your fucking email and call you a charlatan and a fraud. I know people like that. I do too. Um, and you know,

I'm, I don't have a particular war that I study. I, I'm a history major. I study them all, but, um, I don't feel that way about anything. if i play like a video game or or read or look at a painting like his

pants are the wrong color i used to be that way i'm not gonna fill my fucking diaper over it man i used to be that way well you came from the reenactor world i i can imagine that as like their brand is being uniform naz while also being actual Nazis. Stitch Nazis is what they were called. Stitch Nazis. Count every thread. Oh, God, that's annoying. God.

And even the good World War Two movies that I liked were terrible in their eyes. I remember you lighten me up because I said, I like saving private Ryan for that exact reason. I like saving private Ryan, but there, if you look at it as a reenactor, it's kind of terrible. Oh God. Cause I like saving private Ryan.

Is it because it reminds you of the time you almost drowned while serving my chemical romance? I didn't. It was some little fucking 40 year old. We're going to have to post that video again on Twitter. that our podcast is actually popular so more people can see it. What was this song called? God, you should know this. I really should.

You're doing a horrible job serving the black parade. It was done in the Pacific. Oh, I know. Okay. So we have to start off this episode by I'm going to ask you, what do you know about submarines? Submarines? Yeah. Probably nothing.

I know nothing about submarines. Red October. Yeah. Yeah. Neither one of us would ever claim to be maritime experts or historians. Everything I know, everything I know about this episode, I learned through research. I literally went into this only knowing a little bit. I'm blind yeah um so if you were to guess when when submarines entered military service what would you think see i know

i've seen some shit on the civil war yeah i know i've seen some of that yeah um so you're you're right and that that's the first but that's also not the first war they actually entered in the american history the first one ever was uh during the revolutionary what the fuck and we'll talk about that and there's there's some semantic arguments here about what's a submarine and what isn't um the vast so all the way up until uh the first couple they were semi-submersible like so they'd float on the surface of the water like a turd in the toilet and and the vast majority of them would be under under the water but you could like they weren't all the way underwater what is a submarine so a submarine is i mean for a lack of of an in-depth explanation it is a boat that goes completely underwater

um now obviously they have like conning towers and um you know periscopes and stuff that can look over the water um which is how the vast majority of these early ones, when they worked, is how they found their way, and they most of the time just got lost and caught in currents. Yeah, it was a total clusterfuck. I mean, they didn't have a solid grasp of the concept of electricity yet, so this is kind of out of their wheelhouse, but some of them kind of succeeded in being

submarines and some of them only succeeded in being suicide bombers but we'll talk we'll get there um so uh to talk about the the first submarine uh in military service in north america the first true submarine in military service in north america and the first time that a submarine sank an enemy warship we have to travel all the way back to the 1800s in the american civil war and talk about a guy named horace lawson hunley um should we know that hunley was not an engineer nor was he a ship captain or anything to do with that sector of the world so he did submarine stuff right he did uh he i guess this is an era where weapons developers didn't really have to have an education in the school that

they were working in. Because he started – so he was born in Tennessee in 1823 and moved to New Orleans where he would spend the most of the rest of his life. And he was elected to state legislator, meaning he would actually have a pretty large part in the secession movement in the South leading to the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861. part in the secession movement in the south leading to the outbreak of the americans of the war in 1861 so uh not only do we have to thank him for the first functioning submarine in american military service we can thank him for a lot of the war that he would serve in so go fuck yourself on

oh sweet yeah uh if you notice none of the things that i listed about honley's life none of those things was engineer sailor or anything to say build on a fucking boat so he just kind of like he had money uh so that that that worked uh but he didn't have enough money he ended up finding other rich board people who uh wanted to serve the new confederacy but wouldn't do such thing as like going and actually fighting right just like you know you have money that's for the poors to do yeah uh so uh before we get into that we have to talk a little bit about hunley uh and who he worked for and uh that is the navy of the confederate states of america

um not a lot of people talk about the csa's navy and that's for a good reason. There's a few little fun facts that poke up from the Civil War's Navy theater, and most of them are the fact that the Confederates and the Union both invented ironclads, which are really weird boats that didn't really see a lot of action or use outside of the Civil War. But we'll get to that point because the CSA is in a huge shadow. Everybody talks about the land war, but not the naval war. And the Union also had a really effective blockade on the Confederate States of America. So it kind of made the CSA's Navy largely pointless. Most of their missions were based around trying to break that blockade

and failing pretty spectacularly every single time that's awesome i don't know nothing yeah there was a sea shit yeah there was also another point where um the csa was trying because they lacked shipbuilding they uh facilities which ended up capturing which we'll talk about um they lacked uh a military naval aristocracy because like when the two nations broke apart um unlike west point where like all those officers could take their expertise and fuck off south and like i'm a confederate now you could do that in the navy but it's not like they could take their boats with them yeah like so you have they had an abundance of naval knowledge but like no fucking boats so it's

it's worthless i have this knowledge where's my boat yeah see that plank right there yeah that's it yeah you know for the war for war fighting at the time you could fight a pretty effective war with uh substandard soldiers let's say if you had a pretty decent officer to command them around uh not so much in the navy uh you needed a boat that was worth a shit you need so for that you need all the logistics that went with that and then you needed traded semen which they didn't have either uh at one point of the war uh they actually ended up um outsourcing that to england because england was fucking around possibly accepting the confederacy yeah and there was a boat that was commissioned of Liverpool under the CSA's flag

that was commanded and staffed by nothing but Englishmen. Really? Yeah. Yeah. And the last CSA naval ship to surrender and give its colors over was actually over in England as well. Really? Yeah.

That's crazy. It's a really weird sector in the Civil War. But so when the secession happened and the Confederacy was established and they established their Navy, they were at a pretty big disadvantage. They had a fleet of about 30 ships of about only half were seaworthy. So they only could use about 15. The rest are deadlined. The rest are completely pointless. And the Union had over 100.

So the Union wasn't exactly a naval power. but in comparison, they could fucking curb stomp the CSA. And they did. I mean, that's how they established their blockades. The Union's main naval approach was the blockade, and it worked. Their overwhelming superiority of the CSA Navy should have sealed a very quick and violent death for their fleet of 14 ships, but it didn't. And a lot of that had more to do with the Union Army in the beginning of the war being totally incompetent.

One of those fuck-ups effectively built the entire CSA Navy. So on April 20th, 1861, the Union fled Gosport Naval Yard in Virginia, and the Confederate forces just kind of walked right into it. They retreated so quickly they forgot to take any supplies with them and left all of it to the Confederates. This included guns, powder, entire ships, and a frigate named the USS Merrimack

and that was what the hull of the Merrimack is what the CSA used to build their first ironclad out of. But more importantly, they left entire dry docks and shipyards totally intact to build just churn out ships for the confederates so you see that as a fuck up power move big dick energy from the north yeah see it's so easy to beat them we're gonna have to give them all this stuff yeah that would probably make more sense than what they did

uh so the iron so a little uh briefing on the Ironclads, even though we're now talking about them. I imagine we can't talk about the Civil War's naval warfare without talking a little bit about the Ironclads. They were the first armored steam-powered ships ever built. They were pretty revolutionary despite some pretty serious flaws, and they

could eat the wooden boats that the vast majority of the navies were made out of just by running into them. And that's actually how the Merrimack was designed as an ironclad, was just to run into shit. They just built a fucking steam-powered naval battering ram. I kind of want to know how fast they go. Not super fast, but faster than the wind.

It's true. So, just rams into shit. They had guns, too, but when they talked about like blockade running they legitimately meant running the blockade that's fucking awesome uh yeah um it turns out however that innovation in the 1800s so like um the csa never came close to matching the union navy but what they did do was they just kept innovating um and this isn't like a naval genius type shit it's like we can't win them and we can't beat them in open war so we're going to just throw enough shit to the wall and see what sticks one of those things was the quest for some

sweet sweet submarines i'm i'm imagining a submarine right now around that time it just kind of looked like a giant turd looked like a duke i feel like it'd be a whiskey barrel and they just stick some dude in it and be like so that was the first one uh yes during the revolutionary war i mean it hypothetically wasn't a whiskey barrel but it was designed as a barrel like it was even sweet it was even built like a barrel of like one planks being bent into like the iron uh um strips there yeah um but i mean it's kind of weird that america of all places was and who was never a naval power during this time and especially not during the revolutionary war where our navy was like three dudes and some pirates um uh we were kind of the hotbed for early submarine warfare. I mean, hotbed is kind of a strong word.

But, I mean, we were doing it. And it was to mix the results at best. And that one in the Revolutionary War is called the Turtle. And it was built around 1775. And it was built by a guy named David Bushnell. It was meant to sneak up alongside Royal Navy vessels and then plant explosives explosives to them then slowly escape the turtle yeah sweet because i mean run away isn't an accurate description this thing barely moved it was it was moved by hand crank oh which is how every other submarine would move that we're going

to talk about today too but this is one guy um it was some sergeant it was not the guy who built the goddamn thing that'd be fucking great i'll prove that it works yeah um i mean the turtle was made mostly out of wood and brass and since nobody had an idea what the hell they were doing uh they put it together like a barrel like you like you said um it was held in place by iron hoops it was pulled by a hand crank and that thing was controlled so the guy who was running the goddamn barrel submarine had to find out where he was going without any kind of naval compass or maps or anything because it's too goddamn small um while also propelling the boat with a hand crank and all while not getting lost he was also the guy that attached the

explosives this dude's getting cornholed yeah it doesn't end well um they quickly learned that operating a sunken barrel with some bike pedals and trying to attach a bomb to ships all while fighting ocean currents is really fucking hard every mission the turtle went on was a failure and everybody just kind of quit and walked away though unlike all the other boats we're gonna talk about nobody died trying to get this thing to work really yeah uh it was kind of like oh well we're gonna chuck it out in the water a couple times oh it didn't work let's move on because you know where you have to actually fight to survive. Yeah.

Which brings us back to our boy, Hunley. Now, the CSA may have been forward thinking when it came to naval warfare, but even they thought Hunley was nuts and nobody would give him any money. Like, he wasn't a commissioned naval officer or anything like that. He didn't actually, like, work for any of the, you know, machinations of the military for the CSA. He was just some guy who really wanted to build a submarine. Yeah, he just had the money, like you said. And he just wanted to build something. That's fucking great. He was gonna buy

his own navy. I feel like you probably could have. He tried. So, Hunley watched as the Union launched their first submarine of the war, the USS Alligator. And he decided if the CSA wasn't gonna give him any money, he'd just build the goddamn thing himself. Why the Alligator? Well, it was the first one that – it was the first of the boats that come out during the war.

And it was actually commissioned into the Union Navy. Unlike all the boats that Hunley built, this one actually had a government blessing. And the alligator was a total failure. Did it look like an alligator? No, it looked like a giant duke. It's just for the name. Yeah. It's the alligator.

It floats just below the surface. It wasn't a semi-submersible. It could actually go all the way underwater. But to figure out how to make that work, it had a giant 20-foot-long snorkel that had to bring air down into it. And the same snorkel, you could climb up the snorkel to attach, because it's not like they had fucking propelled torpedoes, right?

Yeah. They still all operated under the theory they were going to sneak up to naval boats and then attach explosives to them. And you were going to do this through a giant fucking sea ladder. And, but the alligator just didn't work.

After its tests, everybody said it was a complete fucking failure. And then it sank before they could actually fix any of them. And they just left it. But that still motivated Hundley. I don't know if he knew about it. Yeah. And I don't know if he knew about it failing because I don't think the union

be like, Oh, do you know that revolutionary idea we had? Total fuck up. We're just going to move on. Yeah, this thing sucks. Also, the union didn't really need it for the war. They probably just got it just because, like, oh, that name sounds fucking sweet, the alligator? Fuck yeah. And they're like,

what was this? I think they're operating under the same idea, like, going back to our Iran-Iraq series. They're like like this is really cool we we need this yeah like even though it's completely pointless for the war effort the supply guy flipping through the catalog like we don't need this but fucking sounds cool and i mean at the time this um submarines were only good for sneaking up on stationary ships they couldn't chase a ship they didn't go fast enough and the only place ships are going to be stationary

is like holding a blockade which is what they were doing not the confederates there's a submarine on our six evasive maneuvers yeah just gently float in a different direction because this thing is literally moving at one manpower on a on a fucking crank one manpower it's not even going in horsepower um that stopped um so that that stopped the union from coming up with submarines but didn't stop hunley hunley um teamed up with a couple of the rich dudes one named james mcclintock you know named baxter watson and just going off his name i'm going to assume baxter was just somebody's dog they brought with them he knows about naval stuff. Like Baxter from Anchorman. See, he's wearing a sea hat.

Look at him. He's cute. He's got a tiny little captain's hat. That's adorable. Look at him go. But he's a confederate dog, so he owns dog slaves. So together with their forces combined, they bankrolled the construction of the Pioneer, the first ever submarine in the Confederacy. And now if replicas are anything to go off of,

the Pioneer looked like a giant traffic cone with a propeller. Yeah. These names, swear to God. I guess the Pioneer makes sense. They're pioneering the idea of submarine warfare and their horrible racist secession state. Yeah. No, not really anything's known about its testing,

other than it must have done a little better than the alligator uh because humley and his friends were going to tow it somewhere else for further testing uh but the union armies advanced to new orleans scared the shit out of them so they just sank the pioneer and ran for it what the fuck and they're afraid it's gonna fall in it like this glorious piece of technology is just so good i can't fall in the union hands the union's's going to look at it and go, okay, just keep going. Well, the Union immediately found the goddamn thing. They're like, oh, look, a submarine. Somebody told them they were floating this fucking traffic cone out there.

Look, it failed. So the Union raised it up from the seabed and examined it for, you know, they might use it to build a new one. Instead, they decided it's a giant piece of shit and sold it for scrap. So maybe they weren't onto a whole lot. lot made a whole five dollars off it yeah it's probably made of shitty fucking wood and like you can buy one rifle with this worth it yeah hunley was not deterred uh even though he probably should have been uh the boys moved their workshop to alabama and quickly got to work building another submarine, this one called the American Diver. Using what they learned from the pioneer, mostly that powering these goddamn things through a hand crank sucks ass and they should look at new ideas.

So they came up with the idea of using electrical motors and steam engines to power the thing. That's where all their money went pretty much. And not only did they nearly go bankrupt, neither one of those things worked in a submarine um so they said all the hand crank anyway all we could do is uh buy the engine uh can't afford the actual wood now yeah it's just some asshole with a steam engine uh so they came up with a giant hand crank that has been turned by four different people in unison uh with a fifth piloting the damn thing that's gonna be a musty submarine and it's tiny like submarines are big now for crew but like imagine how small people were back then now imagine this thing's all built out of fucking like bolted together wood and steel and it's being cranked like it by four smelly dudes yeah yeah before like regular bathing was commonplace

oh god and in southern men yeah it's got some spice to it it smells like sweet tea and grits grits are fucking disgusting I like grits but only if it's like shrimp and grits

I only like it when it's cheese grits with only if there's like it's like shrimp and grits i can only like it when it's cheese grits with shrimp in it yeah it basically masks the grits just imagine that except that's what all their taints looked like after just hours of hours of hand cranking this gross fucking submarine in alabama i mean in the like disgusting southern humidity in this heated metal tube just churning away in their wool pantaloons. Ugh. Mmm. Mm-mm-mm.

Speaking, we got dinner later. Yeah, we do. It's not going to be cheesy balls and pantaloons either. We don't know that yet. That's true. We haven't been in the kitchen. But even with four dudes cranking this thing, it barely would go faster than the current would take them. So sometimes they'd just dudes cranking this thing uh it barely would go um faster than the current would take them so sometimes they'd just be cranking their ass off they'd still be moving

in the wrong direction it's usually just pointless yeah they they invented a a buoy that's what they invented they they invented a buoy with people inside the flip-flop I lost when I was a child in the ocean, just floating away. Sure. That's what I see it as. Congratulations on your commission of the Confederate Navy. Yes. You invented the CSS flip-flop. That probably should have stopped them from going forward again.

Also, it should have stopped testing. Or in this case, it should have stopped them from attempting to attack a Union blockade. Didn't do any of those things. Persistent. I like it. They strapped it up full of bombs, and they decided to try to run the blockade in the Mobile Bay in Alabama.

The crew, which included all of the ship's inventors and some random sailors they invented and joining them did not even get a chance to attack anything so i don't know if you want to consider a total failure in comparison to how things fail later on um the diver was hit by waves and bad weather as soon as it set out to sea which caused it to sink all the crew magic escape though isn't it supposed to sink uh yeah but like only a little bit the sink only a little bit only a little bit of sinking uh i feel like they'd still be able to see it like hey look at that thing under the water you would think that um and this would be

actually the last time anybody would uh any of humley's inventions would fail and nobody would die uh really yeah uh all in all and all humbly killed a lot of people who trust this asshole a lot of people a lot of people trust a rich guy in a he's making it rain on it in a gross plantation state it turns out hey uh i mean whatever floats your submarine i guess maybe they just didn't tell i mean it's not like you could like post on facebook like lol let's humbly guys submarine sucks dicks like all you gotta do is get rid yeah all you gotta do is get rid of the old crew and get new ones no one's gonna tell them relatable um this would also be the last time watson and mcclintock would join hunley in his efforts after two failed attempts and nearly dying they decided

to get the fuck out of the submarine game you know what they say submarine game don't play they do i don't think so i don't think there's a submarine game unless you're fucking hunley pretty sure i heard it in school yeah the submarine hustle do the hustle dude uh keep going uh not humbly though he he wouldn't give up he his dream of a slavery powered submarine would come true what is that a thing uh no no i feel like that could have been in the back it probably would have been if it succeeded like if uh the csa would have pumped out a couple submarines it definitely would have been powered by slaves eventually yeah i mean they eventually they end up putting slaves in their army so it didn't really Like if the CSA would have pumped out a couple submarines, it definitely would have been powered by slaves eventually.

Yeah. I mean, eventually they end up putting slaves in their army. So it didn't really give them enough time. Just when he tried getting out of the submarine game, pulled him back in. And that's now Hunley on his own bankrolled a third submarine. Because the costs were to be kept low. Because remember, he doesn't have the two other people to pour their money into it uh it was not an original design and by that mean the hollow is gonna be built to have an old steam boiler someone had thrown out

what that's right he's gonna build a privately funded submarine for a racist rebel army made out of garbage i can only imagine that shit like he's going down like on his horse he's like holy fuck that drum right there. I could cram five people in that motherfucker. That's a submarine right there. If I squint hard enough, I could kill people with that. Squint hard enough and tilt

my head. That's a submarine. That's right. The boat was designed to be a crew of eight, seven to turn the hand cranked propeller and one to steer and direct. We're just at four or seven now. Yeah. He's,

he's shoving more. All right. The people, the problem with the other submarines is there wasn't enough people shoved inside of it. Keep the same space. You'll have more people in it. And yeah,

he learned a lot from his other submarine failures. Like each end was equipped with ballast tanks that could be flooded by valves and pump dry by hand pumps. So like it could submerge. and then hypothetically it could surface for a vigorous hand pumping i feel like if it worked if it worked this would happen um extra ballast was to be used by iron weights bolted to the underside of the hull so in the event the submarine needed additional buoyancy to rise in the case of emergency, the iron weights could be removed by unscrewing the heads of the bolt from inside the vessel.

So like it was an attempt, the first attempt at rapid surfacing. Like now you can see the videos of like submarines leaping out of the ocean, almost like the emergency surfacing. Dude, I love seeing that shit when they break through the ice. This one was just a whole bunch of sweaty guys in a tube

rapidly trying to unscrew weights. Again, theoretically, it might work. Honestly, I feel like he had that whole what you think it is and then reality. Yeah, yeah. He had the idea of what a submarine looks like today, but instead he had a shitty old steam boiler. He just had a fucking nuclear sub in his head.

He's like, fuck yeah. I'm almost there as he looks at this like steam boiler that's thrown out of him and seven smelly dudes he's like close I picked this up on a curb outside of my neighbor's plantation the boat was equipped with two watertight hatches again hypothetical watertight type hatches

which he did not quite figure out yet but he had the idea of them one was forward and one was in the back. So regardless of, again, hypothetically, regardless of where you were in the boat, you could escape. Every crewman's gonna be issued some gum

just in case it starts sinking. Some gum and some caulking. Go ahead and stick it on any part that starts leaking. Here, have some duct tape that hasn't been vented yet. Wait. So it's leaking? Try shoving some sleeves into it.

So there'd be a short conning tower that was the whole navigation system was, and by navigation system, I mean some dude's eyes was going to be ran from it. I really kind of hope it's just some dude on the inside he goes i got this he like gets his finger swipes like the fucking inside of the hole and like licks it and then puts it in the air we're going the right course we're on the right course yeah i mean that's kind of what it was i mean they didn't really have anything resembling technology in there like dials didn't exist yet computers certainly didn't exist i hope they drew some shit on there

like and a fucking compass wouldn't work because they're in a metal tube that's why i hope they drew that on like a compass like oh still going north we're good the whole navigation system was just some asshole sitting in a chair looking out of a tiny window with some chalk and you'd be like oh change that now i i've never jumped in mobile bay in al Alabama, but I can imagine if I'm underwater in a steam boiler full of my friends. You're going to miss your cousins at that point. I assume they brought their cousin wives with them. And you're looking out of a shitty leaking glass hole to try to figure out where you're going. Visibility is bad.

I imagine visibility is not very good. to figure out where you're going. Visibility's bad. I imagine visibility's not very good. If you're picking up what we're putting down here is that this submarine sucks ass and we're about to jump in it. Are you swallowing what we're nutting? Oh, God.

I hope you are. No, don't do that. We might as well be drinking. Eggnog and Old Crow is not the best way to drink Old's really not it's kind of really spicy in the throat zesty it's your mom said oh all right um so uh the the idea of this uh conning tower also made uh entrance and egress out of the boat rapidly pretty much impossible. Like the portholes that people used to get out were really fucking small even for shitty old submarines.

And this will become a little problematic later. That's awesome. Everything about this sucks. I made this death trap. You want to go out floating with me? When you go tubing floating with me? When you go tubing with your boys? Yeah. This is like if your friend made his own tube

but like then lined it with nitroglycerin and razor blades and was like, you want to go hit the lake? Nah, Steve, I'm good. Alright. You're gonna miss out. So in 1863, the boat was ready for demonstration. And by demonstration,

I mean a live operation. They're just going to cut right to the chase. That's fucking awesome. The CSA was actually pretty excited about this version of Hunley's mad submarine dream and sent a Confederate Admiral named Frank Buchanan to go watch. And the reason why they sent

Confederate Admiral Frank Buchanan is because he was the only Admiral in the entire CSA's Navy. So Buchanan, being the only admiral in the Navy, was only promoted to that rank after the war began. So the Navy might actually look like a real Navy by having an admiral in it. We got one of these. Yeah. Yeah. The demonstration for the boat was to go out and attack a Union

coal boat and it was like just a flat barge full of coal. It wasn't like a warship. The coal boat was unprotected and unarmed and the submarine did not sink or damage it hardly anyway. But the test was considered a success. I feel like it probably just like

bounced off it. Kind of. Success. We didn't die. I assume that success in submarine warfare in the 1800s was just measured if you sank and died or not so good job Hunley you didn't die so Hunley was

really excited he finally succeeded at something and he needed to test it more, develop it more because there's still, I mean, it was a fucking garbage boiler. They needed some work. That's still the best part of this whole thing. So he was going to ship it by rail to Charleston to work on it more.

But the Confederate government actually liked it so much they fucking stole it from him. That's fucking awesome. They decided the boat was so cool they're going to take it from the guy who built the goddamn thing with his own money which may just be the most confederate thing it's fucking awesome i mean who would have thought the guy's fighting a war so they could keep black people as property would be pull such a dick move you know um they just like gosh i've

seen it coming yeah they just they just requisitioned the whole thing and didn't pay hunley but they did keep hunley on board for like continuing to work it. Like, so we're going to take that and you're going to keep working on it. Cool. It's almost like if we just stole you, it made you work for free because that's kind of what we do. I bet you he's like using his fingers right now. He's like, okay, I need a flow chart. Okay, yeah, sure.

It's good. I'm good with that. Who would have thought the Confederacy was really cool with unpaid labor? No, this is probably where people are going to pounce on me. All right. Because I... One, we're talking about the Civil War. Someone's going to hate me for it.

Two, we're talking about the nuances of the concept of submarines during the Civil War. And that's because Hunley's garbage sub was not technically the first submarine, the CSA had, um, there was one called the CSS David, and it was actually commissioned into the Confederate Navy. Unlike Hunley's boat,

uh, the day, the David even attempted a daring attack on a union ironclad called the USS new iron sides. Ballsy. Yeah. Real creative name there, guys. Uh, alsosy. Yeah. Real creative name there guys.

Also David. Yeah. I, maybe David versus Goliath cause it's a small thing. Small little boat attacking iron, you know, ironclads. Well,

when you say that it's an all right name. Yeah. But still like the, if the union caught their ironclad, the new iron sides, I guess USS big fucking boat was taken. The David attack was a hilarious failure because it did nothing to the iron sides and the explosion from her torpedo actually put the

so this boat was steam powered so you had to have like um uh the sub i mean was the part so you actually had like a fire lit inside of it to keep it going um the explosion that that set off to try to sink the iron inside did not sink the air inside and then just put out her boiler fires and just left it bobbing in the water as it got shot at. They eventually managed to get the boilers relit and they ran away.

The David survived to try attacking several other Union ships, all of them failing, and then she disappeared around sometime in 1864. So why doesn't the david count as a submarine because it was semi-submersible like we talked about it just kind of bobbed in the water i mean it it has such a low profile and who the fuck is looking for a submarine in 1860s i mean nobody they didn't exist so like it worked to the extent that nobody would be looking for this to be

a threat uh but i mean it didn't work and the only thing it did succeed in is warning the union sailors that submarines are a thing now we need to look out for them hey we gotta look out for this type of shit yeah they're they're generally called torpedo boats now uh not because they had torpedoes in the traditional sense there was these things called spur torpedoes which is what the what hunley said would end up using but it was an explosive attached to a stick that you would like spear into the side of the boat hole and they called those torpedoes that's awesome so you effectively run explosives into somebody but i mean it worked in theory and it did end up working later on.

Anyway, back to Hanley's garbage boat. So, because the Confederates are a bunch of fucking idiots, they actually gave the boat to the Army and not the Navy. What? Who knows? Maybe because the Army actually worked, kind of,

and the Navy was just dysfunctional shit. Yeah, the Navy was just there. Yeah. They had one admiral, for fuck's sake. Yeah. Even though they stole the boat from him, they did allow Hanley to keep working on it and testing it because he was the only person in the fucking Confederacy who knew how to work on the

goddamn thing. So they didn't really have much of a choice. The submarine was so popular within the CSA, they had their pick of volunteers for the first official crew. Navy Lieutenant John Payne was the first official submarine captain in American history, and he was joined by seven volunteers from the CSA ship Palmetto State. So none of these dudes know how to work a fucking submarine.

I doubt they volunteered. I mean, Navy life, regardless of what country you served in at the time, was pretty goddamn miserable. So I imagine anything off of this one shithole was better. I mean, and I'm not being the case, but they probably thought it was going to be better. Um,

so 10 days later, Lieutenant Payne also became the first submarine captain in American history to kill his crew on accident. Really? So, um, on October 15th, 1863,

we were out in their first training mission preparing to do a test dive. So, this is the first actual dive Hunley's sub was going to do. To do all this requires probably quite a bit of preparation. Mostly, it includes closing the hatches. Yeah.

So, while they were floating around with their hatches open, that was when Lieutenant Payne reportedly accidentally kicked the lever that controlled the sub's diving plane. so while they were floating around with their hatches open that was a lieutenant pain reportedly accidentally kicked the lever that controlled the subs diving plane so like they it was these two things on the side that just flooded causing ballast to form then the sub would sink right he'd hit that on accident so the sub dove underwater with all the taches still open and quickly filled with water i figured you'd close that once you go

on your voyage. I would assume so, but at the same time there's no other way to navigate the goddamn thing. If he went under into the boat to see where the hell he was going, he obviously couldn't see shit. And again, it was an accident. He did not mean to hit the little

pedal that triggered everything. Is that hearsay? I would imagine it's most likely true because I doubt he hit it on purpose with the hatches open. Maybe he was just like, all right, let's do this. Excitement.

Hatches are closed, right? Yeah, I don't know. So Payne and two other crewmen were able to escape, but five died. One of the guys who survived, a Lieutenant Charles Hasker, had his leg trapped in one of the hatches because remember how I said the hatches because remember

how i said the hatches were terribly designed like they didn't lock so as water flooded them the hatches slammed shut from the pressure fuck and uh because lieutenant pain was like hanging out of the hatches navigating he was really easy just like whoop i'm out of here haskin or hasker was not so lucky so he was able to push the hatch open, which is pretty surprising as the submarines sinking and all the pressure from the water is pressing down. Yeah. But his leg got caught in it. And he said the hatch was so heavy that quote,

it pressed my calf and to the calf of his leg. It ripped it in half as he tried to tear free and swim to the surface, but he did escape. Jesus. Now, if you were thinking that the CSA would finally give up on their submarine dreams, you'd be wrong. They found and raised the sub back

to the surface, and then they went back into Charleston and found another crew. I think the other crew just looked into the sub and saw the dead guys. It's like Futurama when they show up like what happened to your old crew like nothing or they just show up like hey uh welcome to the uh CSS

death tub help us throw these corpses out please yeah they're really stinking up the place this wasn't the old crew like the new crew shows up to tour the sub like smells kind of corpsey in here here, doesn't it, Jebediah? And there's, like, scratches on the wall from the fingernails or something. And it didn't really seem to slow anybody down.

Did they get paid extra to do the submarine? I don't know. Nobody ever said. Maybe, I mean, remember, this is technically in command of the army. So maybe, like, hey, if I volunteer to go float around this death tub for a little bit, maybe i mean remember this is the is in technically in command of the army so maybe like hey if i volunteer to go float around this death tub for a little bit i won't have to go be in a unit in a confederate army getting shot to shit good enough for me honestly like their chances on the line better at this point um they didn't know that regardless how they found more people to crew

this thing they did pretty much immediately like like within a couple weeks, crew was full again. And so as soon as the crew was trained again, they went back out on the sea. This time, however, the CSA was desperate to get a new captain as Lieutenant Payne wanted nothing to do with that fucking boat again. Fucking smart on him. Yeah, like, so Mr. Payne, we see you survived. You want to captain this motherfucker again like

no i'm i'm gonna go back out the line and fucking die now thank you very much um so he wanted nothing to do with it and there was no one else so even though lieutenant pain didn't exactly have a ton of training he was the only other guy that knew kind of what a submarine was five whole minutes of voyage on that yeah it's five more minutes than everybody else had uh so they decided to say fuck it let hunley captain it himself you think hunley was like oh fuck no like how sure of you are your invention like i just watched five people drown in this goddamn thing but you know what i can probably make this work better uh this is despite the fact that hunley was never trained in any way, shape, or form and was certainly not a naval officer.

He had never commanded people before. Like, it was just him and his rich buddies who made a sub that one day. Yeah, his trash. Yeah. But that was good enough for the CSA and they put him in charge of a crew of another eight dudes who, on the 18th of October 1863, they went out for

some more routine driving training. He was going to teach people how to pilot it now Hunley wasn't actually being given permanent command his job was like to go with a crew and be like this is how you drive it this is how you dive alright I'm out is he still doing it for

free yeah yeah for sure what the fuck like he didn't get a commission at any but like this isn't lieutenant Hunley now he's just like some asshole and i assume like some white three-piece plantation suit hanging out in a sub i imagine he's just like there's maybe trash to some people but it's my trash it's a garbage can not a garbage cannot he like he was only supposed to be there for a couple hours to teach another officer how to use it and he's never gonna get in that fucking thing again uh however this time so the the boat got set

out and again they're floating around at first to show them how to pilot it and with the hatches open like last time but please tell me they left it open uh but now there is uh bad weather uh there's waves there's other ships going by they're kicking up wake um so water began to pour into the hall once again through the open hatches what a bunch of assholes uh this time however the water would come in so fast and the boat would sink so quickly that nobody would escape alive. Hunley was killed by his own invention. It's hard not to laugh, honestly. Uh, so if you were thinking that this time,

however, uh, the second goddamn time the sub sank, and this time killed its father, the CSA would finally call it quits on this goddamn thing. Again, you'd be wrong. We found Hunley's body. Still commanding it he's he's gonna help us yeah it's like now it's uh skeleton hunley's boat uh it was raised once again they

they cleaned the corpses out of it a second time they got the new crew to clean up the old crew and they found eight more dudes to get into the suicide sub. However, this time there wouldn't be any wasting time with things like training or diving drills. The sub was outfitted with some pretty innovative... So, the sub was designed to have torpedoes. Like, not spar torpedoes or spur torpedoes. Like a torpedo. But since, you know, things like a combustion engine or things like that waterproof electronics none of those things existed um the torpedo would actually be towed behind the boat by a rope

and then uh when the boat like lined up its target it was kind of going to be tokyo drifted into the right direction and like the rope would swing the torpedo at the boat that it was trying to kill and it'd explode it like the whole thing it was invented by wiley coyote holy shit that's awesome uh they built a torpedo flail uh so everybody so this was humley's plan like this is how the humley designed the sub and now that hum Hunley was dead, everybody looked at the plan like, that is really fucking stupid. We're not doing that. I can only imagine the pitch like,

this dude's on the chalkboard. Check this out. Making like explosion noises with his mouth. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. And then he's going to... And now the boats would be like, oh no! And then guess what?

Ladies at the bar later on. And then you're just going to be swimming in pussy later. Yeah. And like all the Confederacy's like generals. Throws the chalk in the air. Drops the chalk in the ground for effect. All the Confederacy generals are like, mother of God, it's genius. How can we power it with slaves?

He starts doing the fucking DX like, suck it. I can imagine Chad doing this pitch. Yeah uh horace hunley chad as fuck uh chad submarine innovation drills uh so once he was dead everybody knew this wasn't gonna work and uh they had no salesman anymore so they outfitted it with the spur torpedo i said before it's a it's an explosive on a stick uh significantly less innovative that sounds exciting now the idea was that they would just ram into the side of the boat the torpedo on a stick would stick and it would like burn down the fuse give the boat enough time to escape they didn't totally understand how explosions worked at the time like shock waves things like

that but they knew they had to get away from the goddamn thing so it was going to give them a couple of minutes like because remember hypothetically this whole thing's supposed to happen without the ship noticing like that that they're being attacked um the stick was about 20 feet long uh so not super long um that's long for a stick i haven't seen a 20 foot long stick in a while i don't know about you but i don't want to be 20 feet away from an explosion big enough to sink a boat it's true um so with their plan in place uh the ship was given to a guy named lieutenant george dixon who was not a naval officer, but an army officer. And Dixon was something of a minor Confederate hero already in the army. He enlisted as soon as the war broke before working his way up as an enlisted man all

the way to a lieutenant. And he fought at the Battle of Shiloh, where he was shot in the leg. Now, there was something of an urban legend about him uh that everybody discounted as being fake and till much later and that was it would have killed that shot in the leg would have killed him but it had a gold coin that he carried with him from his house um it absorbed the full shot i mean you know how bad 50 millimeter or 50 caliber musket balls do to a leg? Probably would have killed him without the gold coin. But the coin left him, even though the coin saved his life, it left him with a pretty vicious limp, which precluded him from further frontline service.

So they stuffed him in the suicide set. But he carried the coin with him for the rest of his life. So the story goes, because it was considered like a gift from God. It was so lucky. It saved his life, everything like that. So on the night of February 17th, 1864,

the sub now christened the CSS Hunley, because terrible name for a sub, because the Confederates apparently hated the guy. Like what was the, I think there was a joke. Because the Confederates apparently hated the guy. Like, what was that? I think there was a joke. I forget the stand-up comedian. Like, if I was Jesus and I was to come back to Earth, I'd be really pissed off seeing, like,

pictures of myself being crucified everywhere. Yeah. Like, imagine the Hunley, like, staring down from the afterlife. Like, you named the thing that killed me after me? You fucking assholes um well at least most churches i went to growing up yeah jesus had a six-pack yeah jesus is ripped was it always sunny in philadelphia we said you want to get ripped like jesus so uh it snuck out into charleston harbor to look for a target the water was calm and the moon lit

up everything pretty perfectly uh things could not have been more ideal for the hunley to succeed nice um that was when the sub lined up to attack the uss hussitonic it was a 1240 ton sloop of war that was standing watch as the hunley got close sailors aboard the union ship noticed something weird and began shooting it. Because remember, they know submarines exist now because the David ruined the surprise. And there's no depth charges. They can't lower the cannons.

So they're just popping shots at it with rifles and muskets on board. But they couldn't stop it. So before they could stop the sub or disable it or whatever, the Hunley stabbed it with its bomb stick. So remember I told you about that standoff distance before in the fuse? Yeah. Didn't work.

Everything exploded immediately. You'll have a few minutes. Boom. As soon as the timer was set, was set it just exploded i just can't catch a break on contact um you should probably if you want to succeed you probably shouldn't attach his name yeah he's just a badge of failure yeah um so this tore a massive hole in the hall of the hussitonic and it caused the sink the the sloop to sink rapidly and killed five of its crew

the Hunley for all of its faults had become the first submarine ever to sink an enemy ship in combat did it survive? no it did not Dixon and the crew of the Hunley however did not have time to celebrate their victory because they were all dead I imagine once they were thrusting

it beers on me guys. Yeah. God wills it. Now the reason the Hunley sank and why her crew died or were the Hunley ended up were a total mystery until very, very recently. The Hunley just kind of vanished and nobody

ever found it. Everyone assumed the sub was blown to pieces uh kind of like the houstonic itself because why wouldn't it i mean it set off a giant bomb 20 feet away from the fucking ship underwater uh the csa didn't even attempt to recover it that time they're like yeah whatever sunk a boat thanks dixon win yeah that was until the ship was found in 1995 about 300 feet away from the boat that is sank and the humley was finally raised to the surface in the year 2000 instead of finding it in tons of pieces or signs of explosive damage like what everybody expected

the thing to be blown to pieces it was all in one piece and almost totally unharmed um when salvaged experts opened up the sub to find the crew still at their stations like It was all in one piece and almost totally unharmed. When salvaged, experts opened up the sub to find the crew still at their stations like nothing happened. Granted, they all had rotted away. Yeah. But like there's no flash or anything like that. It was skeletons still in place, still wearing clothes, everything. Dixon's gold coin in his pocket.

They did find Dixon's gold coin in his pocket, which showed that it was not an urban legend that ended up being true that's actually kind of cool yeah because the the coin had a giant divot in it in the shape of a musket ball you think he probably just shot it at home yeah someone's gonna ask me to see the coin yeah um so there was no evidence of anybody in there being like blown apart or nobody tried to make a break for it. That's like the weirdest part is everybody's found in their seat or around the crank. Nobody was trying to escape out the hatches. No bodies were found outside the sub. Everybody's like, whoa, what the fuck?

This is like a Mary Celeste type situation here. That was when Duke University got involved. type situation here um that was when duke university got involved um after studying the remains of the crew they found that the the stick bomb that they jammed the sand the hussitonic was so powerful that it sent a shock wave back into the hunley and immediately ruptured the crew's lungs brain and blood vessels killing them all instantly so like i said they understood how exposed like they knew how to make things explode yeah but nobody understood like damages that shock waves did to people yeah like uh it's one of the main killers of artillery isn't that artillery hits you directly is that it lands nearby and liquefies

your insides yeah um and i i was near some pretty large mortars when they went off those things fucking hurt um and i can imagine it never exactly says how big this torpedo was, but I mean, big enough to bring down a full size warship. It's going to liquefy. Oh yeah. Um, so in the end,

the Confederate submarine program killed significantly more Confederate soldiers than ever did Yankees. I feel like they just still chalked it off as a victory. Like submarine one Yank zero. Yeah what about all the other dead Confederates? Martyrs for the cause. What'd you say?

Say it again. I fucking dare you. So yeah that is the tale of the CSS Hunley. The first and only Confederate suicide bomber. I'm really glad I went into this blind. I'm so glad I came back from Japan to this. I'm so glad I came back from Japan to learn about Confederate suicide bombers.

This was great. Oh, man. Yeah, it's good to... I mean, we've had a lot of good guests while you were gone, but it's weird sitting in this room by myself. Yeah, I have to catch up on all the episodes because you couldn't listen to them ever since I couldn't do shit in Japan I was so fucking mad

oh you missed out so everybody who has donated to the show thank you very much there's a lot of bonus content coming your way if you want to donate to the show our show will always be free but for about a buck you can get access to all of our bonus episodes of which free but for about a buck you can get access to all of our

bonus episodes of which we are on course to put out at least one a month for the foreseeable future if not more if we find time um also the lions led by donkey store is not only open it is has tons of products in it now if you want to support the show by buying a stupid shirt like imu jima shirt that it's fucking awesome sold like fucking 50 of them overnight the other day uh please buy one yeah um if you like getting weird that's us that's our brand yeah historically weird uh so you can follow the show at lines underscore by you can follow me at jcast99 you can follow nick at nickcastm1 thank god i almost forgot it yeah it's like you ever use the goddamn thing that not that that's a flaw

twitter's a horrible website it's just that i for the whole month i was gone can't remember shit yeah um yeah that's all i got i was gonna say something else i forgot but thanks for tuning in we'll see you guys next time later hi this is Nate Bethea, and I'm the producer of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. This show is brought to you by Audible. And as it just so happens, Audible is offering our listeners a free audiobook with a 30-day trial membership. Just go to audibletrial.com forward slash donkeys and browse the selection of audio programs.

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