There were some survivors. miraculously it seems given one of the most spectacular explosions ever caught on film, of the British battleship HMS Barham. According to Wiki, 862 crew lost out of about 1100.
November 1914: HMS Bulwark suffered internal explosion from unknown causes while at anchor, only 14 survived out of 750, with two of those later dying of their injuries in a hospital.
July 1917: HMS Vanguard suffers an internal explosion and 2 out of 800 men survive.
Yeah- I mentioned the Bulwark at #31 above. The Vanguard however, was probably the one I was trying to remember.
Oops! Yes you did.
I was trying to find an HMS battleship loss around 1900, but couldn’t find any. I was glancing through a bunch of ship histories online, and I ended up including Bulwark when I didn’t need to.
The first RN ships lost to a German submarine (WW1) were the “Aboukir”, the “Hogue”, and the “Cressy”-were they lost with no survivors?
Quoth wikipedia:
And to make matters worse one of the survivors went down with all three ships!
No worries. I usually have no problem with those things being repeated as very few people have time to read a long thread.
The Pacific war was brutal on a scale that the European war wasn’t, at least outside the Eastern Front. It was more common for both sides to try to kill the survivors than to try to rescue them, and I’m not talking about the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. From Samuel Eliot Morison’s History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. Vol. 5, describing aftermath of the night action of Friday November 13, 1942 off of Guadalcanal:
Another example, this time describing strafing lifeboats, from A Glorious Way to Die: The Kamikaze Mission of the Battleship Yamato
HMS Thetis was a RN submarine, which sank (accident) before WWII.
I don’t know if anybody escaped-but there was a national outcry-regarding the bungled rescue attempts.
I just looked up the Thetis after your post.
The interesting thing (unless you were a crew member) was that she was lost twice with all hands. Firstly as HMS Thetis she went down. She was raised, changed name to Thunderbolt and was sunk again with all hands.
Just to clarify my previous post, in the Thetis sinking there were actually four survivors.
This is not clear in the first part of the Wiki article which states:
“This makes Thetis one of the few military vessels that have been lost twice with her crew in their service history.”