Like a passenger ship or actually anything non-military that sends a distress signal?
Or even one person in a lost sailboat?
Have subs ever helped in a passenger ship rescue? Do they just tell someone else and let them do something?
Or do they just ignore anything because it would reveal where they are?
Supposedly, U-156 at least tried to pick up survivors.
These days, if a ship or small boat sends out a distress signal, a sub probably isn’t going to hear it. Those types of radio signals don’t penetrate very far into the water, and modern subs are rarely near the surface.
Poking around on google, I did find that a Russian sub came to the aid of a small vessel in 2014. Wikipedia doesn’t have much on the incident, just this: “On 8 June 2014, Voronezh rescued the crew of the Barents-1100 small boat in the White Sea, which ran out of fuel while trying to bypass the area with unfavorable weather conditions.” (From here: Russian submarine Voronezh (K-119) - Wikipedia). There are some pictures floating around on the net, but I couldn’t find any further details in my admittedly brief search.
I also found a story from the Vietnam War era. When South Vietnam fell, submarines would apparently would cruise around looking for boats of refugees/survivors and would give them food and water if needed. One first-hand account said that a submarine appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the night, aimed a floodlight at their boat and gave it a good look, then disappeared back into the night.
And the USS Cod (now a museum ship in Cleveland) rescued the crew of another submarine, the Dutch vessel O-19
https://usscod.org/info.html
The International Convention for Safety of Life at Sea aka SOLAS has this to say in general.
However what it also says is that the convention does not apply to warships. It is somewhat mute on submarines, but we might reasonably assume they count as warships.
That’s SOLAS. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which does apply to warships, also includes a duty to render assistance in Article 98. UNCLOS was never signed by the United States, but it’s widely assumed to be a codification of customary law, and that customary law would be binding on the US as well.
Not exactly what the OP asked as it caused the collision but the US nuclear submarine USS Greeneville did attempt a rescue after it struck a Japanese fishing boat
not really an answer, just a thought to offer perspective …
open seas are soooooooooo vast, the chance that a submarine is where another vessel is in distress at the same time, are pretty much zero.
Also, submarines are to 99+% military and do a lot of secret stuff … and helping others out def. throws a wrench into that.
Having said that, I’d be interested in hearing about the priorization of “sea-etiquette” (for lack of better terms) - vs. “we got a job to do” …if they receive a distress signal. Prob. a call back to HQ or so I would guess?
The captain of a ship is of sufficiently high rank that they are expected to be able to use their own judgement for matters like that.
From the ship it had just sunk without warning. Not exactly rendering aid to a ship in distress.
Well, technically, the ship was quite in distress.
It’s beside the point that the rescuer was also responsible for the distress.
Given the extreme lack of spare capacity aboard a military submarine, I’m guessing the only thing it could do to help a stricken ship would be to provided some limited first aid and healthcare for the critically-wounded passengers, use its communications gear to help hail other ships for help and use satellite comms (in case the ailing ship itself can’t,) maybe give some food and water, but otherwise not much.
If you’re going to commend the firefighter for being the first one to respond to the scene of an inferno that killed 1,658 people, it’s rather important to the point to note that the firefighter in question was also the arsonist who started the fire.
Reading that article, they did quite a bit more than that; see my post in another thread here.