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[Hidden History @HiddenHistoryYT]

On June 25, 1942, an American submarine took a photograph through its periscope that would become one of the most famous images of the entire war: a Japanese destroyer caught at the exact instant it was sinking. But the submarine that took it, the USS Nautilus, already had a remarkable story behind it, and that story starts a few weeks earlier.

Nautilus was one of the US Navy's big, older boats, a long range submarine commanded by a sharp and aggressive officer named William Brockman. At the Battle of Midway in early June 1942, Nautilus had thrown itself right into the middle of the Japanese fleet. Brockman fired at Japanese warships, got spotted, and drew a furious depth charging in return. The Japanese destroyer Arashi was left behind to hunt and kill him while the rest of the fleet steamed on.

Here is the twist that ties it all together. Once Arashi finished dropping depth charges on Nautilus and figured it had done its job, it raced off at high speed to catch back up with the Japanese carriers. An American dive bomber commander named Wade McClusky, lost and low on fuel and desperately searching empty ocean, happened to spot Arashi's long white wake cutting across the sea and decided to follow it like an arrow. That wake led him straight to the Japanese carriers, and minutes later American bombers tore three of them apart in the strike that decided Midway. So the same submarine in our June 25 story had, weeks earlier, unintentionally helped hand the United States the most important naval victory of the Pacific war just by surviving.

Then came June 25. Nautilus, now operating in dangerous waters close to the Japanese home islands southeast of Yokosuka, picked up the destroyer Yamakaze, a modern warship built in the late 1930s. Brockman maneuvered into position, stayed hidden, and fired. The torpedo struck home and the Yamakaze went down quickly, taking essentially her entire crew of more than two hundred men with her.

What makes this sinking legendary is the photograph. As the destroyer was going under, the crew of Nautilus captured the moment through the submarine's periscope. The image is haunting in how clean and calm it looks: a warship caught at the exact instant of its death, photographed by an enemy the dying sailors could not see and never had a chance to fight. That picture later ran in Life magazine and became one of the defining images of submarine warfare, because it captured the whole terrifying nature of it. There was no duel, no exchange of fire, no warning. Just a hidden hunter, a single torpedo, and a ship full of men gone in minutes.

It was a small action by the numbers, one destroyer against one submarine. But coming right on the heels of Midway, it was another sign that the war beneath the waves had become one of the deadliest and most one sided forms of fighting in the entire Pacific, and that Japan's ships were no longer safe even in their own front yard.

[Hidden History @HiddenHistoryYT]

June 8, 1940. Four days after Dunkirk, Britain lost 1,519 sailors in the Arctic Ocean. Almost no one talked about it. The government made sure of that.

Here's the full story, and it gets darker the deeper you go.

HMS Glorious was an aircraft carrier returning from Norway, where she had just pulled off something genuinely miraculous. RAF Hurricane pilots, flying planes never designed to land on a carrier, with no tail hooks and no training, somehow put their aircraft down on her deck anyway. It had never been done before. They saved the planes that would go on to fight in the Battle of Britain.

The ship should have been sailing home as a hero.

Instead, Captain Guy D'Oyly-Hughes had stripped her of her defenses.

D'Oyly-Hughes was a decorated WWI submarine legend, the kind of officer whose reputation had become a shield against criticism. But aboard Glorious, he had spent months feuding with his senior aviator, Commander Heath, who had refused to send his planes on a vague and suicidal attack run against German shore targets. D'Oyly-Hughes considered this insubordination. He had Heath arrested and thrown off the ship.

That decision had a consequence nobody predicted.

With Heath gone, Glorious had no combat air patrol flying. No planes in the sky watching for threats. And because D'Oyly-Hughes was in a hurry to get back to Scotland to personally oversee Heath's court martial, he requested permission to detach from the convoy and race home independently, with only two small destroyers for escort.

The Admiralty said yes.

On June 8, two German battlecruisers, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, spotted a wisp of smoke on the Arctic horizon. They closed at full speed. Glorious had no radar. No aircraft up. No warning at all. By the time her crew understood what was happening, German shells were already tearing through the flight deck.

The battle lasted less than two hours. Glorious went down. Then Ardent. Then Acasta, though not before Acasta's crew, knowing they were dead, turned back toward the German fleet and fired their last torpedoes. One hit Scharnhorst. A final defiant act from men who had no chance.

1,519 men went into the Arctic water.

The sea temperature was just above freezing.

Norwegian vessels found survivors nearly three days later.

40 men were still alive.

The Admiralty convened a Board of Inquiry within days. Then they sealed the findings until 2041.

Not until the 1980s did naval historian Captain Stephen Roskill publish testimony suggesting the entire disaster traced back to one captain's personal vendetta against one officer, and to an institution too proud to question a war hero's judgment. The inquiry findings that could confirm or deny this remain classified for another 15 years.

1,519 people. A captain racing home for a court martial. A government that buried the story under Dunkirk's shadow.

We still don't know everything.

[Turbine Traveller @Turbinetraveler]

Who did this now?

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I love whatever is wrong with him

[That Catholic Guy 🇻🇦 @Catholic_bro]

Facts

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Structure of the Rosary.....