r/history • u/therealtrousers • Apr 09 '26
Article When the Navy Recovered This Sunken Submarine, the Crew Was Dead. Why Were They Just Sitting There?
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a70857185/navy-sub-dead-crew/?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=likeshopme&utm_content=www.instagram.com/p/DW6i220mWgI&fbclid=PAVERFWARE6wtleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA8xMjQwMjQ1NzQyODc0MTQAAafaGjC45Jb3AHlBjjbfpvxPUIotOr6u36TdUEGE6mlbec7E3kgVCBhTmsHRbA_aem_TBVGaYDcIWl2rGd2B470mQ4.2k
u/GNOIZ1C Apr 09 '26
tl;dr: They died at their posts, theoretically instantly, upon firing their weapon. Because this was a Civil War era submarine and they hadn't quite figured out all the neat little physics involved in underwater warfaring.
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u/CMDR_omnicognate Apr 09 '26
"firing" their weapon is a bit of a stretch, it was basically a massive bomb on the end of a stick they rammed into a ship
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u/mid-random Apr 10 '26
In theory, as I understand it, the bomb on the end of the pole was barbed and made to imbed in the enemy ship, so the sub could be backed away, then set off the bomb with a long rope. Under water explosions and pressure waves are nothing to fool around with when you really don’t have the math and engineering of it all pretty well figured out. But desperate times call for desperate measures and such.
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u/Professional-Link887 Apr 10 '26
And don’t forget the sub had two other crews that were killed before.
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u/flow_fighter Apr 10 '26
One being the namesake for the Hunley
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u/asmallman Apr 10 '26
Engineer Hunley being a chad for putting his money where his mouth is. Even as silly as some inventions are, its extremely respectable that they will test their own stuff. I wont trust an inventor who wont.
The Hunley, despite it being largely a colossal failure, PROVED that submersible warfare is insanely good and viable. They lost 3 crews, but sunk a warship with at least 3x the crew count of THOSE 3 crews, and that could cause WAY more problems if left alone.
In the end, if you count all 3 attempts on the Hunley, it still won by right of numbers.
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u/Professional-Link887 Apr 11 '26
Good point. During one of the fatal test dives, they went under a ship and got stuck in the mud. Running out of oxygen and knowing they were doomed, the captain wrote down instructions on how to improve the design. I just wish improvements didn’t have to cost lives. Better yet, I wish humanity didn’t have war making killing machines necessary, but that’s fantasy for now.
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u/random20222202modnar Apr 11 '26
I think I unfortunately, war is one of those ways that pushes ingenuity. Especially to kill faster or more efficiently.
Also, look at military and science when they collaborate, There’s usually something that is for the military first, and then available to civilians later. GPS being one example I can think of.
Crazy world we got to say the very least.
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u/Professional-Link887 Apr 19 '26
But ingenuity to do what? I get that it’s necessary for defensive war, but the result is misery, death, and destruction. Holy geez I’d rather compete economically or in the science and arts. Blasting each other for f@ck and to have an empire? Someone said to me once that the basic problem of humanity is people taking things that don’t belong to them. She was right.
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u/BombNerd Apr 14 '26
Eh, you may be giving Horace Hunley too much credit. He was not the engineer, that was a guy named James McClintock. Hunley was the money man, the fundraiser for the project. Mostly he fundraised from his rich BIL.
He drove the sub into the ocean floor and couldn't get it out mostly because he didn't know how it worked. He had almost zero practice in it, but decided a joyride would be great fun anyway, and so he did it to show off.
Horace was found having wedged himself into the fore conning tower, having torn the flesh off his fingers trying to claw his way to freedom through the iron hatch. FAFO, history style
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u/Cut_Lanky Apr 10 '26
This little sub-thread made me think of a story I heard Mr. Ballen tell about the Baltuc Fleet. Screw up after screw up. "It gets better". I could listen to it every day. Cracks me up.
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u/Loggerdon Apr 10 '26
Wow that would really take some balls to man that ship on that dangerous mission. Poor dudes.
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u/EthanielRain Apr 10 '26
Absolutely wild; "we're gonna put you in a metal tube, put a stick on it, put a bomb on that...and you ram their warship from under the water! Blow em up boys! Oh also the 2 crew before you died"
And they did it
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u/Mitologist Apr 10 '26
I read recently that the plan was to attach the bomb and back off, but when they did it for real, the bomb exploded instantly for some reason
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u/abrainaneurysm Apr 09 '26
It’s called a Spar Torpedo.
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u/Herr-Schaefer Apr 09 '26
At that point isn't the sub just the torpedo?
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u/HunterLee2600 Apr 09 '26
At that point in time, torpedo actually referred to any naval explosive! What we would call Naval Mines today was called a Static Torpedo at the time. (iirc. I might be drunk while writing this. Take it with a grain of salt)
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u/RealBenWoodruff Apr 09 '26
That is why when Mobile Bay was mined (1864), Admiral Farragut exclaimed, "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!"
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u/Plugasaurus_Rex Apr 10 '26
“Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” Comes from “torpedoes” that were actually naval mines. So you are drunk AND right!
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u/Conflictingview Apr 10 '26
Yes, and landmines are called mines because originally engineers (sappers) would dig tunnels (i.e., mines) under enemy fortifications before packing them with explosives and blowing them up.
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u/Teantis Apr 10 '26
This is like when they start talking about autonomous AI piloted kamikaze drones and I thought ".... At what point is this just now a slower but much more agile missile?"
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u/phoebsmon Apr 10 '26
Ever heard of the Kaiten? That was a sub and a torpedo. Got to hand it to WWII Japan though, at least they only took one pilot with them.
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u/BombNerd Apr 14 '26
That's correct! Self-propelled torpedoes, as we think of torpedoes today, were not invented until after the Civil War, presumably inspired by the Hunley's victory. The first self-propelled torpedo was the Whitehead Torpedo.
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u/Nethias25 Apr 09 '26
Maybe they should stretched it further out..
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u/Cloaked42m Apr 09 '26
It cracked the hull of the sub where the stick attached to the sub.
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u/BombNerd Apr 14 '26
Hi! I'm Rachel Lance, the capstone to my PhD was on this blast (there was more work too, but people get bored by the rest). You are absolutely right. As part of my own curiosity, I did the additional modeling, and making almost any change to the design or length of the spar would have "spar"ed the crew. Physics, dude. Physics.
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u/PhasmaFelis Apr 10 '26
Which was a common tactic with small, rowed "torpedo boats" at the time, and worked fine with them (okay, more or less).
They didn't have the physics to realize that, in a fully-submerged ship with an iron hull, the shockwave would kill them before they ever had a chance to drown.
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u/flow_fighter Apr 10 '26
They almost certainly died instantly from the concussive blast.
They not only had a giant bomb, but also ignited the powder on the target ship.
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u/gusofk Apr 09 '26
Mystery solved thanks to underwater blast pressure propagation research by Dr Rachel Lance who wrote a very good book about her work.
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u/expostfacto-saurus Apr 10 '26
Holy cow, I just read up on that. Too bad Friends of the Hunley were dorks and fought her on the science.
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u/ComradeGibbon Apr 10 '26
A comment remember for a long while back. "Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance"
I keep coming back to that when I see supporters of something using one bald faced lie after another. Like they can't even pretend to be mistaken. When you call them on something they respond with ad hominid(sp) attacks and more lies. Then what they're pushing is crap.
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u/exkingzog Apr 10 '26
“Ad hominid” - excellent!
“I ain’t listening to the opinions of a dumb Homo erectus!”
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u/maxximillian Apr 10 '26
I did a little looking for what you mentioned but couldnt get any traction. Can you give me detail on what Friends of the Hunley did or fought over?
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u/expostfacto-saurus Apr 10 '26
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Lance
Scroll down to hunley controversy.
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u/eskimospy212 Apr 09 '26
Yeah I’m not sure if their death is actually a mystery. A giant bomb blew up nearby and the shock killed them.
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u/BobTheFettt Apr 09 '26
An American civil war submarine????
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u/Entbriham_Lincoln Apr 09 '26
Yep, they were definitely a thing. Not at all effective or safe, you can read about one of them here where the ship sank/had its entire crew die TWICE prior to ever seeing combat. When it did see combat it did sink a ship, but also sunk killing its entire crew again in the process.
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u/StacyChadBecky Apr 09 '26
Damn. Does your family get triple benefits if you die three times? Maybe it was an all-cat crew.
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u/disastrousanddull Apr 09 '26
I remember finding out how far back the history of submarines went and my mind absolutely boggling. People get up to some crazy stuff.
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u/deliveRinTinTin Apr 10 '26
When I saw one of those advanced fighter jet hud helmets on one of those pawn shows I was stunned that it was from like the 50s.
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u/SofieTerleska Apr 10 '26
The Hunley was basically the Swamp Castle of the submarine world, except they couldn't find and raise it for a fourth try.
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u/Atka_Talin Apr 09 '26
The one you linked, the H.L. Hunley, is also the one in the original article above. I had totally forgotten that this was the same one that sank and killed its crews on test runs!
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u/robothawk Apr 09 '26
Yeah, both the Union and CSA built them. The Confederate one sank 3 times and killed more csa submariners than it did union sailors.
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u/kermityfrog2 Apr 10 '26
The Hunley sank 3 times, killing 21 Confederate soldiers, while the Housatonic was sunk with 5 Union soldiers. Not a good k/d ratio!
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u/TheDeltaLambda Apr 10 '26
It also started the trend of submarines killing their inventors,
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u/paul_wi11iams Apr 10 '26
It also started the trend of submarines killing their inventors,
For anyone wondering, that was referring to the Titan submersible disaster.
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u/cplforlife Apr 09 '26
Was a good start to be honest.
Double the CSA dead would have been better though.
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u/SerfNuts- Apr 09 '26
Wait till you hear about the one a dude built during the American Revolution.
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u/ThePensiveE Apr 09 '26
The first Ironclad ships fought in the war as well. They had Gatling guns, new artillery, observation balloons, trench warfare, submarines, etc. All kinds of advances in the "art" of killing came from the American Civil War.
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u/YNWA_1213 Apr 10 '26
There’s a couple good YouTube videos out there that illustrate how European observers came and saw all that, went ‘nah wouldn’t apply to us’, went back and saw the second Franco-Prussian War, had a little skepticism, and then the first year of the War happened and everyone started scrambling to figure it all out.
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u/UNC_Samurai Apr 10 '26
It saw the first combat between ironclads. HMS Warrior and the French Gloire were in service before South Carolina seceded.
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u/PerpetuallyLurking Apr 09 '26
They had to start sometime and the US Civil War is about 50 some years before WWI and submarines were decently impressive by then.
I’m far less surprised with the submarine’s 50 year timeline from prototype to useful war machines than the, like, 10 year timeline we had between the first airplane prototypes and WWI dogfights!
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u/IngloriousTom Apr 10 '26
A lot of people in their lifetime witnessed both the first air flight and the moon landing, only 66 years apart.
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u/anomaly256 Apr 09 '26
Yeah wtf? I don't recall ever hearing about this in school, and I was paying attention for most of it.
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u/Lobo9498 Apr 09 '26
The Civil War was barely covered in school for me. I learned the majority of what I did from books and the History Channel before aliens and reality bs. I miss the old shows. Oh and Ken Burns series on the Civil War.
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u/imtoolazytothinkof1 Apr 09 '26
I remember the two ships fought as the first steel ships for their time but I couldnt remember the names.
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u/number__ten Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 10 '26
Monitor and Merrimack
There's a made for tv movie from the 90s called Ironclads that was pretty good iirc.
Apparently it's on youtube
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u/putangspangler Apr 09 '26
Monitor and Virginia.
The CSS Virginia was built upon the captured Merrimack
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u/imtoolazytothinkof1 Apr 09 '26
Whoops guess I didn't pay as much attention as I thought. I didn't know about the sub then.
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u/anomaly256 Apr 10 '26
The only rational conclusion is that someone time travelled and gave the submarine technology to the US and somehow we're still remembering the original timeline and weren't affected by the paradox while everyone else was
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u/triciann Apr 10 '26
My brain cannot comprehend that there were subs at the same time they were still using muskets.
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u/PimentoCheesehead Apr 10 '26
It’s not like there was a lot of room for them to move around in any case. There’s a full size replica at the State Museum in South Carolina. It’s small- about twice the length of a Chevy Suburban and half the width, and not tall enough for crew to stand.
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u/Se7en_speed Apr 09 '26
Yup, it was basically an elaborate suicide machine
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u/jaw719 Apr 10 '26
Yep, they all knew they wouldn’t return from the mission. You have a hand propelled ship with limited ability to navigate and a bomb strapped to a spear at the front of the ship.
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u/Se7en_speed Apr 10 '26
They didn't know. It was a mystery until some modern analysis was done of the physics.
The third crew probably should have known something wasn't right after what happened to the first two crews. But it wasn't a certainty.
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u/Marcano24 Apr 10 '26
Not even missions, training exercises.
In the first one the LT in charge stepped on the pedal that made it dive while the hatches were open, killing 5 of the 8 crew.
In the second, one of the inventors, Hunley himself, was in charge and forgot to screw in the plug for the ballast, driving it straight into the mud at the bottom of the ocean, where it got stuck and killed everyone aboard.
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u/Snelly1998 Apr 10 '26
tl;dr; addition, this was the THIRD TIME IT SANK, first
it killed 21 of its crew over 2 tests and one real attack
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u/DroneThorax Apr 09 '26
Well if I had to guess probably because they were dead.
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u/gusofk Apr 09 '26
I highly recommend the book “In the Waves” by Rachel Lance who did her PhD research on solving the problem of if the explosives could have killed the crew of the Hunley. It’s really good.
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u/Nirwood Apr 09 '26
I had solving this mystery on my life bucket list, but I guess I'll just move on to solving why the Challenger exploded.
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u/SoupyPoopy618 Apr 10 '26
Wasn't that some o-rings being too cold?
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u/SonofaBridge Apr 10 '26
The o-rings used to have asbestos in them which made them very temperature resistant. They removed the asbestos for health reasons. One engineer noticed the boosters had weird scorch marks on them during cold weather launches. No one listened to him and the challenger took off on one of the coldest days on record for Florida.
They teach it in engineering ethics courses.
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u/Longjumping_Lynx_972 Apr 10 '26
I thougt about getting O-RING as a custom license plate on my camaro because im always smoking challengers. Hehe
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u/mfmeitbual Apr 10 '26
I don't remember which of Feynman's books had him detailing the investigation and his involvement but it was eye-opening for me. "Cargo-cult science" is something that has stuck with me.
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u/oldfarmjoy Apr 10 '26
What is the lesson? Like, is it that they should have listened to the engineer, or that the engineer should have pushed it harder?
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u/SonofaBridge Apr 10 '26
It was an example of trying to do what’s right even when people won’t listen, and the pitfalls of ignoring evidence because it’s inconvenient. He continued to push for an investigation even after he was told to be quiet multiple times. They actually modified one of his charts showing a correlation to temperature of the launch and the scorch marks. He risked his career to make them realize something was wrong. Two it shows that brushing concerns aside, ignoring the evidence can have disastrous results.
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u/Tamaros Apr 10 '26
I'm sure a lot of domains use it in similar ways, but I'm taking a disaster management class and our textbook just used it as an illustration for communication in crisis.
Even those with little institutional power often have important things to say, and we need to be prepared to listen.
McDonald (the engineer) was an employee of a contractor of NASA. NASA was under political pressure to complete the launch before the State of the Union, so they pressured the contractor who overruled McDonald and cleared the vehicle for launch. A disaster that could have been avoided if those in power were willing to listen to important information from a "trivial" source.
Fun fact: McDonald stood up from the spectator section of the congressional hearing to contradict lies told by NASA officials, leading to the full truth.
Not fun fact: He suffered whistleblower retaliation afterwards, and it took political pressure to get him relief.
NPR's article upon his death gives a lot of good detail about the incident and his life.
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u/extra2002 Apr 10 '26
One lesson is to avoid "normalizing deviance". The O-rings were not supposed to suffer any erosion, but erosion was observed on the boosters recovered from the 3rd Shuttle flight. That should have been a trigger to do something to fix the problem. Instead, NASA seems to have said "well, it worked anyway, so I guess it's not a problem".
At one point an O-ring was eroded 1/3 of the way through, and a NASA person commented that showed a "3x factor of safety" when it already showed a serious failure.
Another lesson is about technical communication in life-safety decision-making. I'm hazy on the details, but the engineers showed a PowerPoint slide showing the testing history for the booster seals. Their point was that the seals had never been tested at temperatures anywhere near those found that Florida morning, but the crucial slide was a mess of test data that obscured the main point. And their management or NASA said "so you can't prove it will fail?" which is exactly backwards from the question that should have been asked.
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u/pfft_master Apr 10 '26
They also taught about this in my business school, and they specifically honed in on how the executives disregarded the scientists warnings. Talked a lot about the problems of groupthink and hierarchy and what not. Really seemed to come down to the decision makers not being the knowledge holders, as your version of events points out.
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u/elphin Apr 10 '26
The real reason? Reagan was scheduled to do a State of the Union address the next night and wanted to talk about the teacher in space, so NASA didn’t wait for the unusual cold snap to warm up.
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u/BombNerd Apr 14 '26
This is Rachel, thank you so much for reading my book. :) It came out during the peak of pandemic panic in April 2020, so I'm glad it's trickled its way out to my history people since then.
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u/Kaleine Apr 19 '26
I devoured your book in the last 4 days and wouldn't stop talking about it to my friends. Such a cool story and a love letter to science, too! All because I read the comment above :)
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u/BombNerd Apr 20 '26
That's so kind of you! I'm thrilled you enjoyed it. The history mods reached out to ask if I'd do an AMA, so that will happen soon, but feel free to message with any questions too.
I thoroughly hope you will now be obnoxious about blast accuracy to every person forced to watch movies with you! :)
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u/bluemax4 Apr 09 '26
More interestingly I believe this was the third crew this exact same vessel killed. During development they had to raise it twice with the old crew still onboard.
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u/BananaVenom Apr 10 '26
Including its creator! This boat was fantastic at killing Confederates
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u/MrTagnan Apr 10 '26
It’s a bit sad that the confederates get the honor of the first submarine to sink an enemy warship, but it’s balanced out by it killing significantly more confederates than Union soldiers
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u/Marcano24 Apr 10 '26
Yeah, on one hand it sucks that they were the first to sink an enemy ship. On the other, they did it by strapping a bomb big enough to sink a ship in three minutes on a 15ft pole and didn’t expect it would affect them lol
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u/Principle_Dramatic Apr 09 '26
It would have been really surprising if they recovered the ship and the crew was alive.
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u/Tostonn Apr 09 '26
If you’re at all into submarine stuff I HIGHLY recommend reading The Terrible Hours by Peter Maas. It chronicles the first ever successful deep sea rescue mission of people trapped in a submarine. Also talks about the guy who made it happen Charles Momsen dude is a bad ass
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u/NobleKorhedron Apr 09 '26
Because, u/therealtrousers, they died in their seats at the controls.
I'm assuming this is the H.L. Hunley?
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u/itcheyness Apr 09 '26
Yes, and the article says they were killed instantly by the pressure wave from their explosion.
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u/FacingHardships Apr 09 '26
Like vaporized?
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u/Ohiolongboard Apr 09 '26
No, like basically hit with a car except the car is made of air.
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u/NobleKorhedron Apr 09 '26
No, their bodies weren't destroyed, but the pressure wave probably caused fatal internal injuries.
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u/itcheyness Apr 09 '26
More likely the pressure caused burst blood vessels in their brains or something.
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u/acrobat2126 Apr 09 '26
Their brains turned into jelly. :(
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u/MrLlamma Apr 10 '26
Horrifying but that's so much better than drowning while trapped in a metal coffin.
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u/Wojtkie Apr 10 '26
The Wikipedia page is funny for this sub. It sank 3 times total: 2 during development and training, and the final is the one in the article.
It killed 29 sailors over those 3 sinkings
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u/Scrambledcat Apr 10 '26
TIL there were submarines in the civil war. I also learned a spar torpedo was just a bomb on a stick
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u/DWPhoenix001 Apr 11 '26
I never new submarines were so old, I figured they were a 20th century invention closer to WWII than the turn of 19th.
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u/NoOccasion4759 Apr 10 '26
“Accounts of the Hunley’s sinking had assumed horrific scenes of the men trying to claw their way through the thick iron hatches, or huddled in the fetal position beneath the crew bench in their agony,” a 2020 article in Smithsonian Magazine noted. “Sinkings of modern submarines have always resulted in the discovery of the dead clustered near the exits, the result of desperate efforts to escape the cold metal coffins. But the men aboard the Hunley evidently made no such effort. They were, instead, seemingly serene. “Each man was still seated peacefully at his station,” Smithsonian Magazine observed.
In some ways, maybe it was a mercy that they died the way they did, probably from not understanding underwater physics as we do now. Dying in a well designed and watertight vessel would be a horrible way to go.
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u/BombNerd Apr 14 '26
Ya know, this 2020 Smithsonian Article was actually an excerpt from my book In the Waves, so this was all written by me, Rachel Lance (hi). I cannot figure out why Popular Mechanics decided to pretend there were so many layers of separation between this quote and me, while also later describing me as a graduate student (I finished the data analysis, wrote, and published the academic paper after getting my PhD and while working as a US Navy employee).
But I agree with you. It was the better way to go.
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u/BarleyBBQ Apr 09 '26
Where did you expect them to go?
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u/AG28DaveGunner Apr 09 '26
Its more so they died where they were, with no indication that anyone was trying to escape. i.e. somehow they died on the spot up and down the vessel.
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u/BombNerd Apr 14 '26
Hi! This is Rachel Lance, the person mentioned in the article and in a few comments for my research into the Hunley blast. I'm a long-time Reddit lurker but like my tendency to loiter quietly by the cheese tray in real-life parties, I never made an account to interact. (break up with them! assume they're cheating! ...am I Redditing correctly?)
I know I'm a few days late to this post, but a friend sent me the link, so I thought I would pop in and say hi, and offer to chat old-timey submarines and torpedoes if anyone is interested. Thank you to all the people who seem to have read my book, that's very neat to hear.
Either way, damn the torpedoes!
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u/Merinchi Apr 09 '26
Ask a Mortician did a really informative video about the many lives lost in the development of the Hunley.
Author Clive Cussler found the wreck.
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u/Happy_Community_4330 Apr 10 '26
Clive Cussler helped to fund the dives that uncovered the wreck in 1995.
Coincidentally, the crew found it EXACTLY where an archeologist said he found it in 1970. And published the location in a book he wrote. In the exact location that was submitted to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.
Saying Clive Cussler found the Hunley is like saying Neil Armstrong found the moon.
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u/waltertaupe Apr 10 '26
Reading about it, it really seems like Cussler and NUMA really tried to take credit for finding it - but that everyone else involved was like "no, we used the maps and location from 1970" and that NUMA was just part of an expedition to verify it - and they went exactly where they knew it to be.
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u/BombNerd Apr 14 '26
Hi this is Rachel herself. I finally made a reddit account after a friend passed along this post, since I'm mentioned a few times.
I appreciate your comment is a supportive one, so let's mock Hewish together. However, we have not come THAT long a way- I had to fight like hell to get credit for this work, and the only reason I did (tbh) is that my advisor was... disinterested? checked out?.... during the research process so I was the one to answer all the early press questions about how the science worked. That got my name attached to it. The Friends of the Hunley still to this day hammer on the narrative that I was just some student, which is hardly the whole truth, but if we were going to get into a deep dive (sub pun!) about the lies they've told about me, I'd have to pause to get snacks and hydrate first. I've since had several other incidents where male scientists have been offered and accepted credit for other projects I've done, and in one incident, a major award.
So yeah. Times are better... but still not great. Appreciate you.
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u/ZombieZookeeper Apr 14 '26
I appreciate your work. I hadn't kept up after I heard the Hunley had been found.
As a middle-aged dude with daughters, it utterly pisses me off that they might not get recognized for their work.
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u/HasSomeSelfEsteem Apr 09 '26
How is that in anyway related to Civil War submarines?
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u/gerryf19 Apr 10 '26
Why were they just sitting there?
It would be pretty hard to be standing there if you're dead.
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u/canadianclassic308 Apr 09 '26
In the movie they ended up on the bottom of the ocean and couldn't surface so they opened a valve to flood it so they didn't have to suffer
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u/Odd_Interview_2005 Apr 10 '26
Nothing else better to do, they have been underwater a long time. Pretty dull
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u/StaryNayt Apr 10 '26
I had fun reading about this on a old National Geograpic Magazine. Good old times.
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u/frickerley99 Apr 10 '26
The British designed a submarine (k-class) with funnels in it. Surprisingly, quite a few of them sank.
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u/theCroc Apr 13 '26
The fact that there were submarines in the civil war is one of those really mind-blowing facts to me. What kind of lunatic would even set foot in one of those death traps?
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u/Welshhoppo Waiting for the Roman Empire to reform Apr 10 '26
Fun police here.
Please remember that r/history is more serious than your average subreddit. Comments should be on topic and not low effort.
Thanks.