The Submarine That Worked Once and Killed Everyone — The H.L. Hunley: The Strange History Podcast

0:00 Speaker 1: Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to the Strange History Podcast,

0:03 Speaker 1: where we celebrate the kind of historical success that immediately asks, okay,

0:08 Speaker 1: but at what cost. Today's date is February seventeenth, and

0:12 Speaker 1: this is a story so dark, strange, and deeply uncomfortable

0:16 Speaker 1: that history usually rushes past it with a polite cough.

0:20 Speaker 1: This is the story of the h. L. Hunley, the

0:23 Speaker 1: first submarine in history to successfully sink an enemy warship.

0:27 Speaker 1: It worked, and then it killed absolutely everyone involved. On

0:32 Speaker 1: the night of February seventeenth, eighteen sixty four, during the

0:36 Speaker 1: American Civil War, the Hunley slipped out into Charleston Harbor

0:40 Speaker 1: under cover of darkness. This was not a sleek, modern submarine.

0:45 Speaker 1: This was a metal tube powered by eight men turning

0:49 Speaker 1: a hand cranked propeller, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the dark,

0:53 Speaker 1: sweating and hoping no one sneezed wrong. The Hunley had

0:57 Speaker 1: already earned a reputation before this night, and not a

1:01 Speaker 1: good one during testing. In earlier missions, it had already

1:04 Speaker 1: sunk twice, not in battle, just on its own. Each

1:10 Speaker 1: time it drowned its crew, each time the Confederacy raised

1:14 Speaker 1: it cleaned it out and said, okay, but this time

1:17 Speaker 1: for real, which is an incredible amount of confidence for

1:21 Speaker 1: a machine that kept murdering its operators. Still, on February seventeenth,

1:27 Speaker 1: the Hunley did exactly what it was built to do.

1:30 Speaker 1: It approached the Union warship USS Housatonic, attached a spar

1:35 Speaker 1: torpedo to its hull, backed away, and detonated the charge.

1:39 Speaker 1: The explosion ripped the Housatonic apart. It sank in minutes.

1:43 Speaker 1: Five Union sailors died, the rest escaped. History had just

1:48 Speaker 1: witnessed a navel first, and then the Hunley vanished. It

1:52 Speaker 1: never returned to shore, no distress signals, no survivors, just gone.

1:57 Speaker 1: For over a century, no one knew what happened next.

2:01 Speaker 1: Theories piled up. Maybe the explosion damaged the submarine, maybe

2:06 Speaker 1: it ran out of air, maybe the crew passed out

2:09 Speaker 1: from fumes. Maybe the ocean simply claimed it again out

2:13 Speaker 1: of habit. The truly unsettling part is that for decades

2:17 Speaker 1: the Hunley was remembered as a success story, the first

2:21 Speaker 1: submarine attack, a technological breakthrough, a bold innovation. Very few

2:27 Speaker 1: people lingered on the fact that every single crew member

2:30 Speaker 1: died when the Hunley was finally discovered in nineteen ninety

2:34 Speaker 1: five and raised in two thousand. The truth became even stranger.

2:39 Speaker 1: The crew were still seated at their stations, no signs

2:42 Speaker 1: of panic, no attempt to escape, no scrambling. They had

2:47 Speaker 1: died exactly where they sat. Modern forensic analysis suggests the

2:52 Speaker 1: shockwave from the explosion traveled through the water and the

2:56 Speaker 1: metal hull, instantly killing the crew through blunt forced trauma

3:00 Speaker 1: to the brain. They didn't drown, they didn't suffocate. They

3:05 Speaker 1: were simply turned off, which means the Hunley completed its

3:10 Speaker 1: mission perfectly. It did exactly what it was designed to do.

3:14 Speaker 1: It just wasn't designed to survive success. And that's what

3:18 Speaker 1: makes February seventeenth so bleakly funny. In a historical sense.

3:23 Speaker 1: The Hunley didn't fail. It worked. It proved submarines could

3:27 Speaker 1: change warfare forever. It just also proved that being first

3:31 Speaker 1: often means being dead. Naval warfare learned its lesson, submarine

3:37 Speaker 1: design evolved, safety improved, History moved on, But February seventeenth

3:43 Speaker 1: remains the day someone looked at a machine that had

3:46 Speaker 1: already killed multiple crews and said, let's try one more time,

3:51 Speaker 1: and somehow that worked briefly, and that brings us to

3:56 Speaker 1: the end of February seventeenth, the day History achieved victory

4:00 Speaker 1: and immediately paid for it in full. So when someone

4:03 Speaker 1: tells you innovation requires sacrifice, remember the Hunley, because sometimes

4:09 Speaker 1: the sacrifice is everyone. Until next time, stay curious, respect

4:14 Speaker 1: warning signs, and remember just because something works doesn't mean

4:19 Speaker 1: it's a good idea.

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