All language subtitles for Combat.Ships.S02E05.Secrets.Of.The.Sea.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.H.264-BLOOM_track3_[eng]

This time
on Combat Ships,

the shadowy world of naval
deception - revealed...

Hitler had put a 250,000-dollar
prize for the U-Boat captain

who could sink one of the Queens.

She was a marked ship.

Vessels that were not
what they seemed...

It was arguably a greater
engineering feat

trying to get the submarine
than the moon landing.

...and crews on cloak
and dagger missions.

Minutes after they gave up the
search, they had a sonar contact.

And then everything
started to change.

Extraordinary tales of secrets
and lies on the high seas...

Combat ships,

fast, effective.

The mission is pure
James Bond espionage.

Deadly...
- Japan is willing to throw the dice

to engage just about every aspect

of their military force
in a climactic decisive battle

to stop the United States.

They have changed the world...

Warships have been
key factors in global history

from the beginning of civilisation
to the present day.

...thanks to clever design,

raw firepower,

and the heroism of their crews.

On April 9th 1944,

German sub U-515 was on fire
in the middle of the Atlantic.

US destroyers had hounded it
to the surface

so their aircraft
could finish it off.

43-year-old Captain Dan Gallery

watched from the carrier
USS Guadalcanal.

The Germans abandoned ship.

But U-515 stayed on the surface
for a few minutes

before it sank.

It gave Gallery an idea...

Gallery noted that this
highly seasoned U-boat crew

under a highly decorated
U-boat captain

immediately got off the boat

and they didn't scuttle the boat
properly.

They had abandoned ship
too soon.

Could he scare another crew
into doing the same?

And so, he thought, what if
we were able to capture this ship

instead of watching it slowly sink?
So, at that point

he began hatching a plan
to do something

no-one had done before.

Gallery knew that a U-boat
was a treasure trove of intel,

from weapons to Enigma codes.

He asked the Navy Department
in Washington for help.

"Can you give me some information
that would enable me to capture

a German submarine, and if possible
can you give me a ripe one?"

That's Dan Gallery's words.

"Can you give me
a ripe one for capture?"

The Navy already
had its eye on a sub,

U-Boat U-505.

Intercepted messages
from U-505 in the Atlantic

suggested it was a troubled ship.

Its skipper Peter Zschech
had committed suicide

while on active duty.

The crew's morale was low.

It's new skipper Harald Lange
decided to head back to base.

So the U-505 had been out to sea
for a long period of time.

They were running low on food.

They were running low on fuel.

So they start the return
cruise home.

Dan Gallery and his
anti-submarine unit,

consisting of the carrier
Guadalcanal

and a fleet of destroyers,

headed to intercept and capture
U-505 off the coast of West Africa.

By June 4th they had
almost given up.

And minutes after they gave up the
search, they had a sonar contact.

And then everything
started to change.

Fighters from the Guadalcanal
saw the dark shadow of U-505

just under the water.

They fired their machine guns

to show the destroyer
USS Chatelain

where to drop its depth charges.

Hearing the sound of ordnance
ricocheting off the exterior

of your boat's going to make you
want to get off the boat.

Then there was
a historic moment.

Once the sub had surfaced,
the commander of the taskforce

radioed to the ships,

"Away all boarding parties.
Away all boarding parties."

The US navy was going to capture
an enemy ship.

A boarding party from the
destroyer USS Pillsbury

took to the water.

It was a dangerous moment.

So when they hit the submarine,

they were expecting to have
shots fired in return.

But U-505 was deserted.

The crew had abandoned
ship in inflatable rafts.

Like the crew of U-515
two months before,

they had failed to carry out
proper scuttling procedures.

Just as Dan Gallery had hoped.

An intact U-Boat
was in American hands!

And still is today - at the Museum
of Science and Industry in Chicago.

As the boarding party scoured U-505
for log books, Enigma machines,

and other intel, American sailors
captured the sub's crew.

But the sea swell made
the abandoned sub dangerous.

As the Pillsbury tried to tow U-505,

the sub's bow plane gashed a large
hole in the destroyer's hull.

Pillsbury cut the lines,
only just afloat.

Dan Gallery's carrier
Guadalcanal took over.

The Americans interrogated
the U-boat's exhausted crew.

A German submarine sailor
is a highly trained,

highly knowledgeable target
for interrogation

and some of the best intelligence
that was gathered

from a human intelligence standpoint

was from interviewing
German sailors.

And U-505 crew sang like canaries,
many of them.

Most useful were
the sub's tech secrets.

German acoustic torpedoes,

which used sound to track
their targets,

were devastatingly effective
in the battle of the Atlantic.

Allied ships had been using
noise-making decoys

to try and fool the torpedoes
with mixed results.

They were effective
but not completely foolproof,

and getting the newer
acoustic torpedoes

and be able to study the technology,

enabled the Allies to better
their decoy technology,

and so just make
the German torpedoes less effective.

The capture of U505 led to
vital torpedo countermeasures.

Many Allied lives were saved.

The U-505
is also a monument to the bravery

of all the sailors
that served in the Navy

but also, in particular,
Dan Gallery's crew.

They, against all odds,

knowing what was at stake
really risked their lives

to try and capture a submarine that
they knew would help win the war.

July 1914. Ireland
was on the brink of civil war.

The mainly Protestant
northern province of Ulster

believed it
was about to be betrayed.

The British parliament was
on the verge of agreeing that

the island of Ireland
could be self-governing,

in much the same way as a state
within the United States

is self-governing.

This policy of self-government
was known as Home Rule.

In Ulster the fear was that
if a very Catholic majority

were in charge of the day-to-day
business of life in Ireland,

Protestants would be dominated by a
very Catholic, conservative culture.

A militia known as
the Ulster Volunteers

was prepared to fight Home Rule.

They armed themselves
with 20,000 rifles.

To counter the threat from Ulster,
Home Rule supporters in the south

founded their own militia,
the Irish Volunteers.

But weapons were scarce -
some marched with wooden rifles.

What the Irish Volunteers did have

were friends in high places.

Pro-Home Rule Anglo-Irish
aristocrats and politicians

raised money to buy them guns.

One, 34-year-old Mary Spring Rice,

devised a plan to smuggle
the guns into Ireland.

She was a very good
strategic thinker,

probably, we'd call her now.

She was able to see that any other
form of movement of guns

would be difficult,
indeed almost impossible,

and that the notion
of a private yacht

rather than any other sort of boat

would most likely escape detection.

Another leading figure
supporting the Volunteers

was 44-year-old Englishman
Erskine Childers -

the author of
The Riddle of the Sands -

the world's first spy novel.

In his novel, two Englishmen
taking a vacation,

yachting off the coast
of Northern Germany

discover a German plan to mount
a secret invasion of Britain.

Childers became a hero, if you like,
to those who felt that Britain

inevitably was soon going to have
to fight Germany.

Which of course,
in 1914, it was.

Childers owned a yacht

that was perfect
for the gun-running adventure.

Its name was Asgard!

In the spring of 1914,
Erskine Childers bought 1500 rifles

and 49,000 rounds of ammunition
from a German arms dealer

sympathetic to his cause.

Childers arranged
for a tug to take them

to rendez-vous with Asgard
in the English Channel.

Asgard sailed on July 3rd.

Her crew included Childers and his
wife Molly, and Mary Spring Rice.

They rendez-vous'd with the tug.

Mary wrote in her diary...

"The tug looked black
and huge alongside us,

her deck was full of German sailors,

who jabbered away
and looked curiously at us."

Now these guns in those days
would have been very heavy,

quite cold, quite unpleasant,
quite easy to damage yourself on,

and it was all done in a hurry,

so there was a lot of
sweat and tears

and probably blood as well
in the unloading.

It was a rushed job but they did
manage to get them all in.

Although the Asgard's crew
weren't professional gunrunners,

they chose their weapons well.

They purchased 1500 Mauser rifles.

In an echo of Childers' spy novel,

the gun runners sailed into the
middle of a Royal Navy fleet

preparing for war with Germany.

Mary Spring Rice wrote
in her diary...

"There was one awful moment
when a destroyer came very near.

I stood, holding up the stern light
on the starboard side,

watching her getting nearer and
nearer with my heart in my mouth.

Then mercifully, at the last moment,

she changed her course
and past us by."

There are photographs
of them on the boat

where they are holding the guns

and they're sitting on the
ammunition boxes.

I guess the British Navy did have
other things on its mind

which is why it possibly
went undetected.

After 23 days at sea,

Asgard reached its destination,

the port of Howth
just north of Dublin.

A large force of Irish Volunteers
was waiting for them.

"At first there was a fearful
scramble among the men onshore,

for the rifles,
as they were handed up.

Then, Erskine stopped the delivery

until he got hold of someone
in command,

and some sort of order
was restored.

Erskine and Molly Childers
then quickly set sail for home.

Mary Spring Rice stayed put.

She knew that no-one
would suspect her

of being a gun smuggler.

Mary straightens herself down,
straightens her hat

and marches off to a hotel in Howth
and has a cup of tea.

The authorities - who still
answered to the British government -

soon heard about the gun smuggling.

The Crown may have
endorsed Home Rule,

but arming a private militia
was illegal.

A unit of British soldiers
tried to break up the Volunteers

and seize the guns.

A crowd gathered to mock them.

They're jeered and attacked

and stones are thrown at them
by a crowd.

A crowd of onlookers,
not of Volunteers,

quite tough characters I would say.

And an inexperienced officer
gives the order to fire...

...and three civilians are killed.

A week after the Asgard
landed at Howth

the First World War broke out.

Most of the Irish Volunteers
joined the British Army

to show they were loyal citizens
of the King -

and so deserved Home Rule.

But some hard-liners wanted more,
a fully independent Irish Republic.

They kept their smuggled Mausers
hidden

and two years later
staged a rebellion

known as the Easter Rising.

During the 1916 rising,
a lot of these weapons,

what were known as Howth rifles,
were used by the rebels

and they were actually effective,

particularly for long range
fighting.

Both Mary Spring Rice
and Erskine Childers

supported the rebellion.

In 1922 during the bloody civil war
between Irish nationalists

that followed the signing of a
treaty with the British -

Childers sided with those

who felt Ireland remained
too tied to Britain.

In November 1922

he was captured and executed.

The Asgard is now in the National
Museum of Ireland -

a private yacht turned combat ship -

and a reminder of a key moment
in Irish history.

One year later, another
gun-running vessel set sail.

It would meet a tragic
and infamous end.

In the years before
the First World War,

the most glamourous way to travel
was by ocean liner.

Few passengers realised
that the vessels had another role

as combat ships.

When war broke out,

the British reinforced the liners'
decks and put guns on them.

Vessels like the Titanic's
sister ship Olympic

became troop carriers.

Others hauled ammunition
from American factories

to the Western Front.

These liners were secretly used
to bring over arms and explosives.

This was kept very secret
at the time.

One ship in particular was
an effective gun-runner,

the pride of the Cunard fleet:
Lusitania.

In March 1915, the Germans
suspected the Lusitania

was gun-running
between New York and England.

Their spies hung around
New York's wharves.

Because America was neutral,

the Germans could run an extensive
spying operation if they so wished.

And many of the American citizens
were of German descent

and some of their sympathies
lay with Germany, not Britain.

On May 1st 1915,

newsreels filmed the Lusitania
as it departed for Liverpool.

Over 1200 passengers were on board,
including 189 Americans.

Below decks in a secret compartment
were 750 tons of ammunition.

The greatest threat to the Lusitania
was from below the waves.

A week before she sailed,

Germany had warned that
British vessels

were 'liable to destruction'

and passengers travelled
'at their own risk.'

Only two of Lusitania's passengers
cancelled their trip.

Most believed the liner's speed
kept her safe from U-Boat attack.

Submarines are very,
very slow underwater

and even above water they can only
go like 15, 16, 17 knots maximum.

So, if you have a steamship
going 25 knots, the monster liner,

a submarine can never
catch up with it.

On May 7th the Lusitania
was off the coast of Ireland -

only 15 hours from the safety
of Liverpool.

Then at 1:20pm
Walter Schweiger spotted her.

He couldn't believe his luck.

Lusitania had slowed
to about 18 knots,

making her a tempting target.

The U-Boat fires a torpedo
that hits the liner.

Then there is an important
secondary explosion.

It blew a massive hole
in the side of the ship

and very rapidly the ship sank.

1198 people lost their lives,

including 128 American citizens.

One of Lusitania's propellers
was salvaged in the 1980s.

Today it stands as a memorial
at the Liverpool docks.

The Lusitania was important
in history

because it galvanized
the American public

in terms of being,
in their view, at least a war crime,

of women and children
going down with the ship

almost within sight
of the Irish mainland.

Later on of course,
the Germans argued justifiably so

that the Lusitania was in fact
carrying munitions of war,

but it didn't really overcome
the outrage in America

that the Germans were sinking
passenger ships deliberately.

Hostility to Germany
continued to build

until the United States finally
entered the war in April 1917.

In the Second World War
great liners once again

played a life and death cat and
mouse game with U-Boats.

The most famous of all
was the Queen Mary.

At the outbreak of war,

the British were unsure how to use
this fast, iconic vessel.

They really didn't know
what they were going to do.

There was about, let's cut her down
and make her an aircraft carrier.

I've seen the drawings for that.
There was talk about,

do we really need a big
ocean liner right now,

we could make tanks
out of all that steel.

And, finally
they came down the realisation

that during World War One
the British liners served so well

as troop ships and really made
a difference in getting

what they needed from their allies,
on site,

they would go ahead
and do that.

Queen Mary was transformed -
six miles of carpet removed;

precious woodwork covered up.

Her sun deck fitted out
with the latest anti-aircraft guns.

Her hull, superstructure
and funnels repainted -

earning the Queen Mary the nickname
"The Grey Ghost."

In 1940 she began
work as a troop carrier.

The Queen Mary and her sister ship
Queen Elizabeth

were now combat ships - and serious
targets for German U-Boats.

Hitler had put a 250,000-dollar
prize for the U-Boat captain

who could sink one of the Queens.

She was a marked ship.

She could carry over 15,000 people
on one trip, which is not bad

for ship designed for passenger
capacity of about 2,600.

This ship still holds
the world's record for carrying

more human beings on an ocean voyage

in July of 1943,
this vessel left New York,

bound for the Clyde in Scotland,

with 16,683 souls on board.

The Allies knew the Queen Mary
was a big target.

But cracked German Enigma codes

helped her stay one step ahead
of the U-Boats.

Her rudder was
as heavy as the Mayflower

and gave the liner the ability
to take swift, evasive action.

It was not unusual for the master
of the Queen Mary

to receive a message
in the middle of the night

saying that a wolfpack
was lying in their track

and the Queen Mary
would turn about on her heels

and everyone in the ship would feel
the ship list over significantly

as she would race away from danger.

By the end of the war,

the Queen Mary had carried
almost a million troops.

For four years the Grey Ghost had
speed - and Lady Luck - on her side.

There was a time many years
ago when I was a tour guide here

in the 70s, one of the young ladies
was standing up on the bridge

and there was this one
elderly gentleman,

with a very stern face
standing in the back.

Finally, after the third
presentation,

he comes up to her and a very thick
German accent he says,

"You know, I missed her by this much
once."

In the Second World War,

defeating the U-Boats took more
than luck, seamanship and speed.

It took teenagers playing games.

January 1942.

The Allies were losing
the Battle of the Atlantic.

The Royal Navy had no strategy
to deal with U-Boat wolf packs

that were devastating
vital convoys from America.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill
summoned a former naval commander

named Gilbert Roberts to London.

He was a skilled tactician
who specialised in war games

that rehearsed combat situations.

When Roberts arrives
at the Admiralty

he's told the severity
of the situation

and Churchill's aide
says to him,

we want you to get to work
on the U-Boat problem,

using your wargames,
using your tactical nuance,

we want you to essentially reverse
engineer these wolf pack attacks

to expose where our fundamental
misunderstanding is occurring,

and then from there to develop
and teach these countermeasures

that will enable us
to fend off the wolf pack attacks.

That evening Roberts travelled
to Liverpool - to Derby House -

the base for a top-secret
organisation

known as Western
Approaches Command,

now a museum.

The desperate fight against the
U-Boats was orchestrated here.

This main room is like a
global gathering of information.

Effectively, intelligence came in
via radio, via Morse,

so all that information was
brought in, digested, if you like,

by the staff working here

and decisions were made
and information was sent out

based upon top command decisions
being made in this room.

Gilbert Roberts'
received a frosty welcome.

When he meets Sir Percy Noble
who is the commander in chief

of Western Approaches at that time,
Noble says to him,

"Well, you can carry on
with your games on the top floor

but don't bother me with it,
and when you come up with something

perhaps I'll send a few officers
to go and be trained by you."

Noble gave Roberts
10 assistants.

They were from the women's branch
of the Royal Navy, known as Wrens.

Some were as young as 17.

To keep the operational Navy
at sea,

you need a huge support
structure on land,

so, a 'Free a Man for the Fleet'

was very much one of the recruitment
slogans that was put out there.

I think many were motivated as well
by the sense of wanting to do

something for the war effort.

They might have
brothers, boyfriends,

who were being called up.

And they felt
they had to do something too.

Roberts and the newly christened
Western Approaches Tactical Unit

or WATU marked out their wargame
on the top floor of Derby House.

On one side
were the Royal Navy captains,

on the other
U-Boat commanders.

They stood behind high canvas sheets
with peep holes

that allowed the players to see an
equivalent of 5 miles on the board -

just like visibility at sea.

In the game, the team who are
playing as the Royal Naval ships,

really their job is exactly
the same as in live action.

Their job is to protect the convoy,
the flock of sheep

as it goes through to make sure
that none of the ships are sunk

or if any of them are,

that the U-Boat
is quickly dispatched with.

And for the players who assume
the role of the U-Boat captains,

their job is to try to sink as many
escort ships as possible

and then hopefully to try

and exit the battlefield
without being caught.

Every two minutes players gave
orders to move their ships or subs.

Effectively it is a game of chess
but out across the floor,

passed on through the Wrens
who become the runners of the game

to keep it moving,
the games masters if you like.

At the end of the game,
which would last

typically between an hour
and an hour and a half,

everyone comes together
and Roberts using a 10-foot pole,

would sort of commentate on what
had happened during the battle.

One of WATU's first tasks
was to see if a Royal Navy officer

had already discovered a tactic
to defeat the U-Boats.

His name was Johnny Walker -

and he'd sunk three enemy subs
just weeks before.

So successful that he'd been
in that battle that he'd gone home

and had written up what he believed
to be very effective

tactical instructions
that he wanted to be sent across

to the Navy to say, "If you find
yourself in a battle with U-Boats,

this is what you need to do."

But the Navy's top brass
was sceptical.

Had Walker found the answer -
or just got lucky?

Walker's strategy -
nicknamed 'Buttercup' -

instructed escort ships to turn
outward from the convoy

and let off flares to illuminate
any U-Boats

lurking outside their perimeter.

The Wrens and Roberts
set about testing Walker's tactic,

restaging his battle on the floor.

It became clear that Walker's
success was down to three things:

teamwork,

an unusually large number of
escort ships to hound the U-Boats,

and luck.

Buttercup was not
an effective tactic.

But the wargame did teach
something shocking.

U-Boats weren't firing from outside
the convoys

as had been thought
for the last two years,

but inside, on the surface
at point blank range from behind.

Once the torpedoes had done
their damage,

the Germans submerged.

Roberts wrote...

"So we plotted that out
and went through it again

and again for two days

and I couldn't pick a hole in it
anywhere."

Armed with this knowledge,
the WATU team developed a tactic

to deal with U-Boats
inside the convoys.

Gene Laidlaw,
the 21-year-old Wren

who had done
most of the calculations,

christened it 'Operation Raspberry.'

The only aspect of Buttercup they
copied was ships working as a team.

If the U-Boat is below us
what are we all gonna do, well,

instead of all splaying out
and going off on our own

and dropping our depth charges,

we're going to move in
triangular sweeping patterns

right above where we sit,
and this way we'll flush them out.

A ship using sonar equipment
would come through the back

of the convoy
listening for any U-Boats.

When they replay the battle again
using this tactic,

they find that every time
they're able to sink

the U-Boats that are attacking.

A sceptical Percy Noble -
head of Western Approaches -

came to watch the Raspberry
tactic play out.

And at the end
of the demonstration,

Noble stands to his feet
and essentially applauds Roberts,

he asks for a message to be
taken down immediately

and sent to Churchill
saying we've discovered

a cardinal error in our
understanding of U-Boat tactics.

Roberts wrote...

"For many days Buttercup
was shown with its fallacy -

and then Raspberry
was shown to visitors.

It made me rather unpopular
with Captain Walker."

WATU was transformed
into a training unit.

More than 5000 American,
Canadian, and British officers -

including Prince Philip -
played their wargames.

WATU's pupils
learned their lessons well.

The Battle of the Atlantic
began to turn.

So, the number of U-Boat kills
begins to steadily increase

throughout the remainder of 1942
from the summer onwards,

and in fact, by the summer of 1943

the last of the U-Boats
is driven from the Atlantic

during which numerous WATU-developed
countermeasures were deployed

by the Royal Naval ships.

Sometimes wargames aren't enough
to defeat the enemy.

Sometimes it takes
millions of dollars

and the biggest con in history.

On February 25th 1968,

Soviet combat sub K-129

left her home base
of Petropavlovsk

on a routine patrol
of the US West coast.

She travelled in silent mode
for two weeks.

Then disappeared...

What seems to have happened
is that there was an accident

during some sort of exercise,

most likely she was surfacing,
or getting near to the surface

to go through some kind of
missile test exercise.

She sinks to the bottom
of the Pacific Ocean

over 16,000 feet down.

The Soviets had no idea
where K129 and her crew were.

But the US Navy did.

The Americans were very interested
in what happened to K129,

firstly because of where it was
and they had a pretty good idea

where it was from their underwater
acoustic sensors.

It was a good opportunity
to trawl-up nuclear secrets,

intelligence secrets,

and also they may
have had an inkling

that something funny
had been going on

and they wanted to find out
precisely what had been.

The Americans decided that
if they could find K-129

it would be the intelligence
coup of the century.

But how could they retrieve
the secrets of K-129

16,000 feet down?

So, you're talking about
finding a way to recover an object

that weighs 2 million lbs
that's at the bottom of the ocean.

It was arguably a greater
engineering feat

trying to get the submarine
than the moon landing.

The CIA got the job.

They gave the operation a random
codename: Project Azorian.

The CIA realised they would need
the expertise of a company

used to deep sea drilling.

The world leader was Global Marine.

The company drew up plans
for a remarkable ship

named the Glomar Explorer.

In theory it would be able to lift
K-129 from the ocean floor

and bring it to the US

undetected.

But such a large project
needed a cover story.

The world was told that the vessel
would search for deep sea minerals,

and that its owner was one
of the richest men in the world,

Howard Hughes.

If you're trying to come up
with somebody who would build

a really expensive ship to do
a speculative venture of mining

the bottom of the ocean,
Howard Hughes was perfect.

He was sort of like
the Elon Musk of his day.

Hughes put his name
to most of his projects,

so when the 'Hughes Glomar Explorer'
was revealed

after two years construction,
it sounded like just one more

of the millionaire's
bold ventures.

Project Azorian had four
elements.

The biggest and most important
part, I guess, would be the ship,

because without the ship
there's nothing.

That was the Hughes Glomar Explorer,
which is a gigantic ship,

about the size of a battle ship.

Then, there's the steel pipe string,

which is a 16,000 foot steel cable
that's going to hang the grabber,

the thing that will pick up
the submarine.

Then you have the grabber itself,
which is a claw.

I always explain it like that arcade
game where you grab the toy.

The fourth component
was this huge submersible barge

named Hughes Mining Barge One.

The barge served two purposes.

They built the claw inside of it
in secret,

so that it couldn't be seen
from the outside,

and then it would deliver the claw
to the Glomar's floor

without anyone seeing it.

Cos that was the piece of the
mission that you couldn't explain

with the cover story.

The scale of this barge
will tell you the size of this claw.

It's the size of a submarine.

Massive, massive size.

This was a remarkable operation:

first of all, in the speed
with which the ship was built,

the secrecy which surrounded it
and its mission,

and the way in which the whole thing
for a long time was covered up.

On June 20th, 1974

the Hughes Glomar Explorer
set out from Long Beach, California,

for the target site.

The crew was optimistic.

One CIA officer wrote...

"With this crew
and this beautiful ship,

no task was too difficult.

Mission impossible? Nonsense!

'Impossible'
was not in our vocabulary."

After 13 days at sea,

the Glomar Explorer
reached its destination

and took up position over K-129.

The claw - nicknamed 'Clementine'

after the song about the miner's
daughter - started its descent.

Project Azorian
was fraught with danger.

The sub's three warheads
had enough nuclear material

to create an explosion 50 times
greater than Hiroshima.

The operation started badly.

Clementine's descent was hampered by
poor weather and technical glitches.

It should have taken two days.
It took two weeks.

Finally, on August 4th
its claws grabbed hold of K-129.

The sub began to rise.

Suddenly there was a jolt.

Something had gone wrong.

One of the claws broke.

Over half of K-129 crashed back
to the ocean floor.

Fortunately,
the nukes didn't detonate.

The claw lifted what was left
of the sub up into the belly

of the Glomar Explorer.

So what did they find
in the remains of K-129?

There are secrets
involved in this story

that the CIA will never share.

One of them
is exactly what was recovered.

What we know we got were
nuclear tipped torpedoes

which were capable of sinking
an air craft carrier or bigger.

At the time,

the Americans thought that
Soviet subs outclassed their own.

K-129 proved that wrong.

It was I think a confidence
booster for the US,

they're putting a lot of money
into their nuclear programme,

they're sure cutting corners
on average construction

of their vessels.

The remains of some of her
crew were also inside the sub.

The plan was always to be
respectful of the remains

and they knew part of that
was to do a proper burial at sea.

It was filmed and given
to the Soviets later

where a speech is given
in Russian and in English

basically saying, even though
our two countries are at war

we're all brothers in one sense.

The officers and men of this
ill-fated USSR submarine

pennant number 722

who we honour here to today
have reached their journey's end.

Had the multi-million dollar
Project Azorian been worth it?

Maybe the most important outcome
from an American perspective

of what it did to US confidence
and Soviet morale I think

it was completely demoralising to
the Russians, made them think that

the Americans were truly capable
of anything it was carried out

under their noses and politically
it's hard to put a value on that.

But it was hugely demoralising
to Soviet spirit.

History has shown that to
succeed in the shadowy world

of naval secrets, you need...

...dedication...

...ingenuity...

...daring...

...and a lot of guts.

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