The Sinking San Diego

In July 1918, the 15,000-ton armored cruiser USS San Diego ship was returning home after escorting U.S. troop and cargo ships across the perilous North Atlantic passage to Europe after defending convoys against marauding German U-boats and transforming the course of the conflict by delivering 10,000 doughboys a day to the Allied Powers. The ship sank off Long Island, New York, losing six sailors from a crew of 1,200 after a mysterious explosion struck the vessel. San Diego is the only major U.S. warship sunk in World War I but the cause of the explosion has been unknown and still a mystery.

According to some, this happened due to a German saboteur that had smuggled a bomb on board whereby others were convinced that a torpedo fired by a German U-boat was to blame, even though lookouts never saw the tell-tale bubble trail left on the water’s surface. However now military historians and scientists have finally confirmed an initial Navy court of inquiry finding that a German-laid underwater mine sank the warship. A team of U.S. military and oceanographic experts had conducted an investigation or two years and finally announced the result on December 11, 2018 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C., bringing to a close a century of debate. Alexis Catsambis, a maritime archaeologist at the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, had said that “We believe the U-156 [U-boat] sunk the USS San Diego and used a mine to do so”. Catsambis and his team had claimed that the mine explosion did little damage to the ship, but the seawater breached a series of bulkheads and caused the top-heavy ship to topple over quickly. The San Diego had been packed by the crew with coal for the return trip to Europe, including 150 tons sitting on the open deck. In all these years, the wreck has been kept intact by the ship’s iron ‘torpedo belt’ installed along the waterline and has become a popular site for both sport divers and fishermen. Navy officials had decided to launch the investigation to solve the mystery and to admire the six sailors who perished on the centennial of their deaths. Catsambis said “We now know more than ever before about what likely happened during the USS San Diego’s final moments”. In a case of cosmic karma, the same German submarine that placed that mine, the U-156, sunk by American mines in the eastern Atlantic. It had also launched the only known attack on American soil when it fired on tugboats docked in Orleans, Massachusetts.

By: Anuja Arora

Content: https://www.history.com/news/world-war-i-uss-san-diego-explosion-discovery