The Battle of May Island | Down the Rabbit Hole

K22: "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?" The Inflexible: Read ✓

"Desperately, he gave the order to turn to starboard..." Me, having watched Cost of Concordia: "I know where this is headed"

My great grandfather died in this tragedy. He was on k-17. His name was Thomas Jackson and his diary is in the Portsmouth naval museum. The part of the diary I have is mostly about his time in the Dardenelles. My grandfather, also called Thomas Jackson served in the navy (HMS Edinburgh WW2) and never found out what happened to his father apart from he died. Just wanted to say thank you for sharing this.

The description of K6 finding no survivors in the water after K4 broke in half and sunk gave me chills. Imagine being the captain of K6, still reeling from the crash and processing what just happened, suddenly realizing that the whole crew is dead and he is responsible.

it took me a while to realise this wasn't a bunch of backstory leading up to the battle of may island, this WAS the battle

I've never been more stressed watching ovals narrowly miss each other.

Its been 2 years since fredrik went insane studying eve online.

for those wondering why there aren't any new uploads, don't worry he's working on a video about EVE Online that's gonna be over five hours, which is why its taking so long to make. seeing how an hour long vid about an officially documented event like this one took him about 4 months to make, a five hour long one about an ongoing subject with a bunch of vague/untrustworthy info taking over a year is to be expected.

"It surely can't get any worse." "Surely it can't get ANY worse." "SURELY, IT CANNOT GET ANY WORSE." "ARE YOU SERIOUS?!"

"A man aboard a ship who had seen M2 that morning casually asked if it was normal for submarines to dive backwards. He was told that it was not." Jesus Christ.

"He believed that if a ship could move and shoot fast enough, it wouldn't need defense." manses was using video game logic.

I love it when people with last names like "Fisher" end up with titles like "Sea lord".

The whole disaster is just one big, “but wait, it gets worse!”

This is the naval equivalent of when you’re carrying a load of loose laundry and you drop a sock but when you bend down to pick it up three more articles fall and so on and so on until you’re forced to just drop the lot and throw everything back together again. Except people died.

What's wild to me is that despite how much ocean the submarines could have covered and how they all kept changing course, their paths still kept intersecting perfectly by sheer chance

44:45 this to me has to be the worst part. One of the last ships barging through helpless overboard men and lifeboats, sucking some into its propellers. All because of bad visibility and communication. Tragic and absolutely horrific

Imagine being a survivor of this massacre. You’ve just gone through one of the most insane and hellish experiences of your life, witnessing your crew die around you, only to be told that you can never talk about it. And not only that, but you then have to watch silently for years as these machines which you know are faulty and dangerous are casually used to kill more of your fellow sailors just because the high command doesn’t want to admit it made a mistake.

I've made all of the animations you see in the video! The video had me doing research on each specific boat so I could represent them as accuratly as possible and lots of questions to Fred about if the movement I had just animated was correct. There is a wealth of WIP stuff and scrapped content which we might utilize for a future mistakes video. This video also was the first time I created a poster out of the Designs within the show(Will be on sale later). This video uses the most graphics and animations of any episode so far with 32 minutes and 48 seconds of animation over the entire 1 hour run time of this video. I really do hope you all enjoy the video; as usual Fred, Ryan and I worked hard on the video!

I never knew how important the Navaho Code Talkers where until watching this and seeing how hard communication really was. Speed and making sure your enemy couldn't understand you must have been a nightmare.

I was on the dive team you mentioned at the start who discovered the final resting place of the wrecks after the Battle of May Island. From my back porch I can see the site from here. This was an engineering disaster, not a naval one. "Too many damn holes", as one account goes. Worth noting as you mention in the last few minutes - nuclear powered submarines, including the V-boats where I served in the Royal Navy, are also steam powered. They just don't need coal. Right idea, wrong time. Respect to those who served upon these widow makers.