Qualla: HMS Poseidon

HMS Poseidon: Introduction

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At 12:12 on 9 June 1931, in perfect visibility twenty miles north of the Royal Navy's Weihai base, HMS Poseidon collided with the Chinese merchant vessel Yuta. Within minutes, the submarine settled to the seabed 130 feet below. What happened next would change how navies around the world thought about trapped submariners -- and what happened four decades later would remain a secret until a journalist stumbled across the story in a Hong Kong library.

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HMS Poseidon: A Short Career Far from Home

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

HMS Poseidon was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness and launched on 22 August 1929, a Parthian-class submarine designed for long-range patrols. She spent most of her brief career assigned to the Yellow Sea, operating from the Royal Navy's base at Weihai on the Shandong Peninsu...

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HMS Poseidon: Escape from the Deep

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The collision with Yuta was sudden and devastating. Thirty-one crewmen scrambled into the water before the submarine sank, but others remained trapped inside the hull on the seabed. Poseidon carried the Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus, a closed-circuit breathing system that had ...

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HMS Poseidon: A Doctrine Rewritten

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Before Poseidon, the Royal Navy's standing advice to crews trapped in a sunken submarine was to wait for rescue -- sit tight, conserve oxygen, and hope that divers or salvage vessels would arrive in time. The successful escapes from Poseidon proved this doctrine fatally conservat...

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HMS Poseidon: China's Secret Salvage

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For forty years, HMS Poseidon lay undisturbed on the seabed north of Weihai. Then, in 1972, China's newly formed underwater recovery units quietly raised the submarine. The operation remained unknown in the West for three decades, until researcher Steven Schwankert discovered an ...

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HMS Poseidon: Ghosts Between Empires

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Schwankert's investigation became the book Poseidon: China's Secret Salvage of Britain's Lost Submarine and a documentary film, The Poseidon Project. The story captures the overlapping histories that haunt this stretch of the Shandong coast -- a British submarine sunk in waters t...

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