Military Mysteries

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Story 1.

First in Defense

The United States Navy possesses the largest and most powerful fleet of ocean-going vessels on the planet.

In the many years that have passed since it was founded, the brave men and women serving within this institution have been exposed to numerous incidents of an inexplicable and unsettling nature.

In this week's episode, we examine three such occurrences.

In June of 1775, following the outbreak of the American Revolution, legislation was passed calling for the arming of civilian ships and merchantmen in the war against Great Britain.

It soon became clear, however, that this measure, along with the ongoing cooperation of French naval forces, would not be sufficient to break the vice-like grip which the Empire held over the seas surrounding the continent.

The Royal Navy was a vital component of the British forces in the colonies.

Without it, the king's armies would be starved of men and resources, as well as the ability to bombard coastal targets.

Recognising the importance that control over these waters represented, the colonies funded the construction of 13 frigates, specifically designed for war.

This new military force was named the Continental Navy.

and would go on to fight against the British with both courage and distinction.

The experience and skill which these sailors would gain over the next 10 years would become integral to the future of an independent America.

But the price of this knowledge was great, with more than 80% of her ships being sent to the bottom of the sea before the war's end.

It would not be for nearly another decade, in response to repeated attacks on American merchant ships by Barbary pirates, that the U.S.

Congress enacted new legislation.

The Naval Act of 1794 provided funding for six new frigates.

The idea of a United States Navy had finally been realized, and there would be few times in its future where it would not find itself actively engaged in conflict with America's enemies.

Following a brief campaign against her former ally, France, the U.S.

Navy would be employed in further anti-piracy activities and attempts to end the African slave trade before playing a role in further conflicts with Great Britain and Mexico.

U.S.

naval forces proved essential to the Allied victories in both world wars, and they have continued to maintain global security since the end of the 1940s.

During the two centuries it has been in existence, it has deployed thousands of ships and aircraft to locations spanning the entirety of the globe.

Its sailors have served their country on every continent, facing a broad range of enemies in battle.

And in more recent times, the accounts and written records of her commanders have caused commentators to ask probing questions regarding the origins of some of these opponents.

In February 1945, at the height of the battle for Iwojima, elements of the American 5th Marine Division found themselves pinned down by a superior Japanese force.

Despite a murderous hail of enemy gunfire, A lone Marine named Tony Stein performed repeated acts of courage.

These included helping wounded colleagues to safety and braving enemy artillery in order to obtain ammunition for the rest of his platoon.

During the course of the battle, Stein carried out a number of single-handed attacks on the enemy's defensive positions, drawing fire away from the rest of his unit and blowing up concrete pillboxes in the process.

Ten days later, he was killed by a sniper and was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

In 1970, as a further tribute to the deceased hero, the U.S.

Navy named their latest warship the USS Stein.

This Knox-class destroyer was initially assigned to the US 7th Fleet and spent the first few years of her military service patrolling far eastern waters.

In April of 1978, she was ordered to conduct a series of drills off the coast of South America, an itinerary which also included scheduled visits to a number of different ports whilst in the region.

One evening, the crew were going about their duties when the entire vessel was catastrophically shaken by a sudden and unexpected impact.

Sailors were hurled from their feet, several sustaining injuries after violently colliding with their counterparts or the ship's bulkheads.

As shocked crew members rallied to their stations, The Stein's commanding officer made his way to the control room to find out what had occurred.

He found the bridge crew struggling to reinitiate the ship's electrical systems, several of which had been knocked offline by the incident.

It gradually became evident that the vessel had collided with a large underwater object, one which had failed to register on its monitoring systems.

A check of the regional charts confirmed there was no existing anomalies situated anywhere on the seabed, only adding to the mystery.

Assuming that the culprit was either a submarine or a submerged shipwreck, the commander ordered sailors up onto the deck with searchlights, looking for wreckage or bodies in the water.

Nothing was seen, and when the ship's technicians reported that they were unable to restart the sonar system, the decision was made to return to the Long Beach Naval Shipyard in Los Angeles to rectify the issue.

Once the ship had been dry-docked, repair crews fanned out across her hull, documenting any visible damage.

This work was almost immediately brought to a halt when it was discovered that approximately 10% of the Stein sonar dome was missing, and what remained was completely inoperable.

All along the exterior of the sensor housing, deep lacerations and slashes were visible, all of varying length and depth.

As the technicians slowly unfastened the couplings around the device, several objects fell from it, clattering onto the ground below.

Directing their torch beams downwards, the men were shocked to discover that the items lying at their feet were teeth and talons.

In total, over 100 organic samples would be slowly extracted from the reinforced rubber surrounding the damaged sensor.

Amongst these were sharpened hooks, much like those found in the suction cups of giant squid, but some of them were over an inch in length.

five times longer than those found on any creature documented by marine biologists.

To this day, nobody can be sure exactly what collided with the destroyer, but with the damage that was caused, it must have been colossal in size.

If it was indeed a squid, and its dimensions were equivalent to the biological mass it left behind, it would be around 150 feet in length.

A sobering figure, given that this is three times longer, than any similar creature previously encountered.

During the Cold War, the United States Navy actively sought to neutralize the threat posed by Russian submarines capable of launching nuclear missiles at the US mainland.

Key to the US Navy's strategy was a new type of submarine, a fast attack craft which was designated the Sturgeon class.

In total, 37 of these vessels would be deployed during the conflict, including the USS Trepang.

The Trepang took two years to complete, finally launching in September of 1969.

Under the control of Commander Dean R.

Sackett Jr., she was immediately deployed to the Arctic Ocean, with orders to conduct research and mapping in relation to the movements of the polar ice cap.

She was also tasked with investigating the limitations that this hostile environment may hold in the commission of submarine warfare.

For four weeks, the Trepang carried out weapons drills and scientific analysis of the region before she was recalled to the Holy Lock Naval Base in Scotland.

Both the submarine and the men who served aboard her would spend nearly three decades carrying out missions all around the globe before she was eventually decommissioned in 1999.

The USS Trepang should have remained just another anonymous component of America's Cold War fleet, the finer details of her activities shrouded well away from the prying eyes of the general public.

And this this might have been the case, were it not for the release of a series of images in 2015, purporting to have come from the submarine's periscope camera whilst she was on maneuvers in the Arctic Sea.

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In an article published by the investigative website Black Vault, it was alleged that during the Trepang's deployment in March of 1971, she had been in the vicinity of Yanmayan Island when Commander Sackett had been called to the control room by the duty officer, John Clicker.

It was explained that through the periscope, Clicker had sighted an unknown aircraft operating nearby, one which he did not recognise and which was acting in an unusual manner.

Sackett had initially been sceptical of the report, attributing the description to the crewman's inexperience, but when he looked through the periscope, he was shocked by what he saw.

Moving slowly through the skies, not far from his vessel, was an aircraft like nothing he had ever seen.

At the point he first sighted it, the craft had borne a passing resemblance to an airship from the 1930s, but as it carried on along its flight path, it had seemed to somehow shift and alter its form into various different shapes.

The commander had immediately placed his vessel on alert, continuing to monitor the UFO's progress and taking photographs as he did so.

Suddenly, it plunged into the ocean without warning, disappearing beneath the surface.

Sackett ordered his sonar operators to try and get a fix on the craft, only to be told that it was not registering on their systems.

As he watched on incredulously, The object then slowly rose back out of the water before shooting off at an impossible speed.

Whilst critics have been quick to dismiss the account and alleged photographs as a hoax, the story resonates for two reasons.

Firstly, the apparent capabilities of this mysterious craft bear more than a passing resemblance to similar objects which were engaged by F-18s from the USS Nimitz off the coast of California in November of 2004.

More worrying still, the story evokes memories of a secret Russian intelligence report, which alleges that mysterious flying craft successfully drove away a US Navy task force attempting to conduct research in the Antarctic in 1947.

Is it possible that these encounters are linked, and that there is an unknown force which resides in the polar regions?

Commissioned in October of 1955, The USS Forrestal was the largest aircraft carrier of her day, dwarfing those that had participated in the chaotic naval battles of World War II.

She was the first example of a supercarrier, specifically designed for the operation of jet aircraft, a floating city which was home to over 5,000 sailors and flight crews.

The Forrestal was affectionately known to the men who served aboard her as the FID, a nickname derived from her motto, First in Defence.

During the summer of 1967, the carrier and her escorts were deployed to the Gulf of Tonkin with orders to conduct sorties against targets in North Vietnam.

This would be the scene of a tragedy which would haunt her entire service.

On the morning of July 29th, the carrier's flight deck was filled with planes packed wing to wing, in various stages of maintenance to prepare them for the day's sorties.

One of the aeroplanes being worked on was an F-4B Phantom, fully armed, positioned so that it faced directly into the center of the packed jets.

At 1100 hours, a fault occurred whilst engineers were working on the aircraft's electrical systems.

This unexpected surge in power caused one of the Phantom's rocket pods to malfunction, sending an 80-pound air-to-surface missile screaming into the center of the flight deck.

The rocket hurtled approximately 100 feet, impacting the external fuel tank of an A4 Skyhawk.

The Skyhawk's pilot, Lieutenant Commander John McCain, looked out of his cockpit in horror as a flood of aviation fuel sprayed out towards where the red-hot fragments of the unexploded missile lay.

Moments later, the highly flammable fuel ignited, sending a wall of fire across the flight deck.

As men fell to the floor, consumed by the flames, the ordnance and aircraft around them began to explode.

McCain McCain was one of the many men that day who battled to save the lives of those around him, but despite their heroic efforts, 134 pilots, technicians and firefighters were killed.

With 21 planes destroyed and having sustained catastrophic damage to her flight deck, the beleaguered carrier had little alternative than to head to the Philippines for emergency repairs.

Once the bodies of the dead had been repatriated and the vessel restored, the Forestal was subsequently deployed to the warmer climes of the Mediterranean.

Almost immediately, the crew began to report bizarre and inexplicable occurrences.

Hatches were observed opening and closing of their own accord, and lights would turn themselves on and off when there was nobody around.

The Forestal's internal communications system became plagued by mysterious phone calls, where the sailors who answered could hear moaning or someone crying out in pain before the line suddenly went dead.

But nowhere was this activity more prevalent than in the galley, particularly in the vicinity of the ship's two massive food lockers.

Whilst en route to the Philippines, the remains of the dead had been temporarily stored in these two cavernous refrigerated containers.

Now, the cooks and stewards who worked in the galley began to report hearing desperate banging coming from inside them, only to find them empty when they were opened.

As time passed, other witnesses heard moaning or screaming emanating from inside the storage units, again finding nobody inside when they were checked.

There were sightings of a shadowy figure, dressed in the uniform of a petty officer, who would emerge from inside the lockers, inexplicably passing through the metal bulkheads unimpeded before disappearing.

So numerous were the encounters with this apparition that he earned himself a nickname, George, and whilst he would occasionally distract the crew with his appearances, it was generally perceived that he was benign in nature.

When the Forestall was eventually decommissioned in 1993, she was transported to the Philadelphia Naval Yard for dismantling.

One evening, A welder named Stan Shimborsky was cutting away some of the fixtures in the galley when he heard a loud metallic clanging noise coming from the opposite side of a a nearby bulkhead.

At first, the dockyard worker attempted to ignore the sound, but eventually, its repetitive and irritating nature prompted him to investigate.

When he walked round to the compartment where the commotion was coming from, the clanging ceased, and he found the room deserted.

Shrugging off the incident, he turned to head back to his tools, only to find his way blocked by a figure standing a few feet down the corridor.

The man was dressed in the uniform of a naval officer, and slowly began to turn when challenged by the welder.

To his horror, Shimborsky saw that the officer was severely burned, the front of his uniform hanging in tatters from his charred torso, and his facial features ravaged by severe burns.

An overpowering smell of burned flesh filled the narrow passageway, prompting the worker to drop to his knees and retch.

When he looked up a short time later, the odour was gone, and so was the mysterious figure.

Whilst the crew of the USS Stein stuck to the official story that their ship had collided with a submerged submarine, no other vessels were reported damaged or missing in that region at the time.

and it is difficult to argue with the findings of marine biologists who studied the samples.

Similarly, although the images taken from the periscope of the USS Trapang are intriguing, the crew have remained steadfastly silent regarding their validity.

It is possible that these photographs are nothing more than a hoax, but analysis confirms that they have not been doctored in any way, so perhaps there is more to this story than the Navy is willing to admit.

Finally, Despite the stories from the forest stall being completely anecdotal, the fact that they were related by military personnel does lend extra weight to them.

That said, serving on a ship where many people died in a tragic accident may have foreshadowed such an assignment.

Perhaps the knocking sounds which were heard had a rational explanation, but were viewed as paranormal due to the ship's history.

It is more difficult, however, to explain the other phenomena that was experienced.

When all is said and done, we're sure that these occurrences are all all in a day's work for one of the finest navies the world has ever known.

And with that in mind, we only hope to honor the brave men and women who risked their lives in the pursuit of global security.

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Story 2: The Disappearance of the Nanching Battalion

Despite modern advances in communications and surveillance technology, human beings continue to vanish from society without leaving a trace.

Often such disappearances are eventually explained, but this proves more difficult when the incident involves hundreds or even thousands of people.

Join us as we explore the disappearance of the Nanching Battalion.

Whilst the Second World War officially occurred between 1939 and 1945, pre-existing conflicts would eventually become incorporated into it.

On the evening of the 7th of July 1937, Chinese and Japanese troops exchanged fire near Beijing's Marco Polo Bridge.

Although the soldiers involved were not to know it at the time, they had just fired the opening shots of what would evolve into the Second Sino-Japanese War.

China's socialist forces lacked any form of effective training and were woefully equipped to oppose the impassioned and highly modernized Imperial Japanese Army.

Within months of the incident, Japanese soldiers were surging deep into the heart of Chinese territory, ransacking and murdering as they progressed.

By the end of the year, Shanghai had been taken, and the Japanese commanders next set their sights on the Chinese capital of Nanching.

Having fatally underestimated the strength and fury of the invading forces, the Chinese commanders had little option other than to abandon the people of Nanching to a tragic and inevitable fate.

The capital was formally relocated to the southwestern city of Chungqing, leaving behind a token force of terrified soldiers in a desperate attempt to delay the unyielding enemy advance.

It would take less than five days of sporadic fighting for the invaders to emerge victorious, and what followed remains one of the most notorious atrocities in human history.

The next six weeks saw the occupying Japanese forces massacre up to 300,000 men, women and children.

The fall of Nanching would, however, mark a turning point in the brutal conflict.

As the Japanese at last reached the effective limit of their established supply lines, Chinese resistance finally managed to stiffen, and the conflict entered a new, more protracted phase.

Rather than counter-attacking, the Chinese instead formed extensive defensive lines and invited the Japanese to push further inland.

Occupied cities found themselves ringed with heavy batteries of Chinese artillery, poised to annihilate any attempt by the invaders to push further westward.

The conflict descended into a grim stalemate, which would take a further seven years to conclude.

And it was during this lengthy phase of the war that a mysterious incident occurred within the Chinese positions, overlooking Nanching.

In December of 1939, One Colonel Li Fu Zane was responsible for a three-kilometer section of the emplacements, which overlooked the former Chinese capital.

The defensive positions entrusted to him were situated along the slopes of a deep valley, through which the Yangtze River flowed down into the city.

At the centre of his operational area was a road bridge, which allowed vital access across the river.

The bridge represented one of the few routes which the Japanese forces could effectively use to break out of the city.

and the loss of it could spell complete disaster for the Chinese military's entire strategy.

Zane had been appalled at the poor quality of his conscripted troops, as well as the aging weaponry they had to hand.

He had spent many weeks petitioning his commanders for reinforcements, and on the 9th of December, his requests were finally answered.

A battalion consisting of nearly 3,000 extra soldiers marched into his forward command post.

The colonel remained unimpressed by the obvious lack of training and poor morale displayed by the new arrivals, but it was better than nothing.

Too many men had already been lost that winter to disease and desertion.

As the new battalion had lined up before him, he delivered an impassioned speech, encouraging his men to avenge those murdered during the previous year's massacre and to drive the invaders out once and for all.

Satisfied that he had done all he could to motivate the soldiers, the colonel gave the necessary orders and deployed them to the forward positions.

This provided a much-needed respite for the exhausted and battle-weary soldiers who had been manning them up to this point.

As he watched the newcomers march off into the gathering darkness, he sighed in exasperation.

Most of them had been farmers or factory workers up until a few weeks ago.

In their current state, they stood little hope of holding out against any determined Japanese attack.

In the early hours of the following morning, the Chinese commander was awoken by one of his junior officers.

Angered at the impertinence of the man's actions, Zane demanded an explanation and proceeded to listen with growing irritation as the aide attempted to explain himself.

Radio contact had been lost with the forward positions and could not be re-established.

despite the best efforts of the engineers.

Grabbing his binoculars, Zane made his way to the nearest observation observation post and demanded to know if the sentries there had witnessed anything out of the ordinary taking place down in the valley.

The terrified soldiers professed to their enraged commander that they had not, and that there had been no movement from either side of the front lines.

Quietly seething to himself, Zane scanned the darkness for any sign that something was amiss, but could see nothing.

Having become sufficiently suspicious of the developing situation, he ordered that the rest of the regiment be awoken and readied for battle, and then dispatched a small party of engineers and infantrymen to descend down through the Chinese positions and ascertain what was happening on the valley floor.

When they returned two hours later, he could barely believe his ears, as they informed him that the forward positions were completely empty, and the replacement battalion had disappeared.

Exhausted and disgruntled Chinese soldiers were roused and hurriedly dispatched back to the positions they had withdrawn from only hours before.

They were met with eerily disconcerting scenes.

Concealed fires which had been lit to keep the reinforcements warm were still burning.

Playing cards and small amounts of money were laid out mid-game on ammunition crates, and half-eaten field rations lay abandoned in shelters and foxholes.

The precious 81mm mortars that the new soldiers had brought with them, courtesy of the British government, were unpacked and assembled, and stood ready to fire from freshly established positions.

Other new weaponry such as maxim machine guns and flamethrowers were sitting right where they had been unloaded, showing no signs of having been touched.

With the exception of a few sentries who had been sent to occupy positions further up the valley slopes, all of the new troops were gone.

As daylight broke, Zane and his junior officers repeatedly scrutinised the front lines, looking for any evidence of what might might have taken place the night before.

The concealed tripwires and landmines, which had been set to prevent an enemy sneak attack, had not been triggered, negating the possibility of Japanese forces having captured the missing soldiers.

In addition to this, the terrain just ahead of the Chinese positions contained only light vegetation, offering little opportunity for concealment.

Close inspection found no footprints or broken branches, as would be expected from thousands of troops crossing the valley floor.

Repeated interrogation of the surviving sentries on duty that night yielded nothing.

Nobody had been seen to cross the bridge that evening, and there had been nothing unusual to report.

It was as if the 2,800 infantrymen had simply vanished into thin air.

Nanching itself would not be recaptured by the People's Liberation Army until 1949, long after the incident.

Survivors of the collaborationist government that the Japanese had formed there confirmed that their forces had never captured any large numbers of enemy soldiers, or encountered such mass desertions either.

To this day, the loss of the Nanching Battalion remains a complete mystery.

As seemingly unbelievable as the disappearance of nearly 3,000 armed soldiers is, this incident is far from being an isolated one.

There have been a number of well-documented instances of military units vanishing during times of war, with the assumption that they had been killed or captured by the enemy, only for this to turn out not to be the case once the conflict had come to an end.

Following a largely successful invasion of Great Britain, the Roman Emperor Claudius ordered General Agricola to subdue the Caledonian tribes, which had so far refused to accept the Roman occupation.

The men chosen for the task were the veteran 9th Legion, known as the Spanish Legion on account of the land from which they had been conscripted.

In or around AD 108, the men of the 9th marched out of their headquarters in York, later crossing over the border and into the depths of the highlands.

At this point, they disappeared into legend.

There is no evidence that they encountered the Caledonian forces, and no survivors ever returned from beyond Hadrian's Wall to explain what fate had befallen them.

Similarly, in 1915, at the height of the infamous Gallipoli campaign, the 5th Norfolk Regiment, which was made up largely of servants and staff from the King's Sandringham Estate, were ordered to attack Turkish forces occupying the Anafata plain.

On the morning of the 12th of August, just two days after they had arrived, the regiment's officers blew their whistles and nearly 300 British troops rose from their trenches and advanced on the enemy positions positions with fixed bayonets.

Witnesses from the infantry units situated either side of the advance state that as the British troops walked calmly towards the Turkish lines, a strange yellow cloud descended upon them.

It quickly enveloped the regiment and seemed to absorb the soldiers before inexplicably lifting a few minutes later.

When it did so, the Norfolks were gone, and no trace of them was ever found.

In the closing months of World War II, British forces were given the unenviable task of liberating a number of islands off the Burmese coast, which had been occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army.

In January 1945, a force comprising the 26th Indian Division and a detachment of Royal Marine Commandos laid siege to the Japanese garrison on Ramri Island.

Having been eventually routed from their positions by the Commonwealth forces, the remaining soldiers of the Japanese 54th Division, which numbered roughly 1,000 men, withdrew to regroup in the island's mangrove swamps.

That evening, British troops heard sustained bursts of machine-gun fire and desperate inhuman screaming coming from the enemy positions.

The loss of the Japanese troops was put down to a mass nocturnal attack by saltwater crocodiles.

an explanation which nobody who had been present was prepared to accept.

In In all of these cases, it was later proven that the missing soldiers had not been killed or captured due to enemy action.

It was as if some unearthly, inexplicable force had elected to intervene in the conflict for reasons known only to itself.

Particularly in the circumstances of the missing Norfolk Regiment, it has been suggested that these disappearances were the result of extraterrestrial abduction.

Could large-scale warfare attract otherworldly visitors, who use the chaos and confusion of conflict to study our species?

At Nanching, the 3,000 troops were somehow removed from a heavily fortified and well-equipped position, surrounded by sentries and booby traps, an achievement well beyond the capabilities of any terrestrial army of the day.

An alternative theory exists, suggesting that the fate of the missing soldiers was the result of a more supernatural force.

Chinese mythology is permeated with vengeful and murderous evil spirits, all capable of doing great harm to anybody unfortunate enough to encounter them.

These include the Shui Gui, the ghosts of drowned people who sought to drag others to a watery grave, and the soul-devouring vampirous Shang Shan.

Going hand in hand with these malevolent and dangerous apparitions is the Chinese concept of the subterranean realm.

This proposes that the spirits of the dead reside reside beneath the Earth's surface, in hollow areas connected by networks of tunnels and caverns.

Did the Chinese troops somehow get pulled down into this dark kingdom, never to be seen again?

There remains of course the possibility that the vanquished Japanese forces simply denied all knowledge they possessed about the incident.

Given the brazen violence and savagery they had demonstrated throughout the conflict, any of the soldiers who might have deserted and ended up in their charge, or were captured in the act of trying to escape to their homes, would likely have been dispatched in quick and brutal fashion.

Having eventually been defeated by the socialist forces, what incentive would they have had in admitting their part in the incident and risking a similar fate themselves?

Is it more likely that any Japanese involvement in the disappearance of the soldiers would be long covered up, as with many other hidden war crimes?

The mystery of the the missing Nanching Battalion will never be solved, and is one which we have struggled to explain satisfactorily.

The only rational explanation for what may have taken place could be the result of human error.

It is only natural that over the passage of time, the story has been altered and embellished by those delivering it.

Some retellings have the disappearance occurring a year earlier, with Colonel Zane and his men entrusted with making a desperate last stand in front of the advancing Imperial Japanese Army.

If this is true, then the chances that the soldiers either deserted or were completely annihilated are a great deal more likely.

It must also be noted that there is no record in Chinese military history of this entire event ever occurring.

It's possible that either the loss of the 3,000 raw recruits was covered up in an effort to save face or improve morale, or that the unit never even existed, and the story was invented as a cautionary tale told to replacement soldiers posted to the area.

Whatever the truth behind the legend of the lost battalion and the other military forces we have touched upon, there is no denying the futility and hopelessness that accompany such conflicts.

We commemorate this story to the men and women who never managed to return to their loved ones from the field of battle and hope their souls eventually settled in a place of peace.

Bed times glorious.