Human torpedoes

Now here's a story that turns out to be far less exciting than the headline:

South Korean ship sunk by crack squad of "human torpedoes"

Human torpedoes, eh? I had a vision of kamikazi divers with pointy helmets being fired out of a tube at 200mph at the steel hull of their target. And I wondered how on earth a fairly soft human, even with a very pointy helmet, could penetrate, let alone sink, a ship.

Surely all that would happen if you fired human torpedoes at a battleship would be a series of soft underwater thuds and some interesting cleaning work needed next time the ship comes into dry dock.

But it turns out that these torpedoes were small submarines that North Korea manoeuvered close to the target and then detonated. And then it also seems that while these submarines were manned with 13 North Korean commandoes, they may actually have evacuated the submarines before they blew them up.

Pah, reeled in by another overspun headline.