All language subtitles for Combat.Ships.S02E02.Stealth.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.H.264-BLOOM_track3_[eng]

This time on Combat Ships.

The vessels that operate in secret,

unseen by their enemies.

They were fast
and they were stealthy,

and they were a small target
for the enemy.

From the secret missions
that helped win World War Two.

After Lightoller's heroism
on Titanic and the First World War

he was then a hero again.

He took his own private yacht
to Dunkirk.

To new technology
that offers new ways to hide.

It looks like it could be
something out of Star Wars

or it could be
actually flying through the air

instead of on the water.

Stealth ships
stay out of sight in a world

where eyes are everywhere.

Combat ships -

fast, effective...

The mission is pure
James Bond espionage.

...deadly.

Japan is willing to throw
the dice to engage

just about every aspect
of their military force

in a climactic decisive battle
to stop the United States.

They have changed the world.

Warships have been key factors
in global history

from the beginning of civilisation
to the present day.

Thanks to clever design...

...raw firepower...

...and the heroism of their crews.

Today, military stealth
means strange shapes

and angular designs.

Craft using technology to hide
from spying eyes... and ears.

But even
before this technology existed,

navies employed
stealth tactics to avoid detection.

Every form of shipping
at every point in history

has had some form
of stealth tactics.

Whether that's operating at night,

operating quietly.

Whether that's how
you paint your boat

to blend into either sky
or the sea.

Stealth's been part of
naval shipbuilding

throughout naval history.

One way to avoid detection

was to be small... and fast.

This... is the American PT 658.

One of only two operational World
War Two PT boats left in the world.

PT Boats were designed to be fast,

and to be hidden,

and to be very powerful.

PT stands for Patrol Torpedo.

Nicknamed Mosquito boats,
they were small, but fierce.

PT Boats were unique in that they
were the most heavily armed ship

for their size in the Navy.

So, you had an 80-foot ship,
20 feet wide,

80 feet long, basically.

And from stem to stern
there were armaments.

Right on the bow
is a 37-millimetre cannon.

Behind that is
a 20-millimetre machine-gun.

Just beyond that
two 30-calibre machine-guns,

another 20-calibre
machine-gun behind that.

And then, of course, the big boy,

the 40-millimetre
on the very back.

All that
plus four 2,200lb torpedoes.

This firepower was paired
with serious speed.

They cruise real well,
at 45 knots.

And that's all because of
the engines in the bottom.

There's three V-12 Packard
gasoline engines down there.

These engines
produce up to 5,550 horsepower,

propelling the boat's 50-ton wooden
frame easily through the water.

The US Navy tested
the first prototypes in 1939.

Just in time for the brand-new PTs
to receive a baptism of fire.

On December 7th 1941,

the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor

and the US entered
the Second World War.

Japanese forces quickly spread
across the Pacific Islands.

This struggle between

December 1941 and 1945

was overwhelmingly
for possession of airbases

and safe harbours for shipping.

And the Japanese, of course, had
seized an awful lot of this stuff

right at the beginning of the war

when the United States
was almost defenceless.

And the rest of the war
was really spent getting back

inch by inch and then thousands
of miles by thousands of miles,

all that had been lost
in those early days.

The stunned
American Navy had few options.

PT boats were cheap, flexible,
and available.

They were able
to work in shallow water,

where larger ships could not.

They were expendable

and when the Navy

did not want to risk major war
vessels the PT boats were there.

To compensate for their size,

they used stealth tactics.

PT boats
when attacking enemy shipping

were overwhelmingly dependent
on speed and darkness.

They had no chance of surviving
against enemy gunfire in daylight

so they had to attack at night
and they could dash in and fire

and then turn away
and get out with luck,

before the Japanese
could get at them.

While the PT boats performed well

their out-dated Mark 8 torpedoes
were less effective.

It is very difficult if you're on
a very fast moving, bumping boat

to aim a torpedo accurately from
a range of several thousand yards.

It was pretty primitive technology.
These were not guided missiles.

Sometimes they failed to detonate at all.

The heavy deck guns
were far more deadly.

As the war went on they became
less important as torpedo boats

and used as barge hunters.

The Japanese were bringing in
supplies and replacements

along the islands in barges,
which were armoured

and carried heavy guns
and the PTs went hunting for them.

The versatile vessel
quickly became a jack-of-all-trades.

In all sorts of other roles,

at reconnaissance,
rescuing pilots, all sorts,

they were absolutely invaluable

because they were very fast,
very light, small crews.

Qualities that would prove pivotal

in one of the war's
most famous missions.

In March 1942
the Japanese were on the verge

of invading
the US-held Philippines.

There, General MacArthur was
holding out on Corregidor Island.

Commander of US
Army Forces in the Far East

and America's most famous
military leader,

MacArthur was too important
to be captured.

President Roosevelt ordered him
to escape to Australia.

PT boats were given the task
to get him to safety.

They chose PT boats because they
were fast and they were stealthy

and they were a small target
from the enemy.

You know, they were hard to find.

If the Japanese spotted them
the chances

of getting away were almost nil
because the Japanese had almost

total control of air and sea
in the theatre.

On the night
of the 11th March 1942,

four PTs carrying MacArthur,
his family and staff

set off from Corregidor.

To escape they would have to slip
through a Japanese naval blockade

in the dark.

MacArthur recalled the tense moment
they approached the enemy ships.

We waited, hardly breathing,

for the first burst of shell

that would summon us
to identify ourselves.

Ten seconds. 20. A full minute.

No gun spoke.

The PTs rode so low in the choppy
seas that they had not spotted us.

There was only these
tiny little Mosquito Craft

that had a chance at being able
to make that dash successfully

without anybody noticing,
as indeed they did.

600 gruelling miles
and 36 hours later

MacArthur's PT boat
reached Mindanao Island,

where the US
still controlled an airfield.

From here a B-17 bomber
took him to Australia.

There, MacArthur made a famous vow:

I said... to the people
of the Philippines,

"whence I came, I shall return."

Hear, hear...

Tonight... I repeat those words:

Hear, hear...

- "I shall return!"
- Hear, hear...

In March 1945,
MacArthur did just that.

Driving the Japanese
out of the Philippines.

He decided to return
to Corregidor Island...

on a PT boat.

We had departed in the darkness

of a sombre night.

We came back
in the sunlight of a new day.

Six months later,
on September 2nd 1945,

MacArthur would witness
the Japanese surrender

and the end of World War Two.

Crucially, the United States was
able to gather its industrial might,

building a massive Navy,

which included nearly 600 PT boats,

doing their part for victory.

Mixed in
with the yachts and cruisers

in the small port of Ramsgate
in the south-east of England

is a remarkable boat...

with a unique story.

This is Sundowner.

Sundowner was a motor yacht owned by

a captain named Charles Lightoller.

In 1930 he bought an old Royal Navy
First World War harbour launch,

and converted it
into a family cruiser.

He went cruising all over.
He went to Bergen in Norway.

He went up the Baltic.
He went to Holland and Belgium,

and Germany,
and he just enjoyed it.

By the summer of 1939
the Nazis threatened all of Europe.

War was imminent.

The British government
scrambled to prepare.

One intelligence agency
thought that even an old

retired seadog could play his part
in these preparations.

The story goes
that suddenly two blokes arrived

looking rather suspicious.

But apparently
they were admiralty fellows,

intelligence chaps,
and they spoke to Lightoller.

Told him a little bit about
a certain mission, secret mission,

they wanted him to get involved in.

Would he be interested
in trusting them

and following it up?

Why would British Naval Intelligence

be interested in
Charles Lightoller?

Because he had proved himself
to be a remarkable seaman

with nerves of steel.

In April 1912,
Lightoller was second officer

on the most famous ship
in the world - the Titanic.

Aged 38, Lightoller
was a very experienced officer.

He was described by his Titanic
colleagues as being a hard case.

A really tough guy.

On the night of
the sinking on 14th April 1912,

Lightoller was in charge
of the lifeboats

on the port side of the ship.

As Titanic sank he jumped into
the freezing waters of the Atlantic.

Later he would recall:

Striking the water was like

a thousand knives
being driven into one's body,

and, for a few moments,
I completely lost grip of myself."

Lightoller saved himself and others

by climbing onto
an overturned lifeboat.

He was the most
senior officer to survive.

The night the Titanic sank,
Charles Lightoller's character

really shone through:
brave, dependable, capable.

His traumatic experience
did not put him off the sea.

In the First World War
Lightoller commanded a destroyer.

He was on patrol
and then he saw a U-boat surface.

And so he rushed at the U-boat,
slammed into this U-boat,

and split it and that sank.

Now Charles Lightoller
was the right man

for an unusual stealth mission.

On the eve of the Second World War,
the British Admiralty had a problem.

They had almost no intelligence
on the north German coast -

the location for a possible
major amphibious invasion.

In this period
before air reconnaissance,

situational awareness,
as it's now called,

was often quite hard to get.

Any information that could be
obtained was pretty important.

Intelligence officers
asked Lightoller

if he would secretly photograph,

map and sketch the coastline
of northern Germany.

He readily agreed.

His wife Sylvia insisted
she came too.

She could make the mission look
even more like an innocent cruise.

So, in the summer of 1939,
the Lightollers set off for Germany,

to begin their mission.

So he used to go to various bays
and inlets and anchor.

And from below,
through the porthole,

so he wouldn't be
seen with binoculars,

he used to look at the coast,

see what defences
there might be there

and what troops
there were and so on.

As they made
their way along the coast,

Lightoller also measured
the depth of the seabed -

vital intel for any invasion fleet.

Lightoller's mission
is James Bond espionage.

We need to know this information.

We need to send somebody there

who can gather it.

So, he is at serious danger
of being caught and arrested.

I think Lightoller
would have loved the mission.

He'd have loved
the tension of it.

For two weeks things went smoothly.

Then when Sundowner
was moored in Jade Bay

near the major German naval port
of Wilhelmshaven,

a patrol boat suddenly appeared and
made straight for the Lightollers.

With little time to think,
Charles improvised.

So he came up on deck
and with a glass in his hand

and a bottle of gin in the other,
pretending to be drunk.

And he fooled about on the deck
making a big show of himself.

Sylvia at the stern looking very
disapproving of the whole thing.

The Nazis were baffled.

But then they laughed

and the tension was broken
and off they went.

Mind you, at that stage
Lightoller thought,

"Well, who knows what might happen.

They might come back at any time

having discussed it
with somebody else."

So that was the time to go home.

Saved by gin,
Sundowner returned to England

with Lightoller's bag
full of film, soundings, sketches,

and details of
German gun emplacements.

Vital information
for a nation readying for war.

But Lightoller's service
to his country wasn't over.

Weeks later World War Two broke out.

In September 1939
British troops moved into France.

But by the spring of 1940

they were on full retreat
from Hitler's blitzkrieg.

Pushed back into
a small enclave on the coast,

to a port called Dunkirk.

Evacuation by sea
was the only option.

The Royal Navy
quickly devised a plan

codenamed Operation Dynamo.

They have to find means
of lifting all of those men

off an increasingly narrow beach
area with very few port facilities,

under pressure, under bombardment.

Desperate, the British Admiralty

asked small civilian craft
to make the treacherous journey

across the Channel to France.

Really anything that could float
was mobilised by the Navy

to act as the crucial
small craft backup

to the personnel ships
and the warships.

Once again,
Charles Lightoller was ready.

Early in the morning
of June 1st, 1940,

Sundowner left Ramsgate Harbour.

On board with Lightoller
were his eldest son Roger

and a young Sea Scout
named Gerald Ashcroft.

During the journey German aircraft
hounded and strafed Sundowner.

Gerald Ashcroft remembered how
Lightoller, standing on the deck,

skilfully dodged the attacks.

He sung out to go hard a port

which we promptly did,

and the bullets came
flying down the starboard side.

The plane came round,
had another go.

We twisted, we turned. That was
the start of the fighter planes.

Somehow,
Sundowner made it to the chaos

of Dunkirk harbour.

Lightoller wanted to rescue
as many men as possible.

But the most Sundowner had
carried before was 20 people.

We got over 50 aboard down below

and we started filing on deck.

When we got approximately 130,

Sundowner was so low in the water

that we could not take any more.

Troops were brought here minus
their helmets and rifles and boots.

All these troops,
not so well, of course.

They'd been under fire
for many days.

Brought into the main saloon,

pushed into the cabins,
all lying down flat.

Dodging air attacks
and heavily laden

with a remarkable 130 people,

Sundowner made her way
back across the Channel.

Then at 10 o'clock in the evening
on the 1st June, 1940,

she edged slowly into the safety
of Ramsgate Harbour.

Across nine days nearly
340,000 British and Allied troops

were evacuated from Dunkirk,

saving the British Army
from the brink of annihilation.

Few now would guess
Sundowner's war story.

When we read about and think
of naval operations during the war,

we do think of the larger ships,
don't we?

The destroyers and cruisers,
and so on.

But small ships like this one
played a very vital part

and a necessary part.

By the start of World War Two,

the submarine was already
a feared combat ship,

with a formidable war record.

As the war progressed
the Allies saw potential

for more complex stealth missions.

Submarines are ideal
for covert work.

They would surface
for as brief a time as possible

and then you could pop open a hatch

and get agents ashore
or bring people off from the shore

or observe the shore
and then get away again

very quickly.

One British submarine in particular

would become a true
stealth specialist - HMS Seraph.

Seraph played a pivotal role
in two critical Allied invasions.

Her first such assignment
was in October 1942.

General Eisenhower's deputy,
46-year-old General Mark Clark,

was trusted with a secret mission.

He had become good friends with
Eisenhower by this point in time.

A confidant, but also somebody

who was counted on to go ahead

and... and take care of business.

Clark needed to meet
a French General in Algeria,

just weeks before an
Allied invasion of North Africa.

North Africa
is not held by Germans.

It's held by the Vichy French.

So this is the French government
that was set up

after France fell
in the summer of 1940.

Although the French
were former allies,

Vichy France
was a German puppet state

and might resist the invasion.

The Americans and the British
hoped that something

could be worked out
with the French in North Africa.

So we wouldn't
have to fight the French.

They would welcome us ashore.

The mission,
named Operation Flagpole,

would be a dangerous one,
into hostile territory.

It's going through the infested
waters of the Mediterranean.

It's escaping patrols.

So there's great personal risk.

If they're captured they could be
seen as spies and, of course,

we know the countless tales
of what happens to spies.

On board HMS Seraph,

Clark met its young commander,

28-year-old Lieutenant
Norman Jewell.

He is a very, very junior officer
at this point in time.

But he possessed a great deal
of confidence about what he could do

and what his boat could do
in the Mediterranean.

On the 21st October 1942,
they reached the Algerian Coast.

Seraph waited,
submerged, until nightfall.

At midnight the klaxon sounded.
-

Seraph surfaced.
Time to go ashore.

The submarine has to get
in very close in darkness.

They have to extract Clark
and his team from the boat.

Get him into a collapsible canoe
and get him through the surf

and onto a beach
in a hostile country.

They made landfall and
got to the rendezvous without issue.

At 5am, the French General
Charles Mast arrived

and the talks began.

If Clark could get
French cooperation,

thousands of lives could be saved.

There's an initial feeling
out process to the exchange

between Mast and Clark.

But it doesn't take long

where they gain
almost some mutual trust.

General Mast assured Clark

his troops would not resist
the Allied forces.

Suddenly the phone rang.

Word flashes in
that the police are on the way.

And so there's a mass panic,
and as Clark recounts,

it's as if they threw 40 skunks
on the table

and people scatter
trying to figure out what to do.

Clark and his team
wind up in the cellar.

The Vichy police
had been tipped off.

They searched the house.

Clark and his team waited
anxiously with cocked guns.

We could hear the police

tramping around, looking in corners
and behind furniture.

Every time their feet
approached our trap door,

seven hearts
popped into seven throats.

Half an hour passed.

Finally the owner of the house
convinced the police

there was no one else there,
and they left.

Mark Clark decides maybe better
part of valour to leave as well.

Made his way back down to the beach,

trying to get this rubber boat
back into the surf.

Only to find the weather
had taken a turn for the worse.

Lieutenant Jewell
edged Seraph closer to shore.

Clark later wrote about
his perilous escape.

We seemed to be paddling for hours

without seeing anything...

before we spotted the loom
of the Seraph in the blackness.

They had made it
back to the safety of Seraph.

Flagpole had been a success.

Less than three weeks later,

on the 8th November 1942,

the Allies launched
Operation Torch -

the invasion of North Africa.

Torch is a great success.

It comes, relatively speaking,
with a small loss of life.

They accomplish the objective.

They get Allied forces
ashore in North Africa.

Seraph's career
as a stealth specialist wasn't over.

Six months later, she was ordered
to the west coast of Scotland.

Jewell and his crew were about take
a central role in one of the most

elaborate deception campaigns
in World War Two -

Operation Mincemeat.

Once again Seraph's mission
involved an Allied invasion.

This time it would be the first
on European soil.

The Allies were planning
to go ashore on Sicily

in the Mediterranean.

But they wanted to convince
the Germans it was someplace else.

Sardinia, Rhodes,
any place but Sicily.

Two British intelligence officers

Charles Cholmondeley
and Ewan Montagu

came up with an ingenious plan.

They take a dead body,
a random man who's died in London.

They create
the complete false identity

of an officer in the Royal Marines.

Everything from the obvious
things like his uniform and papers,

down to photographs
of his notional girlfriend.

They chain to the hand
of this corpse

a briefcase containing details
of an entirely fictitious invasion

miles away in the
Eastern Mediterranean,

a long way from Sicily.

The final stage of
the deception required the body,

dressed up as a British major with
the fake name of William Martin,

to wash ashore in Spain.

Seemingly,
the victim of a plane crash.

Although officially neutral,

Spain's leader General Franco
was sympathetic to the Nazi regime.

To get the so-called
Major Martin ashore,

you had to transport him
to the right place off Spain

where he would be washed ashore

and this was again
was a perfect task

for Britain's most covert submarine,
HMS Seraph.

On the 17th of April 1943,

a canister containing Major Martin
was brought aboard Seraph.

Mincemeat's success
now depended on the sub's ability

to stay undetected.

After a tense ten-day journey,

Seraph arrived
off the coast of Spain.

On the morning
on the 30th of April,

Jewell and his officers
brought the body on deck.

Norman Jewell
would later recall the moment.

We brought the body out.

Checked that he'd got his papers
and everything on him

and then slid him over the side.

Went full astern on the motors

so that he'd be pushed
in the right direction to start.

With the body floating toward shore,

Seraph vanished.

The Spanish authorities,
sure enough, found him,

brought him ashore,

opened the briefcase,
photographed all the papers.

Put them back in the briefcase,
closed it up,

then notified
the British Embassy that,

"We found a British soldier.
You can come claim him."

But then deliver the
photographed copies to Berlin.

And the Germans fell for the hoax,
hook, line, and sinker.

Hitler orders
extra troops to Sardinia,

moved Panzer divisions from
the Eastern Front to the Balkans

and sent torpedo boats
from Sicily to Greece.

Operation Mincemeat
is one of the most important

deception operations
of the Second World War.

When the invasion of Sicily
happens, it's not unopposed,

but I think it's fair to say
it's initially quite lightly opposed

and there's no doubt
that Operation Mincemeat

was part of the reason for that.

Victory in Sicily
was the beginning of the end

for Hitler's domination of Europe.

The tide was turning
in the Allies' favour.

Seraph proved that there
was no combat ship

stealthier than the submarine.

But was there a way
to build a surface craft

with the same stealth ability?

To be invisible to radar?

The US Navy wanted to find out.

Speed, surprise,
and the submarine

brought naval stealth tactics
into the 20th century.

But as World War Two went on,

a new technology threatened to make

the old school tactics obsolete -
radar.

Radar transformed
the nature of naval war.

Before the coming of radar

you had to,
if you were an admiral,

see physically
the enemy ships.

And now, suddenly, with radar,

if the enemy
was 50 miles away in a fog

you were gonna be able
to see 'em through the fog!

And this changed the game
almost overnight.

A radar antenna transmits
radio waves out in a wide beam.

When these waves hit an object
they bounce back to the antenna.

There, a receiver picks
up this information

and can establish the object's size,

speed, and direction of travel.

The Cold War
between the US and the Soviets

made the need
to evade radar even more urgent.

America began to look into
the possibilities

of new stealth technology -
initially for aircraft.

The reason why stealth technology

was necessary,
is because the Soviet radars

could shoot down anything
that we put in the sky

with complete ease,
and with a far enough range

that they had a huge amount of time

to respond with missiles,
aeroplanes or whatever.

So could we design something
that was invisible to radar?

In 1975, Alan Brown,
an aeronautical engineer,

joined a top-secret project
at Lockheed's

Advanced Development Programmes -

also known as the Skunk Works.

Their goal, to develop the first
aircraft with stealth technology.

In 1981, Alan's team produced the
first operational stealth aircraft,

the F-117 Nighthawk.

It could not be seen by the
best radar operators in the country.

So if they couldn't pick it up,
nobody could.

The key was the
aircraft's striking, angular design.

Radar can easily detect

a conventional aircraft's
rounded, aerodynamic shape.

An angular design ensured that the
waves dispersed in all directions.

Carbon particles
in the stealth plane's surface

absorbed additional energy.

Making the Nighthawk
almost invisible to radar.

The Nighthawk's success
sparked interest

from another branch
of the US military.

Very few people were briefed
on our technology

and the Navy people
took advantage of that

and asked us
if we could do something

that would be virtually invisible
in their case.

So Alan and his team at Lockheed

created the concept for the
first stealth ship - Sea Shadow.

The most logical thing
that we should do we thought

was just make a stealth fighter
that could travel over water.

And so if you look at the front view
of the stealth fighter

and the front view
of the Sea Shadow ship,

you can see
that they're almost identical.

Same surface slopes,

same materials on them
for absorption

and so on and so forth.

By now Alan
and his team were stealth experts.

But they were not ship builders.

So Lockheed pulled together
a small group of naval engineers.

Among them
ship designer Steve Larson.

We were briefed on this programme,
a secret programme,

and we looked at
the artist's conception

and we go, "Wow that's pretty cool."

And so we started work in early '83

and they brought this barge up

so we could build
the Sea Shadow in secrecy.

Even the barge was top secret.

Called HMB-1,
the CIA built it in 1974

to covertly retrieve
a sunken Soviet sub.

After the mission, the 320-foot-long
barge was mothballed,

until it became
the perfect floating dry dock

to build a top-secret stealth ship.

Three years after Steve
first saw Alan's designs,

Sea Shadow was completed.

It was about December of '85

when the whole thing
was finally put together.

I said, "I wish I could take
a picture of that."

But that wasn't allowed so...

Yeah, it was pretty exciting.

Steve's work was done.

It was now time for Alan
and his team at Lockheed

to put Sea Shadow to the test.

Still top secret, and hidden
inside the giant barge,

they moved Sea Shadow
to the Channel Islands,

off the coast of Los Angeles.

The big question:
was it visible to radar?

One of the first radar tests
that they did

was from the Channel Islands
with the big Navy radar station

which belonged to
Point Mugu Naval base

and they looked down
on Sea Shadow in the water.

The first tests were done,

and certainly the vehicle
essentially disappeared.

But there was a problem.

If you're designing a stealth boat

it's very different to if you're
designing a stealth plane.

When you fire radar at the sea

every single wave is a little face
you can bounce your radar off,

so the sea to radar
looks like a big sort of fuzz.

And if you take a stealth ship

and you drop it into the middle
of that it's a black hole.

So when we look down
from a clifftop

using the big Point Mugu
Navy radars on our ship,

we were able to identify it
because it disappeared

when all the rest
of the sea was visible.

Sea Shadow's invisibility

had become her liability.

She never got a chance to become
an operational combat ship.

The Navy moved on
from the $195-million-project.

She did, however,
provide invaluable information

for the next generation
of stealth ships.

The big legacy is that people
are building stealth ships

all over the world now.

Stealth ships are becoming really
standard for a navy's operations.

They aren't drawing necessarily
on the fighter plane technology

of bouncing the signal away.

What they are drawing on
is radar absorbing technology.

The idea is you don't disappear,
you blend in.

Your radar cross-section
looks far more like something

that should be there,
like a fishing ship.

The US Navy
sold Sea Shadow in 2012

on the condition she be scrapped.

But her legacy lives on.

In 2000,
the USS Cole was hit by terrorists

and 17 American sailors

died in that attack, in Yemen.

After that attack,
I started thinking about why

the Navy doesn't have a high-speed
protection boat, a gunship,

to be able to protect their assets
when they're in foreign countries.

I quickly realised that
it was a complex problem

and I started studying
different boat designs.

After four years of research,

three years of construction

and 22 million dollars,

Greg named the finished ship -
Ghost.

This unique stealth ship has solved
the issue that killed Sea Shadow.

It no longer sticks out
like a sore thumb on radar.

How it does it... is classified.

Ghost is designed
for a multitude of roles.

For fleet force protection
or anti-piracy operations.

It can carry cannons
or guided missiles

like the Griffin or Spike

to take out sea
and land-based targets.

Carry special sensors
for intelligence, surveillance

and reconnaissance.

Or act as an assault vessel,
with room for 18 Navy Seals.

But versatility wouldn't mean much

unless Greg could find a way to keep
the boat steady in rough waters.

A problem that plagued PT boats.

One of the biggest problems
with patrol boats today

is trying to fire
any weapon systems off them.

They're so unstable.

You're moving so much,
it's so hard to target.

Retired Navy veteran
Cliff Byrd knows the problem well.

I was a naval special
warfare combatant crewman.

We'd pilot boats on the water,
take them anywhere in the world.

So any maritime interdiction,

maritime operations is what we do.

In 2010, Cliff was called
to a mission in stormy weather.

It was a bigger sea state day,

so, uh, sea is for probably
about eight to ten feet.

And we were running to do
an interdiction of another vessel.

I just got aboard
a combat craft assault - a CCA.

We came down off a wave
and I actually had

my arm up on the console,

and when it came down
I fractured my elbow

and I blew all the bursa sacs,
basically, in my elbow.

Cliff completed the mission

but the injury kept him
out of commission for three weeks.

Greg Sancoff
wanted Ghost to solve this problem.

His solution was
an unusual-looking design

ship builders call SWATH.

A swath is
a small-waterplane twin hull.

That's what it stands for.
A swath is actually running

under the water,
not on top of the water.

When you have a vessel
that runs on top of the water,

if you have large waves, you're
gonna to have a horrible ride.

A swath rides below the water,

so wave impacts
don't matter to us that much

because a wave impact can only hit

the front of
what we call our struts.

Which are very sharp,
which cleanly cut the waves,

without putting a lot of force
against the hull itself.

The result
is a much smoother ride.

It's extremely different.

In this boat you can be in a bigger
sea state of six to eight feet

and still have control
in the cockpit and no G-shock.

There are downsides
to the SWATH design.

Its huge hulls sit low in the water.

Not ideal for operations
close to shore.

Ghost addresses
that particular deficiency

by having reconfigurable hulls

that allows it to settle
out flat on the water.

It's wide, kind of like a catamaran,

but it can sit
and actually operate in waters

that are only three
and a half to four feet deep.

These frontal propellers
also unlocked a revolutionary idea.

One that would make Ghost

the fastest SWATH ship on the ocean.

The key is a phenomenon
called cavitation.

Cavitation itself is simply
changing water like boiling it.

Except that you're just changing
the pressure not the temperature.

Fast moving propellers

create areas of lower pressure
on their blades,

causing the water to boil
at ambient temperature.

This creates a trail
of vapour bubbles, or foam.

What we're doing is we're creating
underwater foam tunnels

with the front of the propellers.

So we're flying through foam,
that's less dense than water,

which gives us
much better efficiency.

Just behind the propellers
are a set of rings with tiny holes.

These use funnelled air from
the surface to create additional

micro bubbles, completely
encasing the 60-foot hulls in foam.

The result: even less drag,
and a faster combat ship.

Ghost has a top speed
of 45 miles per hour,

a world record for SWATHs.

I am invigorated by science
completely, I love it.

I love doing stuff that... that
other people haven't done before.

Fast, stable, and stealthy,

Ghost is a truly
innovative combat ship.

Modern high-tech radar
and detection equipment

means that no Navy can afford to
fall behind on stealth technology.

But even when this technology
wasn't available,

daring sailors used stealth tactics
to hide and conduct covert missions

that had a lasting impact
on the history of naval warfare.

Stealth technology will always need

a sailor's combat skill
to succeed.

The sea is a terrible place
to try and hide.

And what stealth does it gives you
another tool in your toolkit.

To disappear, to blend in, to be
invisible, to reduce your presence

and appear far less
threatening at sea.

But it has to become part of tactics

because stealth is nothing
without the right tactics.

Subtitles by Sky Access Services