This started almost as a joke... but it's actually rather serious. Bolivia has the largest navy of any landlocked country in the world, complete with its own Marine Corps, numbering over 2,000 men in 2010 (for a total manpower strength of 5,000!) Bolivia's navy currently is responsible for patrolling the rivers as well as Lake Titicaca, but it is also a source of political will to someday regain their sea access at Chile's expense.
Chile decided not to block Bolivia's desire to build a patrol force for Lake Titicaca, but wasn't entirely amused when they ordered a pair of submarines...
Records achieved:
- World's highest submarines
- World's largest freshwater submarines
- First submarines to cross the Andes
- Bolivian Navy: only navy composed entirely of submarines
- Smallest torpedoes installed on a submarine (30cm / 12")
- Only warships on world's highest navigable waterway
- World's only landlocked submarine force
- Largest waste of money for national military prestige since the invention of national prestige
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Armchair Admiral Magazine
1922 Jutland Plaza, Suite 428
Cleito, Atlantis, 18-03-441
July 20th, 1989
Mr. Georgi Nikolov Tsvetkov
1418 Pirin Road, #336D
Varna, Varna, BG
Gentlemen,
I was excited to receive your letter the other day inquiring about the Libertador Simón Bolívar-class submarines, and your interest in discussing their fiftieth anniversary for your magazine. I would be delighted to provide you with as much information as I can from my father's old design folders.
As you know already, my father Nikolai Rachov Tsvetkov was working as a designer for the Varna Naval Constructor Bureau in Varna, Bulgaria, from 1935 to 1950. Among his original duties was taking initial draft ideas proposed by the Naval Staff and lofting them into blueprints to provide to the construction managers. In 1939, my father received a promotion to Chief Designer for the Libertador Simón Bolívar, which was a very prestigious career move, as no Bulgarian shipyard had designed and built a submarine before. The Bulgarian Navy's liaison officer spent a great deal of time observing the design and construction process, as the Bulgarian Navy wished to use the Varna yard's project as a test for manufacturing coastal submarines for the Black Sea.
The Bolivian Navy, of course, had a number of difficulties due to being landlocked, and having lost a number of wars in their neighborhood; but they desired the pride of maintaining a naval tradition, and had spent two or three years quietly shopping around Europe for a yard willing to do business with them and their designer, Mr. Miklos Brunszko, a Hungarian (I believe). This, of course, was one of their difficulties, as Mr. Brunszko was a much better self-promoter and womanizer than he was naval architect; and his presence in the Bolivian purchasing team proved extremely detrimental to their negotiating. In fall of 1938 the Bolivian agents finally managed to bribe a small company in Hungary to build the Brunszko Submarine; but less than a week later, while returning from an abortive trip to Byzantium, Mr. Brunszko was pushed out the vestibule of the Orient Express by an irate cuckolded Slovak, and the remainder of the Bolivian commission found themselves in Sofia with an itenerant Catholic priest as their translator. Without Brunszko, the Hungarian constructors folded up their operation and disappeared with nearly a hundred thousand British pounds, and the Bolivians once again found themselves without a shipyard. The lamentable demise of Mr. Brunszko proved fortuitous to the Bolivian purchasing agents, however, as the Bulgarian Navy, in the person of Admiral Stoyanov, was soliciting foreign construction in an attempt to meet a number of budgetary requirements at that time.
Admiral Stoyanov rapidly arranged for the Bolivian agents to discuss their requirements with my father. They presented the Brunszko Submarine in February of 1939, and signed a contract to purchase two boats. Quite unbeknownst to them, my father did not think well of either the Bolivians or the the Brunszko Submarine, and I still recall his comments about the Brunszko Submarine "obviously designed by some fool from a landlocked country and designed for some fools from a landlocked country." He instead tried to interest the Bolivian agents in a fast patrol boat; but they were quite adamant in purchasing submarines; my father told me decades later that the Bolivians had an unreasonable fear of Chilean, Peruvian, and Brazilian airpower, and they believed surface ships would be completely extinct by 1945, in favor of submarines and aircraft. Small-Navy historians will of course note that Bolivia amended this stance in 1948 when they bought a small patrol boat for Lake Titicaca.
Previously, my father had been involved as the senior designer for a Bulgarian submarine project, Project 917, the goal of which was to design a small, rail-transportable submarine to launch on the Danube River, in case of war with Romania or Yugoslavia. This design process resulted in a design fairly similar to the Brunszko Submarine, but had been more fully developed by engineers with more talent than Mr. Brunszko. The idea, of course, was rightly rejected by the Bulgarian Navy, which didn't want anything to do with trying to operate submarines on the Danube River. However, this design was far better developed than Brunszko's designs, going as far as hydrodynamics calculations for hull strength and buoyancy. My father and one of his employees, Emil Zhekov, reworked the Project 917 plans on our family's dining-room table during an all-night brainstorming session. The next morning, Zhekov nonchalantly switched out the plans while my father distracted the Bolivian purchasing commissioners. This, as you no doubt are aware, was the cause of a legal dispute later when Mr. Brunszko's estate agent sued the Bolivian and Bulgarian governments for "stealing" the Brunszko Submarine design; of course this was untrue, as Zhekov and my father had used the modified Project 917 plans.
In March, my father spent much of his time working at the molding loft, and produced a set of 1:1 scale drawings for the shipyards. As far as I am aware, no copies were ever made of these plans, and after my father's death in 1968, I found them neatly folded and cataloged in waterproof boxes in his garden shed. I have recently donated them to the Bulgarian Naval Museum in Varna, where they are viewable by request in the archives.
Construction of both submarines started in April; a very swift advance to the project by any stretch of the imagination. This was, once again, due to my father's use of the existing Project 917 plans rather than the Brunszko designs (as was testified in court in 1942). The two submarines were built in two different sections: a forward section, containing the torpedo tubes and batteries, an aft section containing the diesel engine and fuel. The sail was detachable. This was a key feature brought over from Project 917, which was intended to be rail-transportable from the Black Sea to the Danube. The larger two pieces measured a maximum of 17.5 meters by 4.2 meters by 3.3 meters, and weighed seventy tons; the sail was significantly smaller in size and weighed two tons. An additional thirteen tons of gear was deemed "loose gear" and was designed to fit in a metal-reinforced crate.
Armament was once again a product of Project 917's design process. The original Bolivian specifications as drawn up by Brunszko called for 18" torpedoes, with two deck mounted, aimable torpedo tubes. This, of course, was one of the failings of the original design, and my father instead used the Obrazets 37/30 torpedoes designed by the Bulgarian Navy for use aboard the Danube mosquito-boats. These torpedoes, the smallest placed in production during the 1930s, were designed to be used in riverine and other extremely shallow environments; their normal depth-settings usually being less than two feet. This made their use ideal for the Bolivian submarines; but it was also apparently a condition imposed upon the Bolivians by Chile, which was permitting the transport of the submarines into Bolivia. Apparently, the Chileans feared the Bolivians would someday attempt to retake the coastline that they had fought over as recently as 1933, and would deploy the submarines to the Pacific to use in a war; the thirty-centimeter 37/30 torpedoes ran too shallow to be used in choppy waters (the torpedoes would broach in waves above two feet), and their small 85kg warheads would be hard-pressed to deliver a decisively crippling blow to an oceanic warship.
A twenty-millimeter Oerlikon machine gun was also installed in a unique "disappearing" mount that swung up through the torpedo-loading hatch. This gun could be placed in less than ten seconds, exposing only the head of the gunner above the hull of the submarine while the gun was in action.
Due to a number of delays in the construction process, neither the Libertador Simón Bolívar nor the Santa Cruz de la Sierra were completed until mid-August. At this time, the two boats made their only ocean journeys, which, as a fifteen-year old, I was privileged to join. The vessels, still in the hands of the shipyard, were fully-assembled and temporarily launched under the Bulgarian flag. A small group of Bulgarian submariners, drawn from the BVK Delfi, came aboard along with six Bolivian officers and petty officers, in order to conduct test cruises. My father, being very involved as chief designer, rode along on all of the voyages to observe the testing. On the third and final trial cruise of the Libertador Simón Bolívar, he received permission to bring me along as an observer.
The conn of the Libertador Simón Bolívar was stuffed to the brim with the Bolivian naval officers who would eventually be manning the boat, several Bulgarian sailors who were attempting to keep the Bolivians from prematurely sinking the boat, my father an I, and the Catholic priest who was still serving as the Bolivians' translator. Our cruise lasted six hours and we dived twice. I remember most of all that it was quite crowded and a bit smelly - it was late August and the boats had no air conditioning, so we all stank by the end of the cruise. Still, I found the experience enjoyable enough that four years later I joined the Bulgarian Navy's submarine service, eventually becoming a watch officer of the Akula.
Upon our return to Varna, the Libertador Simón Bolívar and her sistership Santa Cruz de la Sierra were declared fit for delivery, and both boats went into the drydock. Their loose gear was stowed, with the diesel engine and batteries removed and placed in steel-reinforced crates. The conning towers were removed and the two main sections of the hull were split and the transport frames built around each of the sections. Once complete, they were loaded on an antique German steamship named the Shmalkaldic, bound for the Chilean port of Arica.
My father, as Chief Designer, was required to oversee the transit and reassembly of the two submarines to Lake Titicaca. My mother refused to go, and as I was ahead in my schooling, I mounted a campaign to accompany him to Bolivia; this, of course, was quite an adventure for me at that age. My campaign successful, my father and boarded the Shmalkaldic and spent two months crossing the Atlantic. The cruise was very enjoyable for me, and I learned wireless telegraphy from the ship's "sparks"; but my father spent the entire voyage seasick. For reasons that I am unaware of, our freighter's captain decided not to take (or perhaps was not permitted to take) the Panama Canal, so the Shmalkaldic beat around Cape Horn in a Force Eight blow. The Bolivian seamen, accompanying their subs on the journey home, were terrified the Shmalkaldic would turn turtle, and locked themselves in the forward compartment of the Libertador Simón Bolívar, thinking it would save them when the ship sunk. But the Shmalkaldic's skipper chewed on his pipe, and informed me privately that it was quite normal for the Horn, and plowed straight through. The Bolivians stayed in their intended lifeboat for three days until the weather moderated, and they emerged to ironically find a Chilean battlecruiser, the Valparaiso, passing. (Of course you will remember the old grudges Bolivians hold for Chile, which took away their seacoast in the 1800s. I found it quite inexplicable why they would permit the Bolivians to transport submarines across their territory, but apparently they had their reasons.)
At Arica, the submarines and their crated pieces were unloaded and placed aboard train-cars for the journey to Tiguina. The railway from Arica to La Paz is narrow-gauge and partially racked due to the steep grades; and it runs from sea-level to higher than almost all of the highest points in Europe. Our special train had crested the Andes and was heading down into the valley around La Paz when disaster struck in the form of a herd of wild llamas. The railway engineer slammed on the air-brakes and put the train into emergency stop; the rear flat-cars and caboose, with both hull sections of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, broke loose from the train and seven miles down a straight grade, with a trio of terrified brakemen trying to slow it down enough to jump off. The three loose cars rolled straight through the Chilean border station before they finally stopped, and when the Bolivians finally arrived to collect Santa Cruz de la Sierra, they found a group of highly amused Chilean soldiers mocking "the submarine that rolled down the mountain." The Chilean press apparently had a great deal of fun with this at the expense of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.
By the beginning of November, the Bolivians managed to get the various pieces of Libertador Simón Bolívar in place in their drydock at Tiguina, a facility run by a usually-drunk American expatriate who referred to "Lake Tittycocky." The pieces were put back together by a group of enthusiastic (but completely untrained) Bolivian menial laborers, and my father spent most of his time keeping them from taking "souvenirs" - which was a rather surprising problem, especially considering some of the things souvenir hunters managed to drag away. In mid-November, someone actually stole Santa Cruz de la Sierra's entire conning tower, crate and all; my father had to find a local metalworker and have another one freshly built. In another case, a Bolivian government minister took a Obrazets 37/30 torpedo, completely fueled and with a live warhead, as a souvenir. My father tracked it down and found it sitting in the minister's garden.
By December - summer in the southern hemisphere - the two submarines were complete and my father determined to launch them before more pieces were stolen. The Bolivian government rapidly sent out a massive number of government officials and a raucous peasant crowd to officially commission them into service, and there was a massive cheer as the submarines chugged out of the drydock - a cheer that ended abruptly when they submerged, making the peasants in the crowd think they had sunk. Eventually the news passed by word of mouth that they were actually supposed to do this, and the cheering redoubled when they returned.
My father's job completed, he and I returned to Bulgaria (by zeppelin, he insisted), and the Bolivians were left to play with their Lake Titicaca submarines. Their history since 1940 is probably more familiar to the small-navy enthusiasts among your magazine readers, and I am not so well-informed on their careers. I'm pleased to hear, however, that they remain in operation after fifty years.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any further questions. It was a delight to share these memories with you and I'll look forward to reading your magazine article about them.
Sincerely,
Georgi Nikolov Tsvetkov
Archivist (retired), Bulgarian Naval Museum
[SIZE=3]Libertador Simón Bolívar-class Submarine[/SIZE]
Date: 1939
Coastal
Armament 1x20mm gun
ElecHP: 100hp
DieselHP: 135hp
CREW: 18
wt fuel&batts: 7t
Light Displacement 155t
Loaded Displacement 157t
Full Displacement 239t
Reserve buoyancy: 34%
Max Surf Speed: 7.6 knots
Max Sub Speed: 5.1 knots
Length: 35.0m
Beam: 4.2m
Draft: 3.3m
Crush depth: 200m
#TT 2 x 18" torpedoes, two reloads each
Tons Oil: 1.4t
Tons Battery: 6.0t
Cruise speed: 7 knots
Submerged speed: 4 knots
Surface Range: 471nm@7 knots
Submerged Range: 9nm@4 knots
[SIZE=1]Note: even though Bulgaria's building these boats, I am not taking commission money for doing so, as Bolivia is an NPC. Design is based on the historical Finnish submarine Saukko.[/SIZE]
Thursday, May 16th 2024, 6:23am
Go to the top of the page
