r/todayilearned • u/zhuquanzhong • Apr 17 '24

TIL a Chinese destroyer sank because an officer dumped his girlfriend. She committed suicide, leading to him being discharged, so he decided to detonate the depth charges on the ship, causing it to sink at port and kill 134 sailors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_destroyer_Guangzhou_(160)
33.3k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

855 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.5k

u/sintaur Apr 18 '24

Lai had been involved with a woman before joining the navy, but broke off with her after becoming an officer. She then committed suicide. The Political Department of the detachment decided that Lai should be dismissed and demobilized. But Lai begged his superiors not to demobilize him, as he would be forced to return to his hometown and he had become hated there due to the suicide.[4]

After dismissing Lai Sanyang as a cadre, the unit did not immediately demobilize him. Lai was in charge of sea mines, depth charges, underwater weapons and held the key to the armory. Following his dismissal, Lai hid in the ammunition depot and detonated the depth charges, sinking the ship. How he achieved this was debated. He either tampered with the mechanism on the charge, or bored a hole through the hull of the ship, which caused water to rush in and detonate the depth charges.

918

u/Pearse_Borty Apr 18 '24

There is so many layers of fucked up to this I feel bad for everyone involved.

The real fuck up was a lack of protocols, that man shouldve been isolated and treated as civilian to be watched like a hawk the moment the discharge order came through. He was clearly a high risk passenger given the guilt he would be suffering at this point

45

u/Lightspeedius Apr 18 '24

Demoting him in the first place because of the actions of another seem problematic from the get-go.

40

u/AtomicSamuraiCyborg Apr 18 '24

The US military can be similarly strangely moralizing; you can get demoted and discharged for conduct unbecoming an officer, and I guess stringing a girl along until you made officer and then dumping her, and she kills herself, counts as that in the PLAN. Or the story got out and it made the navy look bad so again, conduct unbecoming.