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Military and Naval Diving - Branches of commercial diving [click here to return to previous page]

Military and Naval Diving:  A Clearance Diver was originally a specialist naval diver who used explosives underwater to remove obstructions to make harbors and shipping channels safe to navigate, but later the term "clearance diver" was used to include other naval underwater work. Units of clearance divers were first formed during and after the Second World War to clear ports and harbors in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe of unexploded ordnance and shipwrecks and booby traps laid by the Germans.  The first units were Royal Navy Mine and Bomb Disposal Units. They were succeeded by the "Port Clearance Parties" (P Parties). The first operations by P Parties included clearing away the debris of unexploded ammunition left during the Normandy Invasion. Six groups of Clearance Divers including Commonwealth and European allied forces were in operation by 1945.  Naval work diver training is much longer and harder than sport diver training and has much stricter entry requirements.  For a long time navies used the old-type heavy standard diving dress when work needed doing underwater. During and after World War II some of them started using frogman-type gear when frogman's kit became available. Later they started often using open-circuit scuba gear for work diving.  In some navies including Britain's, work divers must have a line and a linesman when possible.  Military Diving covers all types of diving carried out by military personnel. There are a number of different specializations for a military diver to choose, some depend on which branch of the military they've joined or where the military needs more divers. Typical offensive activities include underwater demolition, infiltration and sabotage, this being the type of work elite regiments such as the UK Special Boat Service or the USA Navy Seals carry out. Defensive activities are centered around countering the threat of enemy special forces and enemy anti-shipping measures, and typically involve defusing mines, searching for explosive devices attached to the hulls of ships, and locating enemy frogmen in the water.  Military divers need equipment which hides their position and prevents explosives from being set-off, and to this end, they use rebreathers which produce few or no bubbles on the surface, and which contain no magnetic components, this continues down to the design of their diving suit, which will normally have a non-magnetic zip, and the face-mask may be fitted with special anti-reflective glass. Some navies have gone further and given their divers special contact lenses instead of large face-masks to cut down on the risk of a reflection.  Naval diving is the military term for commercial diving, and is drastically different to military diving. Naval divers work to support maintenance and repair operations on ships and military installations. Typical tasks include changing propellers or fitting replacement anodes. Naval divers may also work to recover downed aircraft, submarines, missiles and other military hardware. Their equipment is derived from commercially available equipment, with the US Navy using versions of the Kirby Morgan helmets and full-face masks amongst other equipment.  Experimental diving, is conducted by the US Navy's Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU) and involves meeting military needs through the research and development of diving practices and diving equipment, testing new types equipment and finding new and safer ways to perform dives and related activities. The US NEDU was responsible for much of the early experimental diving work to calculate decompression tables and has since worked on such developments as heated diving suits powered by radioactive isotopes and mixed gas diving equipment, while the British equivalent perfected the Mark 10 submarine escape suits utilized by both the Royal Navy and the US Navy.

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Reference material for this scuba diving related informational article: wikipedia – the free online encyclopedia, scuba diving category

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