During the end of the 19th century till 1941 several Navies suffered heavy accidents out of non obvious reasons, leading to exploding warships both in battle and in peacetime. Some of the most notorious are the explosion of the battleship USS Maine (ACR-1), on February 15th ,1898, in Havana in peace time and the sinking of three English battlecruisers during the Battle of Jutland on May 31 ,1916. Most of the events sparked careful investigations with different explanations for the incidents.