Project for Divers?

The disposal of the U boat in Liverpool highlights a major problem with preservation and recovery. When the U boat was raised it was very very difficult to find anywhere interested in putting it on display. Sure we who read this forum are keen on historical obects, but we are in the minority.

The aviation example I can think of is what happened to the Sunderland recovered by Peter Thomas and displayed at Pembroke Dock outside. Hardly any local support and eventually moved to Hendon.It is a surprise to read of a planned recovery of another Sunderland for display at Pembroke Dock.

The positive angle is that several Uk air museums which are non public funded , have managed to get large aircraft under cover such as Newark and Elvington. And others such as MAM do a great job of coping with the impact of weathering.

There was a recent news story on UK TV stating that a USN carrier was being sunk as a ‘dive reef’. The news clip was very short, so more details are needed. Man, that will take some exploring!

My original post has expanded a bit…

Bri 🙂

some good shots here;

http://www.ussoriskany.com/id29.html

there was a full length programme on some of the Satellite channels a while back but cant remember the details.

There was a recent news story on UK TV stating that a USN carrier was being sunk as a ‘dive reef’. The news clip was very short, so more details are needed. Man, that will take some exploring!

My original post has expanded a bit…

Bri 🙂

Since this thread started with aircraft crashes in water I thought you might be interested in this….

http://www.divernet.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?id=6473&sc=1079&ac=d

http://blogs.wessexarch.co.uk/aircraftcrashsitesatsea/about-the-project/

U-534 was still intact earlier today, although the rust looks very brittle…. it’s just sat there at the dockside for how many? 10 ish years? sad..

Thanks for the info on HMS Dasher chaps. The comments about the book are appreciated and noted.

Best wishes
Steve P

Re: HMAS Otway

Sorry to deviate again… the HMAS Otway above is in Holbrook, NSW Australia. Sub theme to honour Commander (?) Holbrook, Australian WW1 Sub Captain.

The Otway is just what you see above ground. So, no, not the whole sub. Still, very big, and very cool!

There is the recently sunk USS Oriskany, but it is a bit deep for the average diver at 130 feet to the flight deck.

There is a lot of video of diving the USS Oriskany on YouTube plus this remarkable footage of the actual sinking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saEy35JycMQ&mode=related&search=

I too saw the Ark Royal documentary. It seemed to contradict the official version of events somewhat.

One interesting part was the presence, during filming of the wreck, of one of the Fulmar pilots. I can’t remember his name but apparently he was the very last man to abandon the Ark before she capsized.

Some very tantalising footage of Fulmars and Swordfish lying on the seabed at 900 metres. I expect they would disintegrate if any attempt was ever made to recover one of them.

Is Ark Royal protected as a war grave? Only one crew member lost his life and his body may have been removed before she sank.

I don’t think the Graf Zeppelin has been mentioned yet.

She was discovered in the Baltic at 80 metres (265 feet) by Polish divers in July 2006.

Indeed – there was a very good BBC documentary on it as well.

My post only related to vessels not alrady mentioned on the thread; however, I remembered last night that I neglected some other WW1 aircraft carriers and pre-aircraft carriers lost: the previous HMS Hermes (a cruiser come extemporised carrier lost in 1914), and HMS Ben-my-Chree lost in the Dardinelles – although consulting a reference book this morning it says that the wreck was raised and scrapped in 1920.

Aircraft carriers

Dont forget Ark Royal , there is a really good book on her discovery including pics of complete Fairey Fulmars sitting on the seabed , cannot recall author of book but a good read.

cheers dave

Am I alone in thinking the book “They Were Never Told” is one of the most ignorantly written books ever produced about military matters? The authors deserve to be congratulated for investigating an overlooked tragedy and for dilligently collecting (wildly conflicting) eye witness accounts. But I believe that it is clear that they have absolutely no understanding of difference between the normal elaborate measures for storing aviation fuel in HM vessels and the extremely dodgy bulk fuel storage on the US built escort carriers. As a result of this fundamental lack of comprehesion the authors come up with the most ludicrous ‘**** and bull’ theories for the loss of the vessel. So if you want to find out more about this loss by all means read this book as one information resource, but be prepared to be deeply irritated by it.

Rant over. Other RN fleet aircraft carriers lost are HMS Courageous which went down in deep water off the coast of Ireland, HMS Glorous which is in the northern North Sea, and HMS Hermes in the Indian Ocean (hasn’t this been explored?).

Of the other escort carriers, the first HMS Audacity went down on the Gibraltar run (off the Bay of Biscay if I recall correctly), and HMS Avenger was torpedoed west of Gibraltar.

HMS Dasher – The forgotten Tragedy

It has been dived but it depends what you mean by ‘surveyed’. Conditions and depth would make things extremely challenging.

I found this site:

http://www.extremetechnical.org/hms_dasher.html

Steering the topic back towards aviation…

Has the wreck of the aircraft carrier HMS Dasher been surveyed?

Best wishes
Steve P

No way! Can’t possibly be a whole submarine! 😀

Where this a will there is a way!

This submarine is miles from any water.

Photographed on the Albury Road in NSW, Oz, last year.

Mark

Shame the Canadians never operated Short Stirlings – God knows what’ll happen IF a suitable example is ever found, by a Brit team ?

Whatever happened to that project that found a Stirling buried in silt in a Norwegian fjord?

I think it had ditched following an attempt to drop equipment to a resistance unit.

It was reported in Flypast about four-or-five years ago and was an MOD sponsored effort if I remember correctly.

These are above the surface….just !!

I suppose these could be salvaged but at least two are missing about a third of their hulls (the engine/motor rooms and stern). I don’t think any of them have coning towers.

I not sure what would be more expensive. Raising a u-boat from the seabed or extracting these three from under the collapsed bunker.

There seems to have been little interest in U-534 and that only needed recovering from Birkenhead! 😀

U-boats history

Try this page

http://uboat.net/history/hamburg_elbe2.htm

These are above the surface….just !!

…and there are no better u-boats to be had…anywhere!

Without doing a search for their numbers I believe there are 2 very complete and original U-Boats. One is in Germany and was presented to them by Norway who used it after WW2 and the other is in the US (Chicago or Boston or somewhere).

I thought somebody would pick me up on that point. 🙂

What I meant of course is that there aren’t any u-boats available that haven’t spent 15 years more than U-534 on the seabed.

I didn’t think there was much chance of getting hold of U-505 (type IXC) from Chicago, U-995 (type VIIC) from Laboe, near Kiel in Germany or the Wilhelm Bauer (ex-type XXI U-2540) from Bremerhaven, Germany.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unterseeboot_995

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wilhelm_Bauer_%28U-2540%29

There is also CV-707 (type II) built (in Finland) as the prototype for the type II German u-boats preserved on the island of Suomenlinna in Finland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_submarine_Vesikko