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Sunken WWI U-Boats a Bonanza For Historians
schwit1 writes "Archaeologists have found the rusting remains of 44 submarines off the United Kingdom's coast, an oceanic graveyard made up mostly of vessels from the German Imperial Navy dating to World War I. Der Spiegel reports a quartet of divers are now at work probing the massive trove of 41 German U-boats, and a trio of English submarines, found at depths of up to 50 feet, off England's southern and eastern coasts. 'We owe it to these people to tell their story.' says archaeologist Mark Dunkley."
Been to the Chicago one !!
It stinks !!
Imagine the WWI stink !!
That was WWII not WWI.
Oh yes, Turing was a genius, helping to sink German U-Boats at the age of 6 ;)
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
Dunkley and his team of divers found UB 17 off England's east coast, [...]
Let me know when they find UB 40 ...
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
To all our soldiers who fought and suffered in that war a few more sunken U-Boats would feel better yet. Wretched wars that did nothing but evil should never have existed.
"Archaeologists"...!?
I am Greek living in Greece and i feel insulted - and i am sure some very old people who were born during WW1 and are still alive are feeling the same as me.
They enlisted, they fought, they sank, they died.
And I did it without any funding too!
Don't you get on Al Gore's internet* and start blathering about facts, young man.
*Al Gore did not invent the internet. This reply is meant for humorous value in this specific context only, and is not intended for use in a factual exchange.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Wow. Only 15m down, off the east coast of England, and nobody noticed before? I'm surprised someone fishing didn't notice.
Initially I thought the same thing, but it really is WW1 and not WW2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-boat_Campaign_(World_War_I)
im sure they could correlate a wealth of information by looking at german communications station logs from these vessels to determine the exact time and date of their demise
"day 15, we remain undetected off the enemy coastline. I dont know how the allies have patrolled so long and hard without fiWF##$(_NO CARRIER"
Good people go to bed earlier.
The First Battle of the Atlantic
British submarines in World War One
His German Imperial Majesty's U-Boats in WWI
WWI German submarine has underwater Lake Michigan grave
German WWI Submarines (Pictures)
U-boat Attack, 1916
Anti-Submarine Measures from World War I
Depth Charges
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
That's what I read.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
What the heck is a Wii U Boat?
**nor did he ever claim to have invented it.
I love how they call it a "race against time". 100 hundred years underwater, and it's in bad shape, but some small amount of extra time, and all will be lost.
Learn to love Alaska
Seems like something that shallow would have been found a long time ago.
I'm not clear here. Are you asserting Turing didn't 1. play a substantial role in the war effort through his work at Bletchley Park and 2. play a significant role in the development of the digital computer?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Citing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Swan_Project
Per Court precedence in the USA, as the U boats were sunk in a time of war, and non-natural causes, the submarines belong to their respective countries. Any archaeology performed, shall require that country's permission, and give the entire wreck findings, scientific findings, and any possible media derived profits to the country of derivation.
whether it be 0.5 billion in gold and silver or chunks of wood, ships sunk in a time of war are treated differently in international waters.
Sites of sunken WW2 U-boats (and other warships of all nations) are treated as war graves with a prohibition against entering or disturbing. Why would WW1 sites be treated any differently?
How old would such wrecks have to be before skeletons would be treated as just skeletons? Most likely nobody would have any scruples nosing around wrecks of Norse longboats of 1,000 years ago, or if that is not the case, how about Greek ships from BCE?
3. play a substantial role in the war effort in WWI.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
It bears reminding that wreck diving costs money, and is fun.
Make a historically entertaining case for sponsorship then have at it.
Wrecks are somehow more interesting to the public than the same or similar vessels preserved on land.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Surviving submarine commanders, and Admiral Doenitz who commanded them, wrote memoirs.
There are plenty of first-hand accounts of submarine warfare from participants. They are in dead-tree media but still available.
Also very interesting are accounts of commerce raiders and Q-ships in both wars.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
World War I had nothing to do with countries being invaded and citizens being murdered.
The Kaiser's invaded France and Belgium and the atrocities committed against civilians are well documented. So for many French and Belgium volunteers the war was precisely about invasion and murder. You are not considering that the people who declare wars and the people who fight wars are entirely two different sets of people with entirely different motivations. Perhaps some of the Kaiser's troops were thinking about murdered princes and national honor but French troops were fighting on **French** soil, they had a very different set of motivations.
"Archaeologists"...!? I am Greek living in Greece and i feel insulted - and i am sure some very old people who were born during WW1 and are still alive are feeling the same as me.
Perhaps a person trained to dig through ancients ruins and reconstruct history is also the best qualified person to dig through modern ruins and reconstruct history. Perhaps archeological techniques and best practices developed over the centuries at ancient historical sites can be applied to modern historical sites as well. Are archaeologists somehow unfit to work at a modern historical site merely because that is not their traditional use?
Surviving submarine commanders, and Admiral Doenitz who commanded them, wrote memoirs. There are plenty of first-hand accounts of submarine warfare from participants. They are in dead-tree media but still available. Also very interesting are accounts of commerce raiders and Q-ships in both wars.
Its not U-boat history in general that is being referred to. It is the specific history of these boats, the specific story of these crewman. I once visited the submariner's memorial at Pearl Harbor. It lists the U.S. submarines that fought in the Pacific during WW2. A bunch of submarines were lost. Some of these were marked as "sunk", some of these were marked as "overdue, presumed lost". To many people there is something unfinished, something sadder, about "overdue, presumed lost". Moving a ship and crew from the "overdue, presumed lost" list to the "sunk" list, giving a location, is meaningful. Especially to family members.
Sunken WiiU boats? If you ask me the whole thing sunk.
You don't get on the tubes, you get *in* them. Everybody knows the internet is made out of tubes!
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Sites identified as being likely to contain the remains of a vessel or its contents which are of historical, artistic or archaeological importance can be designated under Section 1 of the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973 http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/discover/maritime/ http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/caring/listing/protected-wreck-sites/ with a Map of The Designated Sites in UK http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/discover/maritime/map/. English Hereitage are having a push on pre 1840 wrecks http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/about/news/pre-1840-shipwrecks/
I find it weird that naval battles occurred in water too shallow for today's newest, and largest container ships...
That's just Archaeologists speaking. They don't believe anything unless they dug it out of the ground themselves.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Nope. There were U-boats in World War 1.
In fact, the German unrestricted U-boat campaign of 1917 was one of the reasons why the USA entered the war.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Is that a U-boat?
No, that's not-a my boat.
Don't you know it was replaced by tubes a long time ago?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Oh, the tubes are old hat!
It's all been replaced by an XML-RPC lattice.
In fact, the German unrestricted U-boat campaign of 1917 was one of the reasons why the USA entered the war.
That's a huge over-simplification. More can, and should, be said about this.
The British blockaded German (and neutral) ports as part of their war strategy, using their surface fleet.
Incidentally, years before the war, the British had refused to sign a treaty that allowed medical supplies and food to pass through blockages, something that would never be tolerated today. Both food and medical supplies were blockaded. Goods for neutral ports in nations within shipping distance of Germany were blocked as well, to prevent those goods from being re-sold by the neutrals to the Germans. It was just too bad if the neutrals actually needed any of those goods for their own use.
The Germans in turn blockaded Britain using their submarines.
This was unacceptable to many US industrialists. The British had enormous wealth from their empire, and were prepared to buy large amounts of munitions from the US, at a substantial profit to the industrialists.
The Germans, on the other hand, weren't in the market for large amounts of US munitions. Their chemical industry was capable of making its own munitions.
In fact the pre-war British army heavily depended upon German imports for its ammunition, a point the cretins who pushed Britain into the conflict somehow failed to consider in their rush to go to war, and one of the reasons -- aside from gross military incompetence -- the British were so desperate for munitions.
The US industrialists were not about to accept the loss of the enormous profits to be made by selling arms to Britain. They went screaming to the press and the government about the Germans infringing "freedom of the seas" and the evil "U-boat menace", but were strangely silent about the British limiting that same freedom. Since some of these same industrialists owned a number of key press organizations, it wasn't hard for them to find a sympathetic reporters and editors to make sure the story was spun the right way.
As part of the strategy to put pressure on Germany to allow sales of munitions to Britain, incidents such as the Lusitania sinking were deliberately blown out of proportion. The Lusitania was described as an innocent passenger ship, sunk by the cold-hearted Germans. In reality, the ship was built for conversion to a merchant cruiser, and was listed in the German fleet list for the British navy as a merchant cruiser. While the ship was carrying civilian passengers, it also was carrying vast amounts of munitions at the time it was sunk (carefully disguised in the cargo manifest as cheese and butter, being shipped in vast quantities in -- unrefrigerated -- cargo holds with the destination listed as the Royal Weapons Testing Establishment, which was apparently short of dairy products!). The presence of munitions on the ship was confirmed by divers in 2008. Further, during the war the British routinely used liners as troop transports, moving hundreds of thousands of troops from throughout their empire to France to fight in the battles there, making a "liner" a legitimate military target by any standard.
For a while, the strategy worked. The Germans were convinced to back off from their naval blockade, while the British one continued unimpeded.
Eventually, the Germans got tired of putting up with this sort of cynical double dealing and re-imposed the U-Boat blockage. The US industrialists them pushed the US into war, allowing them to sell even more weapons.
They had code breakers in WWI as well, or did you think code breaking was a new invention