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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."
That was WWII not WWI.
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)
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
Basically all too true, and I couldn't agree more with the general distinction, but it wasn't that cut and dried. When you use the phrase "nothing to do with" you do need to be careful. It didn't hold a candle to the the devastation of civilian populations in WW2, but it was bad enough in its own right.
DIRECT civilians deaths DUE TO MILITARY ACTION in WW1
Russian Empire 500,000
Romania 120,000
Austria-Hungary 120,000
France 40,000
German Empire 1,000
Excess deaths due to famine, disease, etc attributable to the war:
Ottoman Empire 2,150,000
Russian Empire 1,000,000
Italy 585,000
German Empire 425,000
Austria-Hungary 347,000
Romania 330,000
Serbia 300,000
France 260,000
UK 107,000
Bulgaria 100,000
A global total of 950,000 direct civilian deaths plus 5,900,000 indirect civilian deaths was a "good" warmup for WW2 with its 38 to 55 million civilian deaths. Since the bulk of the civilian hurt didn't come down on the UK and France, and the worst of it not even on Germany, it gets overlooked, but I doubt if the people of Russia and Turkey will ever forget what their forebears went through.
Just to be clear, for people not alive in the UK in the 80s the name of the band UB40 came from the code on the unemployment benefit form.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Submarines are ballasted with seawater. The leaking mercury you read about was cargo, being carried to Japan by one German submarine (U-864) for use in explosives manufacture.