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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.
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.
"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 didn't call them pigboats for nothing.
I feel as if I just woke up in a beer bar between football games...
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.
If your country was being invaded or your people were being murdered wholesale you'd pray for a war to end it.
Fucking retarded fucks don't give a fuck about reality.
Look you f*cking retarded Anonymous Coward f*ck who doesn't give a f*ck about reality - Read a history book.
World War I had nothing to do with countries being invaded and citizens being murdered. It was all about the aristocracy sending young boys to their death due to antiquated treaties signed by the same aristocrats. It carried on for years, with boys being shot, gassed and suffering terribly so those same SOBs could save face.
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
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.
World War I had nothing to do with countries being invaded and citizens being murdered. It was all about the aristocracy sending young boys to their death due to antiquated treaties signed by the same aristocrats. It carried on for years, with boys being shot, gassed and suffering terribly so those same SOBs could save face.
It had all to do with 40 years of nationalism, an assassination and automatic mobilization of ones military. With a base policy of self-reinforcing militarization and mobilization. If you don't have any idea what that last sentence means, it means that x country would deploy 5k troops, you'd deploy 10k, they'd deploy 15k, and and a destroyer. So you'd deploy another 20k and two destroyers and a dreadnaught. Then, you'd start building more ships, more guns, and so on.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
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.
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.
For certain values of "our".
Most wars do nothing but evil.
So Germany invading Belgium despite Britain's guarantee to Belgium and France had nothing to do with the war.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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?
That might be plausible, if the Wii U really is as big of a flop as some reports indicate.
Since Atari's New Mexico landfill no longer accepts electronic waste, scuttling at sea may be the next best option.
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."
"All of the sunken U-boats are relatively close to the coast, at depths of no more than 15 meters (about 50 feet)"
Doesn't sound like international waters to me.
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.
World War One not only set the stage for World War Two, but it resulted in issues that plague us to this very day. The first world war ultimately lead to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, and the Islamic Caliphate government in 1923. One of the key goals of Islamist extremists, in particular al Qaida as they are fighting today, is to reestablish the Caliphate, and from there rebuild an Islamic empire. By similar token, the Ottoman Empire was carved up in such a fashion that there will likely be no end of conflict in the Middle East for the foreseeable future.
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
Your forgot to mention rise of Communism in Russia. Not only did Germany directly sponsor the movement, but the war weakened Russian Empire enough to make toppling the government possible.
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?
World War 1 set the stage for pretty much everything that happened in the 20th century. Europe was VASTLY different before WW1 than it was after. Before, Europe was mostly a collection of a few large "global players". Afterwards some of them (most noticeably Autria-Hungary) dissolved into a sizable amount of smaller countries. That tilted the balance of stability considerably, with all of the remaining imperial superpowers trying to gain a hold of the newly created smaller states.
France wanted to subdue Germany forever, but only managed to set the stage for the rise of Hitler and WW2 in the process by creating a lot of hatred and an urge to get revenge on the other side of the Rhine.
The fall of the czarist Empire in Russia and the rise of the Soviet Union would not have happened, or at the very least would not have happened so easily and quickly, without WW1. It's actually likely that some kind of revolution would have happened, but without WW1 the other conservative absolutist monarchies (notably Germany and Austria-Hungary) would probably have intervened at the side of the Czar, like it was the other way around in 1848 during the uprisings in those countries, containing the revolution.
The fall of the Ottoman Empire mostly led first to the "winners" splitting up those areas between them, which we still can see in the Middle East, and which still causes trouble to this day. Of course islamist organizations want to reestablish the rule of the Islam, I just kinda doubt that they'd be very happy with the Caliphate that ruled the Ottoman Empire in the end. The zeal seems more to be that those areas should be put back under Islam rule, no matter in what kind of state, as long as the Sharia is the law.
Another important aspect of WW1 is actually that the USA came out of its Monroe Doctrine, its self-declared isolation and its decision to avoid interfering with European politics. That is, IMO, one of the most often overlooked and actually one of the more important effects of WW1: The US decided to be a global force. Of course WW2 ended the idea that a country like the US could abstain from international politics for good, but WW1 certainly put the first crack into that shell.
I think WW1 and its effects is easily overlooked and it sure is overshadowed by WW2, its effects and atrocities, not to mention that WW2 is not only closer to today but also without doubt the war that the US was a lot more involved with, but the effects it had on Europe were quite on par with those WW2 had.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
you're talking about proximate causes
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/
It's a given and there is other stuff going on in the world. Just because the USA is still obsessed with Hitler doesn't change that the rest of the world sees Stalin the same way and is amazed that people in the USA haven't caught up yet.
So just take it as read that the USSR was a disaster, that we all know that already, and please let us discuss other stuff.
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.
We do see Stalin the same way, well those who no who he was. There was even thinking of continuing WWII and turning on Russia after the fall of Germany in some America circles. The reality I think for most Americans is that the USSR was the existential threat to us that Hitler's Germany was to Europe and North Africa. We just don't like to talk about because its what had us cowering under tables for 30 years and seeing spies around every corner.
Stalin and Kruschev(sp?) are unpleasant memories
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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+
And rampant profiteering by the military-industrial complex
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Really strong evidence against that is that Saddam liked to compare himself to Stalin but that wasn't enough for the US media - they had to compare him to Hitler instead.
I don't really understand the connection. I could continue with the atrocities during the Russian revolution of 1917 (the October one, not the February one), the "cleansing" during Stalin's reign, the various and numerous crimes against humanity in the Gulags and other camps that are not far from what we remember from Nazi concentration camps... of course, but it would be kind off topic in this discussion, wouldn't it?
This here was about the results of WW1 and how it affected history in the 20th century. And yes, without WW1, without the aid of the Germans and without the Russian army no longer being the backbone of the Czarist rule (actually, if I'm not mistaken, one of the main backbones of the Bolsheviks was the navy, but I have to admit I'm not that firm in Russian history), nothing of the communist crap that went down over Russia between 1917 and 1990 would have happened. History sure would have taken a different turn without WW1. WW2 would not have occurred. Or at the very least it would have looked vastly different. It's interesting to ponder the development of Europe without WW1. Imagine Franz Ferdinand didn't get shot in 1914 and would have inherited the empire of Austria-Hungary in 1916 when Franz Joseph II dies.
In total, though, I'm almost certain war was inevitable. When you look at the nations before WW1, they were armed to the brim, everyone hated everyone, everyone wanted to bite out a piece of everyone else and everyone was just waiting for a reason to attack.
Germany had a militarist tradition and was a very militarist country. Today we remember that as some sort of Nazi thing, but they only reaped that militarist tradition. It was sown during the latter half of the 19th century, and being in the military was some way to climb the social ladder. Even if you didn't make it into the officers ranks, you were a soldier, you were someone. You were not, well, you existed. Even getting a good civilian job was tied to the question "did you serve?" Additionally, Germany was late to the colonial race and they sure wanted their part of the cake. If necessary, by force.
France was still pissed after losing the war of 1870/71. The coronation of emperor Willhelm of German in Versailles in Paris sure didn't help here either. They wanted revenge.
England was wary of the German arms build-up in their naval department, their doctrine relied (with good cause) on having the strongest navy of all countries, and they saw it as some kind of insurance for their "splendid isolation" on their island, considering that nobody can land on it who doesn't have the naval superiority. A Germany that builds dreadnoughts was certainly not something Britain could easily stomach.
Austria-Hungary was maybe the only large country that had better problems to deal with than a war, it's only ironic that they are essentially what started the whole crap. The Austrian-Hungarian multi-ethnic state was about to crumble (as it aptly did after WW1). Essentially, everyone wanted out. Franz Ferdinand (heir to the throne and the person who was shot in Sarajevo, which started the whole mess) had plans to create some kind of "United States of Austria". One can only speculate how long this would have held together, but it might have saved the Empire. Essentially, their reason to join the war was, aside of the obvious that they were the ones feeling attacked, that an external enemy might make internal bickering disappear. And it actually worked for 4 years, only to end up in a violent explosion.
And of course Russia. Russia, I think, didn't want that war. Russia was quite happy on its edge of Europe and didn't really have everything in place to go to war yet. They needed a few more years, which makes for an interesting question whether the war would have run differently had Russia gotten a decade more to finish their railroad network and build up more industry. They were only beginning the industrialization that took place a century earlier in England, but they gained track quickly. The general situation of Russia, especially the Russian peasants, was devastating. But I think if they knew what's in store for them, they would have preferred being serfs rather than starving to death.
One can only speculate.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Consider the pursuit of Goeben and Breslau: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pursuit_of_Goeben_and_Breslau
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
A few years later, the Spanish flu killed ten times that much. These casualties weren't particularly big at the time, and compared to the military casualties and the scale of the conflict, WW1 was one of the more chivalric wars.
Germany had a militarist tradition and was a very militarist country.
This is a somewhat misleading statement. When considering WWI, it's worth remembering that many of the earlier histories were written by the "winners". Some of these contained substantial amounts of propaganda, or highly prejudicial descriptions and interpretations of events, and others were based on rather sloppy research. The myths propagated by these earlier "histories" continue to persist in the face of more recent scholarship.
What we think of today as "Germany" was actually formed from a number of different smaller states (27?), only united in the mid to late 19th Century. These smaller states had very different cultures and even significant language differences, and this was reflected in the attitude towards warfare of their people. There were many times in WWI where German units -- usually those from particular backgrounds -- did very little to pursue the war, even going so far as to adopt an unofficial but very real truce with their Allied counterparts across the lines, essentially a live and let live approach, or "you don't bother us, we won't bother you".
The units from Alsace-Lorraine were especially notorious for having little enthusiasm for the war, not surprising considering how many of these people had both French and German relatives, but were certainly not the only group in this situation.
The Prussians had a reputation for militarism, but were only one of the German states. You may be thinking of them. Even there, things are far more complex than most people suppose.
John Mosier notes in his book "The Myth of the Great War" that in 1900 Germany had a little over a half million people in uniform, while France and Russia had nearly two million. The French appropriated far more money to their military, and had a far larger percentage of their population involved in mandatory military training (about 85%) whereas less than half of the eligible Germans had military training and the numbers were even smaller in Austrian (Hapsburg) lands. These numbers changed by 1914, but even then the Russian and the French armies together significantly outnumbered the supposedly "ultra-militaristic" Germans.
As far as the causes of WWI go, the situation is far more complex than most people realize. Some of the older histories, still influential, seem to neglect German-language written sources (perhaps the authors couldn't be bothered to learn German?), which show that there were considerable differences in opinion concerning the desirability of war. Kaiser Wilhelm, for example, did not want a war.
Mosier notes "As in France, the [German] military didn't determine foreign policy, it simply tried to win whatever war the government had forced it to fight. In this, both General Staffs were alike." (pp 50)
The criterion is distance from the shoreline (whether it's MAT, Mean Astronomical Tides or LAT, Lowest Astronomical Tides I'm not sure ; in most places it only makes a few metres difference), not water depth.
In this case, being on the "East coast of England" would mean that the agreed median lines between states would come into effect. I've worked on at least three, probably more, oil fields that straddle the median lines, and where the geological and petrophysical data I collect determines the way that production is assigned between countries, and hence who gets what tax. the question is thoroughly settled.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"