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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.
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
I am Greek living in Greece and i feel insulted
As well you should, but not for this particular reason.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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
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
That probably says a lot about how pleasant sport diving is off the North East coast of England. Let's see...... Grand Cayman, or the North Sea.... think think....
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.
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.
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."
Yes, you may be right - but exacly for that reason ("There are tons of words derived from Greek") maybe it would be better if the English language was i little more carefull with the meanings (many Greek words are used as synthetics in many English words, many times with very different meaning that leads English speakink people -and Greeks!- to confusion).
"English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James Nichol
Under those conditions, it would be unwise to expect too much precision as words move into English. Not to speak of the fact that over time, some English words change meanings. And the young whippersnappers think everything that happened before they were born is "ancient".
Besides, the original article was written by Germans.
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
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.
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.
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.