Posted on 06/02/2021 6:01:49 PM PDT by nickcarraway
It is an uphill battle to track down the culprits, the programme Undercover Asia finds out. Meanwhile, experts urge greater protection of underwater cultural heritage.
Deep-sea diver Dave Yiu has done countless dives to Asia’s World War Two shipwrecks over the past 20 years.
He imagines what life was like aboard the ships, and is awed by their historical value and the surrounding marine life.
In recent years, however, he has also witnessed their destruction first-hand.
Two wrecks that he has often visited are the British Royal Navy battlecruiser HMS (Her Majesty’s Ship) Repulse and battleship HMS Prince of Wales. They sank off the coast of Kuantan, Malaysia on Dec 10, 1941 under Japanese attack.
On a trip in 2013, he noticed a propeller missing from the stern of the 242-metre-long Repulse, which lies about 50 metres underwater at its shallowest point.
(Excerpt) Read more at channelnewsasia.com ...
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Let’s be realistic. If these shipwrecks and war graves dated back a few thousand years instead of only seven decades, we’d strip them bare and our museums wouldn’t call it looting. Somehow it’s OK when the right people do it.
I do think recovering things for the enrichment of human knowledge is different than looting.
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***a propeller missing from the stern of the 242-metre-long Repulse, ***
I’ve read that the bronze propellers on the LUSITANIA disappeared several years back.
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Exactly. Let rich museum snobs take the artifacts and charge admission to see them and all is well. Let someone else take them and it is looting. Good chance it is going to a museum anyway.
I remember reading somewhere (quite likely here on FR) that there is a demand for steel created before the atomic age. It apparently has important qualities (or lacks qualities) that steel from later times has.
I wouldn’t even use the term “looting” to describe what’s going on there. If scavengers can recover pieces or wreckage from a shipwreck that’s 150 feet underwater, then the Royal Navy could have done it themselves at any time over the last 80 years. They obviously didn’t think it was something terribly important to their country over all that time.
There is very little left on these ships. They have rotted already. I’ve dove those waters plenty, and I’ve seen the insides and out of those ships. There is little left. When bodies or a safe is to be had we called the DoD who called the State Dept who called the owning country, and the owning country came for the bodies and the US Navy for the safes.
Churchill’s writings still stick with me ever since I read them as a teenager 55 years ago.
“In all the war I never received a more direct shock. The reader of these pages will realize how many efforts, hopes, and plans foundered with these two ships. As I turned over and twisted in bed, the full horror of the news sank in upon me. There were no British or American capital ships in the Indian Ocean or the Pacific. … Over all this vast expanse of waters Japan was supreme, and we everywhere were weak and naked.”
Under international law sunken warships continue to be the property of their governments. You can salvage sunken civilian ships without anyone’s permission, but not sunken warships.
Not that I disagree with you, but you’re missing the larger picture:
Did you see the movie Titanic? I’m hard pressed to recall a single movie which portrayed a shipwreck as hallowed ground.
It’s just not in popular culture to treat them in such a manner. The only examples which come to mind are the Arizona & Hunley, the latter an afterthought once it was determined that the men’s remains were, indeed, encased in the mud-filled hull (it was part an archaeological expedition and in part an investigation for the cause of the sinking).
The idiom ‘Davy Jones’ Locker’ is rather apt in this respect to describe public opinion for shipwrecks, military or otherwise.
The ironic thing is that the demand for steel made before we started exploding nukes in the atmosphere is DRIVING demand for WW2 shipwreck steel.
The US Navy has this same worry about a certain wreck in Pearl Harbor.
Ok, I have no idea what that is about. Who is demanding steel made before nuke tests? I would love to see the source and understand why?
= = =
Supposedly there is radiation in ‘everything’ these days, due to nuke bombs and nuke tests.
So If I want to make a testing or measuring device for something that may be affected by background radiation, I might consider some ‘pre-nuke’ steel for the construction material.
Some ship compartments are welded shut when the ship is constructed. Like around the bow, maybe, where it is not useful space for storage or access.
For ships constructed before nukes, the air in these compartments has been extracted, examined, and used for scientific purposes.
I’ll bet if Bill Gates thought breathing non-nuke air would make him live longer, he would personally locate and extract every molecule of it on the face of the earth.
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