In the early hours of February 28th 1942, almost 80 years ago, the Dutch light cruiser
HNLMS De Ruyter sank to the bottom of the java sea. After twelve hours of fighting against
a superior Japanese force, an allied squadron under Dutch rear Admiral Karel Doorman had
been decisively defeated. More than 300 sailors onboard De Ruyter had been killed, including
Admiral Doorman himself. 75 years later, in 2016, Admiral Doorman’s
82-year old son Theo travelled with an expedition to the wrecks of the dutch ships lost in the
battle. Arriving at his father’s flagship and gravesite, what they discovered shocked
everyone onboard. The wreck had vanished. And it wasn’t just De Ruyter.
Across the Java Sea, ship after ship was found to have been looted, and in some cases like
De Ruyter completely removed from the seabed in what was fast becoming the largest grave
robbery in history. -
- The illegal salvaging of the Java sea wrecks
hit global headlines in November 2016, when the absence of De Ruyter from the seabed was
first reported. Follow up searches had revealed the Dutch ships Java and Kortenaer had also
completely disappeared. On November 11th, the Guardian newspaper reported the same had
happened to the British ships Exeter and Encounter. In this image from the sonar of the survey
ship, you can see just a groove in the seabed remaining where Exeter’s wreck had lain
for decades. It didn’t stop there either- 60% of the Australian cruiser HMAS Perth was
found to have disappeared by 2017, and in February of that year it was reported that
three Japanese transports sunk off the coast of Borneo were between 98 and 99% salvaged.
There was quite a lot of international outrage when this became public, particularly in the
Netherlands where the salvaging was front page news. Remember, its not just metal that
has been dredged up, its also the remains of hundreds of sailors who lost their lives
onboard. In some respects, this wasn’t a new phenomenon.
Shipwrecks in the Java sea region had been suffering damage from illegal salvaging for
years, as a result of the shallow water in which they lay. In 2014 the American cruiser
USS Houston’s wreck was found to be missing parts of its hull, and the following year
a Malaysian patrol boat interrupted a group of Vietnamese sailors engaged in trying to
loot the wrecks of HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse. In fact as far back as 2002, the
Royal Navy was concerned enough about salvaging to dispatch a team of divers to recover the
ships bell from Prince of Wales to prevent it being stolen.
What was new in 2016 though was the sudden realisation of just how widespread and successful
the illegal salvaging had been, and just how ultimately powerless the nations to which
these ships had belonged had been to prevent it. While the world hadn’t been looking,
the salvagers had become bolder and more organised. You might now be asking what on earth the
salvagers wanted with these ships in the first place. Why would groups go to the trouble
of procuring sophisticated salvage equipment and starting painstaking work for the sake
of exhuming seventy year old war graves? The answer, as you might be able to guess, is
that it was profitable. The shipwrecks were a huge supply of scrap
metal, both steel and other more valuable metals such as aluminium and brass. The steel
on the ships is whats known as ‘pre-atomic steel’. Steel forged since the detonation
of the first atomic bombs is contaminated with trace amounts of radioactive particles
which the java sea wrecks – being built earlier and then spending decades under the
ocean- manage to escape. This makes steel from the wrecks especially useful for sensitive
equipment such as aeronautical instruments and Geiger counters.
The propellors on the British ships were made of Phosphor bronze, a metal which in 2016
would sell for $2700 per ton and in the years since has seen its price rise to more than
$6000 per ton. When the propeller of a large ship might weigh up to 20 tons, you can see
how it can become highly lucrative to salvage parts. Indeed, even on the wrecks of repulse
and prince of wales – which are more intact than some of the others, the propellers are
one of the first parts to be stolen. Prince of Wales sits upside down in the seabed, so
in this footage shot in 2014 you can see the absence of the propellers where they should
be, either side of the rudder. So having identified where the wrecks were
and the bits they wanted to loot, the question is how the salvagers managed to execute it
so completely as to totally erase some ships from the seabed. Initially it seems that many
would pose as fishermen, like those over Prince of Wales that the Malaysian navy disrupted
in 2015. They would use long oxygen hoses to enable divers to remain underwater for
some time, cutting away valuable parts or setting explosives to break the ship up, allowing
access to interiors and making it easier to bring to the surface.
Now if this sounds like a complex operation that would’ve required lots of resources
and time, you are right. The kind of equipment you need to lift thousands of tons of steel
off the seabed and ferry it back to land is a major engineering challenge. Large sea cranes
would have had to have been present over the sites for a long time, and many trips made
back and forth to where the scrap was going to be cut up. It’s probably not the work
of a few enterprising fishermen, but of an organisation with money to spend, and the
ability to get away with illegal salvage. There were many in Indonesia who thought along
the same lines as the extent of the salvaging began to become clear in 2016 . An Indonesian
police investigation into human remains allegedly found at Brondong port near Surabaya was launched,
and others began to dig around as well. One of those, the freelance journalist Aqwam Fiazmi
Hanifan, contributed extensively to a documentary on this subject produced by the Singaporean
public broadcaster Mediacorp in May 2021. The full documentary is up on YouTube and
I highly recommend you check it out at the link in the description. A big takeaway from
the documentary is the apparent stonewalling of Hanifan’s journalistic attempts to get
to the bottom of what happened. Remains exhumed from a cemetery in Brondong were claimed by
the police to be animal, not human, and a later investigation into a salvage company
was dropped due to a supposed lack of evidence of lawbreaking. Despite shipwrecks being protected
sites under Indonesian law since 2010, the impression you get is that powerful institutions
weren’t that interested in dealing with the illegal salvage.
In some ways this is understandable. After all, as Dr Natali Pearson points out in 2017,
these are the ships of colonial powers, sunk there on missions to defend the imperial position
of the dutch- or to threaten it- and remaining the property of the nations under whose flag
they sailed. When the illegal salvage first became a global issue Pearson quotes an Indonesian
naval official as saying: “The Indonesian navy cannot monitor all areas all the time.
If they ask why the ships are missing, I’m going to ask them back, why didn’t they
guard the ships.” Despite this kind of attitude prevailing initially,
over time investigations were launched and stronger action was taken. In April 2017 the
Indonesian navy seized a Chinese dredger, the Chaun Hong 68 off Natuna in the Riau Islands,
where it had been allegedly scavenging the wrecks of several Japanese ships. In a remarkable
turn of events the Chaun then absconded from Indonesian custody, before eventually being
picked up by the Malayasian Maritime Enforcement Agency. A statement from the Chinese government
claimed the dredger had been operating on contract from a Malaysian company.
In the years since, stronger action has been taken by all states involved. For example,
in February 2018 Indonesia introduced a network of maritime conservation zones around many
of the wrecks, designed to protect them and the ecosystems around them. It’s a positive
step forward. Ultimately though, the damage has been done.
Action taken now isn’t of much use to the families of those sailors whose remains have
already been disturbed, lifted from the seabed and then lost forever, dumped somewhere that
will probably never be known. The intangible heritage of shipwrecks as wargraves is something
that you can’t get back on ce disturbed. Thousands, even tens of thousands of people
alive today will have a relative who served on one of these ships and never came home.
I want to leave the final word in this video to Theo Doorman, who will probably never know
where his father’s final resting place is: “I was sad. Not angry. That doesn’t get
you anywhere. But sad. For centuries it was a custom not to disturb sailors graves. But
it did happen here.”