10: The SS Thistlegorm The SS Thistlegorm was one of the greatest
steamships the world has ever seen, and remains as one of the most fascinating shipwrecks
of World War Two.
However, most people have never even heard of this ship before.
It began its life in April of 1940, as a British armed Merchant Navy steamship.
It was named “thistle” after the national flower of Scotland, and “gorm” after the
Gaelic word for blue.
Sadly, this enormous vessel wouldn't survive active service longer than a year.
It went on three voyages across the Atlantic Ocean before meeting its match during the
fourth.
The Thistlegorm was on its way from Glasgow in Scotland to Alexandria in Egypt, when on
October 6, 1941, the Germans attacked.
A pair of Heinkel He 111 aircraft from the German Luftwaffe were dispatched from Crete,
which at the time was occupied by the Axis forces.
The only goal of the pilots was to destroy something, and they succeeded.
The aircraft dropped two bombs, which sank the vessel nearly instantaneously.
Four sailors were blown to pieces and five members of the Royal Navy gun crew were lost.
These days, the wreckage of the SS Thistlegorm is still sitting at the bottom of the ocean.
Near its ruined hull, you can find the remains of the ship's cargo.
She had been carrying steam locomotives for the Egyptian National Railways when she was
blown up.
They ended up being buried on the bottom of the ocean right there with the ship.
9: Tanks from D-Day Off the coast of England, divers discovered
a lost host of tanks sitting at the bottom of the ocean.
These ruined army vehicles, may not look so interesting now covered in sea slime, once
prevented a massive disaster from occurring on D-Day.
If it hadn't been for the destruction and sinking of these tanks, thousands more soldiers
may have died needlessly when the Allies stormed the beaches.
It could have been such a blunder that the day turned out differently.
These underwater tanks were used during Operation Smash, a training exercise on Dorset Beach
in April of 1944.
Soldiers were preparing for the Normandy landings.
During the drill, it was important for military tacticians to learn what would happen when
tanks were launched in shallow water.
They learned the hard way that it’s not a good idea.
32 tanks were launched during the training.
Seven of them sank and six people were killed.
What it showed is that when you launch a tank from a boat in water too deep, the tank simply
sinks and the soldiers inside of it die.
This hard lesson is now preserved off Dorset Beach, where the tanks remain today in their
watery grave.
8: Wreckage in the Mississippi Near downtown St. Louis, Missouri, a ship
from World War Two called the USS Inaugural sank back in August of 1993.
The ship was moored near the Gateway Arch but accidentally got separated from its moorings
in the Mississippi River.
The ship drifted off downstream, turned on its side, and then sank near the Poplar Street
Bridge.
The sinking ship was a pretty big story in 1993, but people quickly lost interest.
After a little while, locals completely forgot there was a World War 2 ship down there.
They weren’t reminded until last summer when the Mississippi River reached historic
lows.
The water dropped to just 3.8 feet (1.15 m), revealing the busted vessel at the bottom
of the river for the first time in three decades.
The USS Inaugural was launched on the 1st of October, 1944.
It was decommissioned just two years later in 1946.
The Inaugural participated in the invasion of Okinawa, then continued minesweeping operations
in the waters around Japan and Korea.
It cleared 82 mines during its service, even being awarded 2 battle stars.
It was ultimately relocated to St. Louis in 1968 to be a floating museum.
The ship became a National Historic Landmark but then lost its designation after the sinking.
It looks like the government didn't think the ship deserved to be on the National Historic
Landmark list considering it was underwater.
Since the water level in the Mississippi River has gone up, the ship has once more gone into
obscurity.
It's still right there near the Poplar Street Bridge, just hidden underwater.
7: Destroyed Bomber A destroyed bomber aircraft from World War
2 was found off the coast of Croatia.
It wasn't the first time one of these warbirds were discovered in the area.
There are thousands of sunken vehicles from the war all throughout the Adriatic Sea, including
planes and boats.
On the island of Vis, there was a very busy Allied airport in 1944.
It had only a single runway.
Sometimes, it was so busy that planes waiting to land would run out of fuel and simply drop
into the ocean.
Around Vis’s old airport, at least 30 aircraft have been found through the years.
In 2009, a diver came across the remains of a severely damaged B24 heavy bomber.
With help from the Croatian Conservation Institute, researchers were able to properly identify
the plane.
They now know it successfully completed 27 assignments before falling near the airport
in Vis in 1944.
Seven of the crew members were rescued, the remaining three unfortunately perished.
We may not know what kind of brave or courageous things these pilots did in the war, but they
were undoubtedly still heroes.
Shortly after this wreckage was discovered, the same divers found yet a another B24 heavy
bomber in the same area.
This one was sitting at a depth of around 300 feet (91 m).
The divers almost missed it because of the poor visibility at such depth.
They haven't been able to identify it yet or to find out anything about its history,
but it goes to show just how many planes are still lost in European waters.
6: The Caraquet The Caraquet was built long before World War
Two ever broke out, back in 1894.
It was constructed in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
When the ship first set sail, she was a passenger steamer that helped deliver British mail.
Her name then was the Guelph, but it was changed to The Caraquet in 1913 when the vessel was
handed over to the Royal Steam Packet Company.
Just ten years later on June 25, 1923, the vessel sank.
She was en route from the British Virgin Islands to Halifax when she encountered rough seas
and hit the northern barrier reef of Bermuda, near Fort St. Catherine.
There wasn’t much that could be done to salvage the ship, and efforts weren't made
in earnest until World War Two broke out.
Suddenly, copper and metal were in high demand.
A crew was sent over to the vessel to rip apart coils, propellers, conductors, and anything
else made of copper, brass, or bronze.
Anything of value that could be removed was taken from the ship.
These days, the wreckage of The Caraquet is strewn over an area of prime, underwater real
estate in about 45 feet (13.7 m) of water.
Divers have found the ship’s engine sitting on the seafloor, some giant boilers, two large
deck winches, and the ship’s impossibly huge anchor lying on one side.
5: Dumped Military Equipment Divers in the Pacific Ocean have discovered
heaps of expensive military equipment that was discarded after the US finished up with
Japan in World War Two.
These incredible discoveries were made in the waters of Vanuatu, where it was apparently
cheaper to dump equipment than to transport it back home to American soil.
Divers managed to photograph jeeps, bulldozers, forklifts, and even tractors.
All kinds of heavy machinery needed for the war effort was abandoned here, dumped at a
place called Million Dollar Point.
The name is appropriate considering how much money was thrown away here.
It's impossible to say exactly what all this equipment together must have been worth in
the 1940s – but it was probably over a million.
The US had two military bases in the Vanuatu islands, Buttons and Roses.
They had even conscripted the island natives to help them build the bases, which they used
as their headquarters for attacking the Japanese.
When the US left, they tried to make the locals buy the equipment.
But understandably, the peaceful fishermen wanted nothing to do with such things.
And besides, they didn’t have millions of dollars for tractors.
So, instead of doing something nice and charitable to the people that helped build their military
bases, the US Army dumped their valuable equipment into the water.
If the islanders wouldn’t pay for it, nobody could have it.
What are your thoughts on the US Army dumping so much valuable equipment into the water
because it was too costly and difficult to take it home?
Does this practice surprise you?
Share your thoughts in the comments and don’t forget to hit subscribe before the end of
the video!
4: Sunken Assault Rifle A pair of friends in Holland use magnet fishing
rods to look for artifacts and historical relics left behind throughout Europe’s grand
history.
Recently, the pair discovered a sunken assault rifle left behind from World War Two.
But this was hardly their first piece of military equipment.
These guys, both residents of the Netherlands, have already found plenty of machine guns,
rifles, hand grenades, and too many dog tags to count.
The one reason this particular assault rifle proved so interesting is that it’s a Sturmgewehr
44, one of the very first of its kind ever built.
The Sturmgewehr 44 was the very first widely distributed assault rifle in the world.
It was designed with the ammunition capacity of a submachine gun, yet it fired bullets
that would normally come from a rifle.
The weapon was used by the German Army, and was the original inspiration for the Soviet
AK-47 and the US M-16.
The Germans may have been the enemy in the war, but they really did create some of the
most innovative and devastating weapons.
Just about every assault rifle today came from this original model.
Nobody knows how the gun wound up underwater.
The Netherlands hosted some pretty fierce fighting at the beginning of the war when
Germany invaded in 1940.
Then, during the Allied liberation in 1944, they experienced even more battle.
Considering the Netherlands is a nation of rivers, canals, and ponds, it’s no surprise
that some weapons have ended up buried in local waters.
3: Lost Enigma Machine German divers discovered an encryption machine
known as an Enigma device at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
These incredible machines were used by Nazis during World War Two to send coded messages
from one place to another.
The Enigma machines were so complex that Allied scientists had no clue what to make of them.
Because of their complexity, Enigma machines allowed the enemy to send messages freely
without too much worry about sensitive material being intercepted and translated.
At least, the Germans didn't have to think about it for a few years.
In 1941, British mathematician Alan Turing finally cracked the code and figured out how
the machines worked, allowing the Allies to use German messages to their own advantage.
Historians have estimated the war was cut short by at least two years thanks to Alan
and his impressive math skills.
But what was this machine doing at the bottom of the ocean?
Divers hadn't even been looking for artifacts.
They were searching for abandoned fishing nets when they came across the machine.
At first, lead diver Florian Huber thought he had discovered a typewriter.
But it turned out to be a real historical artifact, probably thrown overboard in the
last days of the war.
When the Germans realized defeat was imminent, warships and submarines started dumping their
code machines into the water to get rid of any evidence of what kinds of evils they’d
been doing.
2: The SS Richard Montgomery The SS Richard Montgomery has been rusting
underwater for nearly eight decades.
All that you can see of this strange, abandoned shipwreck today are a trio of masts sticking
out of the water.
The ship ran aground back in August of 1944 with a cargo of explosives.
And guess what!
The submerged wreckage still has over 1400 tons of TNT sitting in its hold, and it's
less than one mile (1.6 km) from land!
The ship is currently at the bottom of the Thames Estuary, close enough that folks in
the nearby city would see the explosion but probably far enough away that it wouldn't
do much damage.
At least, that's what the government hopes.
There are high explosive bombs, fragmentation bombs, cluster bombs, explosive booster charges,
smoke bombs, and pyrotechnic signals.
There are enough explosives here for a fireworks festival.
There is an exclusion zone around the wreckage, prohibiting people from going near it just
in case it blows.
But as of right now, nobody has dared go in and take out the bombs.
Chances are the fuses have already been flooded and the explosives are inert – but you just
never know.
1: Lost Gold Did you know that there is roughly $4.5 to
$5 billion worth of gold hiding at the bottom of the sea going back to World War One?
During the first and second world wars, over 7500 British merchant ships were sunk.
At least 700 of them were official gold carriers, meaning they were shipping full cargoes of
gold from one part of the globe to another to pay for supplies and munitions.
While much of this gold has been lost forever and will probably never be recovered, research
teams have found some of it.
Researchers from the UK, the US, and even Canada have spent the last 25 years trying
to track down lost British gold.
By going through over 8000 documents and using the newest technology to scan the ocean floors,
researchers with an organization called Britannia’s Gold have been tracking down wreck sites.
They haven't actually pulled any gold up from the bottom of the ocean, but they are trying
to get some salvage missions going.
For example, they discovered the location of The City of Benares, a British liner destroyed
by German torpedoes in 1940.
The ship was carrying 262 evacuees to Canada when it was targeted by the enemy.
But it wasn't just full of civilians, it was also full of hidden gold stashed there by
the government.
The team at Britannia’s Gold can't actually touch this sunken ship, as it's considered
a war grave.
But still, it's a great example of just how much lost gold there is sitting at the bottom
of the ocean.
What would you do if you could get your hands on sunken World War 2 treasure?
Would you give it to a museum or keep it for yourself?
Let me know in the comments and thanks for watching!
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