At the start of May 1942, a British cruiser sank in the Barents Sea with four and a half
tons of Soviet gold ingots onboard. This is the story of how it got there, and how it
was reclaimed from the depths decades later. -
At the outbreak of the Second World War, HMS Edinburgh was one of the Royal Navy’s most
modern light cruisers. After two years of war service, in late December 1941 she was
assigned to escort convoys on their new supply route to the Soviet Union through the arctic.
The arctic convoys were a fearsome logistical challenge for the Royal Navy, and the urgent
need to supply the Soviets meant that convoys continued well into the late spring of 1942
in the face of increasing attacks by German aircraft, u-boats and surface ships.
At the end of April 1942 Edinburgh was at Murmansk, having successfully escorted the
convoy PQ14 from Iceland earlier that month. It was now time for the return leg, and the
light cruiser was preparing to join up with the homeward bound QP11 as part of an escort
under Rear Admiral Stuart Bonham Carter. Before leaving port though, a very special
cargo was loaded aboard under armed guard. It was more than four and a half tons of gold
buillion, in 465 individual ingots. This was part payment from the Soviets for the supplies
they had received through the arctic route. It had a value at the time of around 1.5 million
pounds sterling- in todays money, a value of about 140 million sterling. It was a huge
amount of money, stacked in Edinburgh’s bomb room at its stern.
On April 30th, Edinburgh rendezvoused with QP11. The cruiser manuevered to the front
of the convoy and pressed ahead, heading north-west. Little did they know, ahead of them lay the
german submarine U-456. Commanded by Lieutenant Max-Martin Teichart, the u boat ambushed Edinburgh
with two torpedoes. Both smashed into the British cruiser, gouging
a hole amidships and totally wrecking the stern of the ship. The rudder was destroyed
along with the main propellers, and huge amounts of seawater began to flood in. Edinburgh’s
captain, Hugh Webb Faulkner, had to quickly order the affected compartments be sealed
off in order to save the ship. With the damage Edinburgh had sustained, it
was quickly obvious the chances of making it to Iceland were zero, so the ship had to
try and make it back to Murmansk. Leaving the convoy behind, the escorting destroyers
Foresight and Forester came to her aid, joined for a while by two Soviet destroyers that
had been trailing QP11. With this new escort Edinburgh crawled south
at barely 2kts, having to make constant adjustments with her auxiliary propellers to stay on some
kind of consistent course. At 0600 on May 1st the two soviet destroyers detached themselves
and headed back to Murmansk, citing low fuel. They were replaced on station by the British
minesweepers Gossamer, Harrier, Hussar and Niger, alongside the Soviet guard ship Rubin
and a civilian tug. If Edinburgh was to fail to make it back to port, it would not be for
a lack of trying. -
Meanwhile, away to the north-west three German destroyers were harrying QP11. Under the command
of Commander Alfred Schulze-Hinrichs, the Z24, Z25 and Hermann Schoemann had sortied
early that morning, reaching the convoy by the early afternoon. They dueled with the
four escorting destroyers, damaging the tribal-class ship Amazon and sinking the Soviet freighter
Tsiolkovski with a torpedo. Shortly after 5pm though the Germans turned
away, giving up their attack on the convoy in order to bear down on what they now knew
was an ailing light cruiser trying desperately to get back to port.
- Commander Schulze-Hinrich’s destroyers arrived
at Edinburgh on the morning of May 2nd. Sighted by the minesweeper Hussar, the Germans began
to trade fire with the British escorts. Observing this, Captain Faulkner on Edinburgh quickly
decided that his ship was not about to sit this one out. The russian tug was cast off
and he accelerated to the ships maximum speed of seven knots. As Edinburgh only had use
of some of her engines and no rudder, this put the ship into a slow continuous turn to
port. The forward guns were manned, and with the Radio fire director out of action, would
be manually aimed. By now Foresight and Forester were engaged
at close range with the German ships. The German destroyers significantly outgunned
their British equivalents with 5.9inch guns, and this superiority told. Both British destroyers
took bad hits and were forced to stop, leaving them vulnerable to further attack.
But then, out of the mist, spinning in a circle, came the six inch guns of HMS Edinburgh. With
just their third salvo, Edinburgh incredibly managed to hit and disable the Herman Schoemann.
The German destroyer immediately began to list dangerously and came to a halt.
With one of their number foundering, Captain Schulze-Hinrichs now pulled back his other
destroyers from the attack. Foresight and Forester got the breathing room they needed
to get going again, and the Germans made sure they could pull survivors off of Hermann Schoemann
before it sank. When the German attack was renewed it was
met by the four little minesweepers, who charged head on to try and protect the Edinburgh.
They were massively outgunned and the visibility was poor, but they were determined to drive
the destroyers off. But before they could, Z-34 fired a spread of three torpedoes at
Edinburgh. Captain Faulkner saw them and tried desperately to use the engines to turn the
ship towards the oncoming metal fishes, but the ruined cruiser responded just too slowly.
A torpedo crashed into the ships hull, almost exactly opposite one of the holes made two
days earlier. The ship now appeared almost completely cut in half, with only the deck
and the keel holding it together. This could give way at any moment, so it was time to
abandon ship. The minesweepers Harrier and Gossamer came alongside and were able to take
crew off relatively easily as Edinburgh was now so low in the water that the ships decks
were about level with each other. Altogether 790 of the 847 crew were saved. HMS Foresight
then sent Edinburgh - and her vast quantity of gold - to the bottom with one final torpedo.
- For decades after her sinking, Edinburgh lay
undisturbed at the bottom of the Barents sea, even though both Moscow and London were well
aware of the huge value of the cargo onboard the wreck.
In the initial post war period it was judged too difficult to try and recover the gold.
Edinburgh was designated as a war grave in 1957, which effectively ruled out the easiest
form of salvage known as ‘blast and grab’ which was to simply blow your way into the
wreck with explosives and take what you came for. As you can imagine, there was little
chance the British ministry of defence, or public opinion, would tolerate that on a war
grave. As a result, It wasn’t until the early 1980s
that a consortium of British firms were able to secure the necessary approvals for a salvage
attempt. The consortium, led by Wharton Williams Ltd and Jessop Marine, planned to use divers
to cut into a small part of the wreck and retrieve the gold, while doing the minimum
amount of disruption to the rest of the ship. Finally at the end of April 1981 long-awaited
approval from the Soviet government was granted and the consortium was able to begin its salvage
attempt. First though, they had to find the wreck.
On the face of it this was no easy task. Edinburgh had made dozens of course changes in the two
days before she sank, and in the chaos of battle her own plotted positions were likely
to be inaccurate. In fact, reports from multiple ships had given Edinburgh’s location at
different positions scattered across an area the size of greater London.
Substantial work had to be done to work out which of these ‘sightings’ would be most
accurate. Eventually it was ascertained by Kip Punch
of the survey company Racal Decca that the Minesweeper HMS Harrier’s track was probably
the most accurate, since it had made the fewest course corrections since leaving port and
therefore its positions would be the closest to accuracy. At the end of April 1981 the
survey vessel Dammtor sailed to confirm the location of Edinburgh. Almost 39 years to
the day since the ships sinking, grainy images of the ship were beamed back to the Dammtor,
with Edinburgh lying at almost the precise location Harrier had plotted decades before,
244 metres down. After a few months of preparation, the actual
salvage operation was able to begin in September 1981 aboard the salvage ship Stephaniturm.
It was a tremendously risky operation, both physically and financially. The divers would
be working at world-record depth for this kind of operation, and the cost of the whole
expedition was such that some of the backers would be in financial trouble if it failed.
As Ric Wharton, one of the architects of the salvaging puts it: “We were going off into
the unknown, at depths never before attempted, in hostile waters both physically and politically…
We were now embarking on the diving equivalent of the first moonwalk.”
The salvage attempt was to be carried out using what’s known as ‘saturation diving’.
On September 2nd eight divers entered a special sealed set of chambers on the Stephaniturm
which were then pressurised to the depth they’d be working at on the seabed- equivalent to
23 atmospheres. Each day, in shifts, they’d commute down to the wreck to work, and return
to the saturation chambers after they had finished. This way of working meant that the
divers did not have to make lengthy decompression stops at the end of each shift- instead they
would remain compressed as if they were on the seabed 24/7 until the job was done. If
for whatever reason they needed to leave early, they’d be unable to without a lengthy decompression
process. On September 4th the first dives to the wreck
took place. Initially progress seemed very slow, as the divers had to assess the best
route to the bomb room where the gold was stored, and cut their way through the armour
plating to access it. Inside the ship there was a large amount of debris between them
and their target. As Edinburgh had sunk stern-first, a large amount of wreckage had accumulated
at the rear of the ship, and there was no choice but to painstakingly remove it all
to allow access to the gold. To complicate matters more, when the divers
eventually reached the bulkhead of the bomb room they found a large hole in it which had
been gouged by a German torpedo. This was partially good, as it meant there was no build
up of explosive gases from decaying ordinance on the other side, but also a massive hindrance
as the bomb room had become covered in layers of silt and debris. For day after day, round
the clock, the divers worked tirelessly to clear the bomb room, keeping a keen eye out
for any flashes of gold. Finally on September 16th, on dive number 27, at 10:48pm, they
found it. And where there was one bar, more followed.
Over the next three weeks, hundreds of ingots were brought up. The peak was the 40 bars
retrieved in one dive by Dougie Mathison- worth £4 million alone. By the time the diving
operation had to be suspended on October 8th due to worsening autumn weather, 431 of the
465 gold bars had been recovered. It was an astonishing achievement: “We had recovered
93% of the Edinburgh’s cargo form a record depth in the most hostile waters in the world,
and we had done it without any serious injury.” The haul was worth around £40m sterling in
1981, a value roughly equivalent to £140m in todays money. It was a huge amount, which
ended up being split at various percentages between the British and Soviet governments
and the consortium which had put together the salvage efforts.
Before departing the wreck site for Murmansk and then the UK, the crew of the Stephaniturm
held a short memorial service, throwing a wreath over the side to commemorate the 57
sailors who went down with the ship 39 years earlier. Five years later in 1986, the salvage
consortium would return to retrieve 29 more bars from the wreck, finally concluding the
remarkable story of HMS Edinburgh and her golden cargo.