generalspeaking

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

An Oceanic Historical Battlefield

"It gives you pause when you see a shoe lying in the bathroom or somewhere, because you think, was one of these guys wearing this shoe when the ship went down?"
"The steel plates of the ship are bent like they were Plasticine. You just thank your lucky stars that you weren't there when the explosion happened."
"It's a really important story in our nautical heritage, and wartime heritage here in Newfoundland and Labrador."
"The more people who can see it and understand it, I think it's really worthwhile."
Diver Neil Burgess, Flatrock, Newfoundland, president, Shipwreck Preservation Society of Newfoundland and Labrador

A diver checks out one of the four shipwrecks in Conception Bay set to be cleared of unexploded military ordnance next week. (Ocean Quest Adventures)

One of the very few places in North America that came under attack by German U-boats during the Second World War, Bell Island is now the site of a concentrated effort by a team of navy divers to retrieve unexploded ordnance from rusting remains of four iron ore carriers; the Lord Strathcona and Rose Castle from Canada, PLM 27 of France, and Britain's Saganaga.

The area is a magnet for divers from all over the world. That an unknown number of undetonated explosives, several hundred at least, remain with the wrecks is concerning, that divers might inadvertently set one off with dreadful consequences. The ships are some 120 metres in length and have, over the years been colonized by marine life; flower-like anemones and fish swimming about the old battle sites.

Diver Burgess himself has notched up over 50 dives in the area and each of them leave him with a sad and sobering impression, having seen the mangled areas where torpedoes struck a ship. He has seen artillery shells on the ship decks close to the stern gun -- which the ships used to carry iron ore from Bell Island's mines to steel mills in Sydney, Nova Scotia to be manufactured into war materials had been fitted with -- in case of German attack.

Bell Island sits in Conception Bay, on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland. It's serviced year-round by ferry, and used to be a bustling iron ore production site. (Submitted by Jeff Quilty)

An estimate of 50 shells present on each of the wrecks propelled Diver Burgess to provide the military diving team with old plans of the ships, to enable mapping out of retrieval manoeuvres. The artillery is to be taken to a shooting range near St. John's to be detonated. A survey of two of the shipwrecks in 2000 was ordered by the military, fearing an accidental explosion.

Ocean Quest Adventures has guided tours for the past two decades of the "underwater museum" according to the group's Rick Stanley who speaks of the connection to Canadian, British, French and German forces along with Bell Island families who looked after survivors of the sunken ships. Two of the ships are known to be the burial ground of those who died in the explosions sinking their ships.

Stanley speaks of a tour he guided for the daughter of the Saganga's chief engineer, and another for the daughter of German U-boat captain Rolf Ruggeberg, whose attack it was that sank the Saganaga. Local drivers discovered the main casing of a German torpedo on the sea floor close by without its warhead, in 2000.