There were no updates to the database in November but a few in December:
3 records had edits to the date the ship sunk
5 records were moved to more accurate locations
1 new record was added
These days, since I seemed to have mined most of what is available online there aren’t many changes. But occasionally I do come across information that allows me to add in a new record. That was the case for the German corvette UJ 201 Egeria. krnicadive.com has a few shipwreck locations listed on its site, all within the Adriatic off its east coast. One of them was the Egeria. Included on the site is a detailed description of the events that led to its destruction on the last day of February, 1944. For a shortened description of the events, visit my Instagram post on the ship.
The Admiral Graf Spee, launched in 1934 was, along with the Deutschland, the first capital ship of the Kriegsmarine to venture into battle. A quick search on the Internet turns up a few route maps, most notably Roskill’s Map 11 from the first volume of his four volume The War at Sea or some version thereof (see below).
This, of course, was mapped by the Royal Navy, using Royal Navy records. But does it conform to what the Germans recorded? After all, the Admiral Graf Spee‘s war diary or Kriegstagebücheris available, albeit only in German. Nevertheless, the dates and geographic coordinates are easy to ready so let’s compare.
Admiral Graf Spee set sail from Bremerhaven, Germany on August 23, 1939 and was scuttled off Montevideo, Uruguay on December 12, 1939, 111 days. Position readings were taken twice each day, normally once at midnight and once at noon. Along with the occasional position reading taken during a significant event such as a capture or sinking of a ship, we can actually extract 232 different locations. That provides a fairly good indication of the ship’s route. With some additional mapping detail provided from the British HMSO Report on the the Battle of the River Plate, I was able to stitch together a fairly accurate map of the Admiral Graf Spee‘s voyage.
In the map below, the red lines are taken from Roskill’s Map 11, the blue lines indicate the route based on the coordinates given in the KTB. As you can see there are a few significant differences.
On Roskill’s map the 3 week period between the time the Admiral Graf Spee reached its patrol area and the time it was given the go-ahead to attack shipping towards the end of September is sketched out and marked as a waiting area with little details as to the ships movements during that period. The KTB indicates a lot of moving around in the area and this is included in the new route map.
KTB’s can easily have errors in the log and this item indicates one such possible error. The coordinate in question is from midnight on 12th of October and is listed as 7˚ 9′ S, 12˚ 25′ W. Based on the other positions from 12 hours before and after it’s more likely that the position is around 10˚9 S, 12˚25W.
Finally, as indicated with the blue lines, there was much back and forth over the same area during October 23 & 24 and again on December 2 & 3.
Add in the locations of the 9 ships that the Admiral Graf Spee sunk and the location of the ship’s own demise and we have a far more accurate map:
Updates to the database of ships sunk during the Second World War:
1 ship added to the map
9 corrections to ship locations
A slow month as most of the bigger “goldmines of data” have been exhausted.
IJN Settsu, sunk July 24,, 1945 in Kure Harbour. Credit: Naval History & Heritage Command
The only vessel added to the database was the IJN Settsu, a 21,442 ton battleship (pictured above) that was launched in 1911 and disarmed in 1922, serving from then on until her demise on July 28, 1945 as a target vessel. The source for the ship’s location came from the United States Strategic Bomber Service’s The Campaigns of the Pacific War.
Page 377 of the USSBS’s The Campaigns in the Pacific
Some of the vessels sunk in the Garonne near Bordeaux in 1944
Most of the changes were tied to updated to ship sinkings around Bordeaux, France and Genoa, Italy. This is likely to be the last large update for some time.
Current total number of sunken ships mapped: 15,165
Current number of sunken ships on record but not mapped (due to no or inexact locations): 4,927
Frequently in my work I find a location for a sunken ships that is simply listed by the name of the harbour in which it sank. As the western Allies progressed on to the mainland of Europe, the Germans often sought to make whatever they left behind as useless as possible. Harbours, of course, were eminently useful to whoever had control of them and so they scuttled numerous ships in an effort to block the harbour and make any cleanup of them a long and arduous process (see Mud, Muscle, and Miracles: Marine Salvage in the United States Navy for a description of some of the challenges).
Aerial view of the harbour at Marseille, France in 1944. Note the two ships on the left-hand side of the photo (yet to be identified).
This was also the case for Marseille, France in the summer of 1944 where, according to a caption of another wrecked ship, 192 ships were wrecked (many presumably sunk). Unless there is a convenient map that displays both the names and the location of each wreck, determining the exact location for each sunken ship can be a monumental challenge.
Cap Corse, a French cargo ship appropriated by the Germans during the Second World War, was scuttled by the retreating Germans at the entrance to Marseille’s old port. With a couple of strategically angled photos, it’s exact location was fairly easy to determine.
The Cap Corse on its side before Marseille’s Fort Saint Jean. Image source: Inch High Guy
I came across the image above from another blog site, Inch High Guy, where the ship is identified as the Cap Corse. Subsequently, I found other photos of the same ship from different angles to confirm the sunken ship’s resting place before it was cleared away. Below is one such photo of the same ship, but looking from the other side of the channel.
Rarely does it happen that the wreck of a ship sunk during the Second World War is still visible today. Frisco, an Italian cargo ship of 4,610 tons, was scuttled in late August, 1944 by German troops and is currently sitting in shallow water in the Gironde, making it easily visible – and easy to map.
Frisco as viewed from the shoreline. Image via Reddit
Image via Google Maps
The ship is viewable on Google Maps and other online map providers (Google seems to have the best imagery for it – see to the right). See for yourself.
Submarines were the single greatest cause of vessel sinkings during the Second World War – about 34% of the total 20,000 ships that were sunk. The Germans in their U-boats accounted for 2,955 of these vessels and collectively they totaled over 14 million tons of shipping. Less well known is the US submarine war against the Japanese. American submarines accounted for 1,994 vessels with a tonnage of 5.6 million. Further down the list was the UK who accounted for 1,625 vessel sinkings of 1.5 million tons. The Japanese, surprisingly, accounted for only 187 vessel sinkings of less than a million tons.
It is worth noting a couple of things about these numbers:
Not all ships listed in the database have a tonnage value. Records for the western Allies tend to be better and more complete and these were often the victims of German submarine attacks. Japanese records – the target of US and UK submarines in many cases – are less complete.
Many of the vessels sunk by US submarines were small vessels (less than 20 tons) including fishing vessels and small junks in use by the local population (See the records for USS Blenny, for instance).
The database of ships sunk during the Second World War currently contains 19,862 records, 15,025 or about 75% mapped. These ships were sunk in different ways but they can all be categorized into one of the following: submarine attack, surface vessel attack, aircraft attack, land-based attack, mines, scuttling, other means and unknown means. The breakdown is as follows:
Type of Attack
Number of Vessels Sunk
Percentage of All Vessels Sunk
Submarine
6,721
33.8%
Aircraft
5,624
28.5%
Mine
2,669
13.4%
Scuttled
2,199
11.1%
Surface Vessel
1,833
9.2%
Land-based
177
0.9%
Other
248
1.2%
Unknown
394
2.0%
Total
19,866
100.0%
Attacks by submarines, aircraft and surface vessels accounted for 71% of all the vessels sunk during the Second World War.
