Sunken Ships of the Second World War
An ongoing project to track and map every ship sunk as a result of military action during the Second World War
Updates this month:
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).
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.
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.
A broader perspective is shown on the cover of Yank magazine below:
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.
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.
A number of updates were made to the sunken ships database. These include:
View all these updates and the rest of the database on the mapping dashboard, available here.
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:
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.
It is difficult to come up with an exact number of the ships that were sunk in the Second World War. There were at least 19,000 of all sizes with the potential for many others that have yet to be accounted for. Plotting these in a chart by the date on which they were sunk provides an interesting result and a small snapshot of the entire naval war.
Catastrophic events such as the evacuations of Dunkirk, Greece, Tallinn and Indonesia clearly stand out as do the scuttling of the French and Italian fleets on 28 November 1942 and 9 September 1943. But in the latter part of the war, the frequency of large numbers of ships being sunk increased so as to make singular events more difficult to pick out.
Visit the map and dashboard to get details on 14,500 of the 19,000 ships that could be mapped.
The evacuation of the Netherlands East Indies was chaotic, as were many during the Second World War. However much they may be planned in theory, evacuations during wartime rarely go smoothly, and even when they are deemed “successful” (such as the one at Dunkirk in 1940), in the moment, chaos reigns, as the pursuing enemy disrupts events with bombing raids. Sunken ships can still be located, however. It is surprising that anyone engaged in a battle for their life might think to record the exact location of their ship’s demise, but this is what happened during the evacuation of the Netherlands East Indies, March 1 to 8, 1942.
In his book The Allied Defense of the Malay Barrier, 1941 – 1942, Tom Womack provides a detailed account of the Japanese invasion of the Netherlands East Indies. He focuses on the naval and maritime aspect of the event and provides a grim look at the scale of the Allied defeat. In just seven days, Womack writes, 186 merchant and naval vessels were scuttled as the Japanese approached Soerebaja (now called Surabaya), Batavia (Jakarta) and Tjilatjap (Cilacep) on the island of Java. The locations of 59 of these scuttled ships has been mapped; the rest received hasty descriptions, such as “at Soerebaja” or “in the Donan River.”
These numbers do not include the more than 50 vessels that were sunk at sea during their attempts to escape. These locations are mostly known, as the sinkings occurred one by one at the hands of Japanese naval personnel, who recorded them in their ship logs.
Sunken Ships of the Second World War 