Tag: WW2

January 2023 Updates

I must confess: I was wrong. In last month’s update blog post I said that “These days, since I seemed to have mined most of what is available online there aren’t many changes.” Well, this month I stumbled across an entirely new source of data.

I am referring to the UK Hydrographic Office’s Admiralty Maritime Data Solutions. There they offer a shapefile of 94,000 wrecks from around the world for hundreds of years. Filtering out only those ships that were sunk between 1939 and 1945 leaves about 4,000 records. Though the wrecks can be found all around the world, the majority of the shipwrecks in the database for the time period that I am looking at are around the UK (see map), not surprisingly. I am happy to report that it appears that I have 97% of the shipwrecks on their list.

The UK Hydrographic data isn’t perfect. There are duplicate records, records putting ships well inland and a number that are listed as NameProbably? But it’s another data source and it has inspired me to dig deeper on some of the wrecks.

As a result, this month’s update is considerable:

  • 54 additions (not all because of the UK Hydrographic list)
  • 4 deletions (all duplicates)
  • 387 records were moved to more accurate locations
  • 5 other edits

I expect the next month or two to be similar as I wade through the remaining 2/3 of the data.

See the new additions and changes on the map!

December 2022 Updates

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.

UJ 201 Egeria in happier days

Find the ship (and others) on the map.

September 2022 Updates

Updates this month:

  • 92 ships added to the map
  • 31 corrections to ship locations
  • 2 edits to ship records
  • 3 deletions
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

Check out the updated map and dashboard here.

Cap Corse, 1944

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.

Cap Corse looking south. Source: National Museum of the U. S. Navy

A broader perspective is shown on the cover of Yank magazine below:

Frisco, sunk in 1944

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.

July 2022 Updates

A number of updates were made to the sunken ships database. These include:

  • 35 records added to the database
  • 2 records deleted from the database
  • 29 records had their locations updated
  • 2 records had either a name change (misspelling) or a date change

View all these updates and the rest of the database on the mapping dashboard, available here.

Submarine Activity during World War II

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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).

World War 2 Ship Sinkings by Cause

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 AttackNumber of Vessels SunkPercentage of All Vessels Sunk
Submarine6,72133.8%
Aircraft5,62428.5%
Mine2,66913.4%
Scuttled2,19911.1%
Surface Vessel1,8339.2%
Land-based1770.9%
Other2481.2%
Unknown3942.0%
Total19,866100.0%

Attacks by submarines, aircraft and surface vessels accounted for 71% of all the vessels sunk during the Second World War.

A Graph of Sunken Ships

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.

An annotated chart of all the ships that were sunken in World War 2

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.