luxurysetr.blogg.se

As the boat closed in on the wreck site, Cassway studied digital readouts from the console. RV/Explorer steamed out of Cape May on Labor Day, exactly 100 years and 5 days after U-111 was sunk.

The spooked team agreed that only the ROV would go into the water. The weather looked good for Labor Day weekend, but then came news of two rare fatalities in the wreck diving community. (Rise too fast and the gas inhaled under pressure at 400 feet would bubble out of the divers’ blood and result in “the bends,” injuring or killing them.) Each diver would be outfitted with 300 pounds of gear and could spend no more than 20 minutes exploring the wreck before beginning a maddeningly slow, four-hour ascent to the surface. The extreme depth would require extreme measures. The plan was to send the ROV back down to the wreck along with three technical divers. The team decided to return to U-111 to glean more information before summer weather gave way to more unpredictable fall conditions. “That’s when we decided hey, there’s got to be something there,” Petkovic recalls. When Cassway typed the coordinates into the database, multiple hang records popped up.

While hang logs identify underwater obstructions for fishing vessels to avoid, they indicate something else to divers: potential shipwrecks. Cassway consulted a database of “hang logs,” locations where fishermen have reported snagging their nets. In the summer of 2021, he called his dive buddy Rusty Cassway, who captains a dive vessel out of Cape May, New Jersey, and read off a set of coordinates. But information Petkovic was collecting suggested a different location-a spot slightly landward of where the coastal shelf plunges hundreds of feet. Navy records indicated that U-111 went down in 1,600 feet of water. On August 31, 1922, the storied U-boat was hauled out into the Atlantic, its hatches opened, and explosive charges detonated. The sub was eventually raised and towed to Norfolk, where it sank and was raised a second time. Plans called for the U-boat to be sunk off the North Carolina coast in 1921 as part of the so-called “ Billy Mitchell fleet.” (Mitchell, an Air Force brigadier general, wanted to demonstrate the superiority of the fledgling Air Force over the Navy by destroying a fleet of ships from the sky.) But as U-111 was being towed from Maine to Cape Hatteras, the sub foundered and sank off Virginia Beach. A heroic effort by the chief gunner’s mate saved the vessel and crew. And U-111 had a salvaged, low-power radio with limited reach.įour days into the Atlantic, a soluble plug secretly installed by German saboteurs gave out, nearly sinking the submarine in the middle of the night. sailors at the time relied on magnetic compasses to navigate, while the German U-boat was outfitted with a more sophisticated-and unfamiliar-gyrocompass. More than half the crew had never set foot on a submarine before, much less operated an enemy sub with signage in a foreign language. When the U-boat finally launched four days later, the commander made a fateful decision: Rather than chase the convoy, he would attempt a solo voyage along the shortest-and deadliest-course across the Atlantic: the Northern Route, the iceberg-strewn passage that claimed R.M.S. U-111 was still undergoing repairs when the convoy set sail for the Azores on April 3, 1919. The last-minute exchange put Daubin and his 32-person crew behind schedule. photograph by Benjamin Lowy, National Geographic Right: The U-boat is covered with marine life and fishing nets. After a friendly conversation fueled by scotch, Daubin persuaded British authorities to swap the sabotaged sub for U-111.

Commander Freeland Daubin was given charge of U-164, but he discovered that the submarine had been sabotaged by both German and Allied operatives eager to keep technological prizes out of each other’s hands. The subs were to travel in a convoy escorted by a submarine tender, sailing from Harwich via the Azores and arriving in New York no later than April 23, 1919. Then the vessels would be taken apart, studied, reassembled, and eventually towed out to sea and sunk. President Woodrow Wilson directed the Navy to send six surrendered U-boats to the U.S., where the subs would tour the East Coast and raise money for Victory Bonds. history, despite a lack of supplies, communication and navigation equipment, and sabotage.Ĭourtesy Naval History and Heritage Command Commander Freeland Daubin, it made the first solo transatlantic submarine voyage in U.S. Right: A photograph of U-111 and its jubilant American crew when it arrived in New York City in April 1919.