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By  Oliver Holmes and Luke Harding - The Guardian

Three British ships and a US submarine that sank in the Java Sea during the second world war have been destroyed by illegal scrap metal scavengers, the Guardian can reveal.

The UK’s Ministry of Defence said it condemned the “unauthorised disturbance of any wreck containing human remains” and requested Indonesian authorities investigate and take “appropriate action”.

The commercial salvaging of war wrecks has caused significant upset among veterans, historians and governments who want to preserve the final resting place of sailors who went down with their ships.

A preliminary report from an expedition to document sunken ships, seen by the Guardian, shows that the wrecks of HMS Exeter, a 175m heavy cruiser, and destroyer HMS Encounter have been almost totally removed. Using equipment that creates a 3D map of the sea floor, the report showed that where the wreck “was once located there is a large ‘hole’ in the seabed”.

A 100m destroyer, HMS Electra, had also been scavenged, the report found, although a “sizeable section” of the wreck remained.

The 91m US submarine Perch, whose entire crew were captured by the Japanese, had been totally removed, the report said.

All four sank during operations in the Java Sea in 1942, when Japanese forces overpowered Dutch, British, American and Australian sailors. The battle was one of the costliest sea skirmishes for the allies during the war and led to the Japanese occupation of the entire Dutch East Indies.

The Ministry of Defence said in a statement that the British government had contacted Indonesian authorities to express “serious concern” and request they investigate and take “appropriate action to protect the sites from any further disturbance.

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By Caroline Torie - WSBT

On this Veterans Day, we remember an important part of World War II history that took place on the waters of Lake Michigan.

The U.S. Navy used the lake to train thousands of pilots heading to fight in the Pacific. Pilots learned how to take off and land on makeshift aircraft carriers. When Pearl Harbor was attacked - the U.S. Navy was not prepared to wage a large-scale war.

The U.S. had to ramp up airplane production and train pilots to fly them. Lake Michigan proved to be a great spot for this naval aircraft training. It was protected from enemy fire because it's insulated by U.S. and Canadian territory.

17,000 pilots became certified naval aviators over the lake. About 130 aircraft were lost to the depths of the lake, and 10 pilots lost their lives there between March 1942 and September 1945.

Close to 50 of those have since been recovered. Many of those efforts are thanks to A & T Recovery, a company that works to rescue these forgotten aircraft. "It was a dangerous operation – especially having to do it all year long. And they had to, because the war didn't stop.," says Taras Lyssenko, A&T Recovery General Manager.

Decades after the last plane dove into the lake, A & T Recovery seeks to bring them back out to see the light of day. They use a side-scan sonar to find the aircraft underwater. It's similar to an ultrasound. Lyssenko says, "It uses a sound wave, and it listens for an echo return, and draws an image of it."

The process of recovering and restoring the planes is a long process. Three of recovered planes are currently at the Air Zoo in Kalamazoo. One is fully restored, while two are undergoing restoration.

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From Mail Online

A former deep sea treasure hunter is allegedly faking memory problems to avoid revealing the location of missing coins minted from gold he discovered in an 1857 shipwreck.

Tommy Thompson rose to fame decades ago when he discovered the sunken SS Central America, better known as the Ship of Gold, in 1988. But now Thompson - who was on the lam for three years - is behind bars, and allegedly refusing to reveal the location of 500 gold coins said to be worth millions.

Thompson has been held in contempt of court since December 2015 for violating a plea deal in which he was required to answer questions about the coins' location.

But a federal prosecutor said Thompson's answers were evasive and concerning during the first hearing in October 2015. At the next hearing, he refused to cooperate at all and a judge also ordered him to pay $1,000 a day until he decides to cooperate.

The former treasure hunter has maintained that he suffers from a rare form of a chronic fatigue syndrome that has created problems with his short-term memory and made it harm for him to provide complete answers. Thompson also said he could refresh his memory by reviewing documents in 75 boxes held by the US Marshals Service, but that he hadn't been allowed access to that information, according to court records.

But on Thursday a judge ruled that psychiatric evaluations prove that Thompson's isn't suffering from a condition that would prevent him from complying with his plea deal. A test by a court-ordered psychiatrist turned up minor memory problems, the psychiatrist said in a sealed document, part of which the judge quoted in his order.

Thompson 'routinely made references to things that demonstrated his retention of information from minutes and hours earlier,' the evaluation read.

'He remembered things from one day to the next, he recalled aspects of his various cases with great specificity, and he recalled information about his career and business adventures dating back decades,' it continued.

Thompson previously said that the coins had simply been turned over to a trust in Belize, a claim the government does not believe. He is now waiting to serve a two-year prison sentence for failing to appear before a judge three years ago to answer questions about the coins.

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By Merrit Kennedy - NPR

Three Dutch shipwrecks dating back to World War II have mysteriously disappeared from the sea floor, Dutch defense officials say.

The three warships were sunk by the Japanese during the 1942 Battle of the Java Sea, near the coast of Indonesia.

In 2002, amateur divers found the wreckage, where 900 Dutch and 250 Indonesian-Dutch soldiers are buried. A team of divers recently went down to shoot footage of the wrecks prior to the 75th anniversary of the deadly battle, Dutch Navy spokesperson Paul Middelberg tells The Two-Way.

"They dived for the wrecks to find that the wrecks were gone," he says. Using sonar, the divers were able to see the imprints of the missing ships on the sea floor.

The remains of HNLMS De Ruyter and HNLMS Java are completely gone, the Defense Ministry says, while a large portion of the HNLMS Kortenaer is missing.

The ministry says that as the final resting places of soldiers killed in battle, they are seen as war graves and desecrating them is a serious offense.

An investigation is trying to solve the mystery of why the wrecks disappeared, Middelberg says.

He declined to speculate out of respect for the families of the dead. "We don't want to give misinformation or half information," he adds. "We want to find out what happened and come out with that message." This comes on the same day

The Guardian reported that the wrecks of three British ships and a U.S. submarine in the same area have been "destroyed by illegal scrap metal scavengers." The newspaper says it was able to obtain 3D maps of the seabed, which show large holes where the ships used to be.

"The commercial salvaging of war wrecks has caused significant upset among veterans, historians and governments who want to preserve the final resting place of sailors who went down with their ships," the Guardian adds.

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By Zachary Lewis - The Plain Dealer

Cleveland's museums don't house all the city's treasures. Plenty of other great artifacts lie in Lake Erie, just waiting to be beheld.

Beneath the surface, in some cases just so, and often not far from Cleveland ports, sit any number of fascinating old shipwrecks, victims of Erie's violent and unpredictable temperament.

All one needs to interact with them are the right training, equipment and interest. Neither is Lake Erie the only such sanctuary. All the Great Lakes, including those adjacent to Erie, are home to underwater ruins, many of them well over a century old, making of Northern Ohio and the Upper Midwest a kind of playground for the amateur wreck diver.

Intrigued by this portal to history, I've spent the last few years obtaining the proper certification and gear to scuba-dive in the Great Lakes.

Now that effort is paying off. In the last two months, I've visited four separate wrecks and come away from each with what I hope are fascinating images and memories.

Around this time of year in 1864, while the Civil War was still raging, a novice captain on Lake Erie ignored warnings and made the foolhardy choice to press onward out of Cleveland in a storm.

He ended up paying the ultimate price. Six lives, including his own, were lost that September day, when his ship laden with huge grindstones listed and sank in tumultuous waters roughly a mile off-shore, well within sight of what is today Burke Lakefront Airport.

The Sultan was my intro to wreck diving. Resting in just 35 feet of water a quick boat ride out of the Flats, it's relatively shallow and easy to visit and navigate.

All one needs to dive it are basic open-water certification and conditions clear enough to make its features visible. A small buoy marks its location on the surface, and to find it, a diver simply follows a line down to a nearby anchor.

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From CBS Boston

In 2014, explorer Barry Clifford claimed to have found the wreck of Christopher Columbus’s Santa Maria off of the coast of Haiti in the Bay of Cap-Haitien.

But shortly after, the site was discovered by looters. Clifford said they took away anything that may have positively identified the ship. UNESCO then concluded the wreck was more likely a ship from a later era. “They never talked to us, they never asked to see our records,” said Clifford. “It’s a very serious situation.”

But Clifford, 71, insisted to WBZ NewsRadio 1030’s Kim Tunnicliffe that it was the famed flagship of explorer Christopher Columbus’s fleet, and that it must be preserved.

“That ship changed the course of human history, and it’s being destroyed right now by people who are stealing things off of that wreck because UNESCO said no, that’s not it,” he said.

Clifford discovered the only authenticated pirate shipwreck in the United States in 1984–the wreck of the Whydah, pirate captain “Black Sam” Bellamy’s ship–off the coast of Wellfleet.

By Léa Surugue - International Business Times

The first maritime archaeology expedition mapping ancient submerged landscapes to take place in the Black Sea has led to the discovery of more than 40 shipwrecks associated with the Ottoman and Byzantine Empires.

Vivid descriptions of these ships can be found in historical records, but some of them had never been seen before.

The Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project is run by an international team and involves the University of Southampton's Centre for Maritime Archaeology. Funded by the Expedition and Education Foundation (EEF) – a charitable organisation for maritime research – its aim is to survey the Black Sea near Bulgaria to understand how water rose there and covered ancient lands at the end of the last Ice Age.

"We're endeavouring to answer some hotly-debated questions about when the water level rose, how rapidly it did so and what effects it had on human populations living along this stretch of the Bulgarian coast of the Black Sea," explains principle investigator Professor Jon Adams.

"As such, the primary focus of this project is to carry out geophysical surveys to detect former land surfaces buried below the current sea bed, take core samples and characterise and date them, and create a palaeo-environmental reconstruction of Black Sea prehistory."

On board an offshore vessel called the Stril Explorer, the team is equipped with some of the most advanced technologies in the world for underwater archaeology.

They are surveying the sea bed using two sophisticated Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) – one of which has set new records for both depth (1,800m) and sustained speed (over 6 knots).

And what they have found has exceeded their expectations.

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By Darren Boyle - Mail Online

These haunting images show forgotten US planes from the Second World War lying on the ocean floor.

The pictures reveal how marine life has taken over these once deadly weapons. One image even shows how schools of fish have been making themselves at home inside a rusted cockpit. American photographer and scuba instructor Brandi Mueller, 32, captured the images when diving off of the coast of Roi-Namur, Marshall Islands.

The wrecked planes include the B-25 Mitchell bomber and a Curtiss C-46 aircraft. he said: 'Diving these wrecks feels like going back in time. I want to show what the wrecks have become. 'They have been underwater for over 70 years now and are beginning to deteriorate, so it sort of feels like I’m documenting them as they change.

'Eventually there won't be anything left of them.' The Marshall Islands were the setting for the Battle of Kwajalein when the United States launched an attack against the Japanese.

The island was the first of the Japanese islands to be successfully captured by the US. The battle took place between January 31 and February 3, 1944.

However, many of the planes that remain were mysteriously dumped by the US government after hostilities with the Japanese ceased.

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