'Virtually intact' wreck believed to be Royal Navy warship torpedoed in WWI | Hacker News Reader

'Virtually intact' wreck believed to be Royal Navy warship torpedoed in WWI

theguardian.com

52 pointsSonOfKyuss31 comments

My great great grandfather was one of those who went down on the Hawke.

The news was censored, and despite rumours of what had happened, official confirmation didn’t come until after the war. His widow was told that he had deserted and she wouldn’t be receiving a pension.

Fast forward to 1942, my great grandfather is on HMS Curacoa on a foggy night, escorting the Queen Mary, which then rams the Curacoa, sinking it with almost all hands.

You’ll never guess what the admiralty did next.

I've never heard the story of the Curacoa, but the summary on Wikipedia is bonkers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Curacoa_(D41)#Collision

Queen Mary is zigzagging around because maybe it'll confuse U-boats if there are any. Curacoa is trying to just go in a predictable straight line to maximize ability to defend against enemy aircraft if there are any. Queen Mary turns and slices straight through the Curacoa, doesn't stop to help because maybe there might be U-boats, and then everybody spends years in litigation after the war about whose fault it was.

> And sure enough, the Queen Mary sliced the cruiser in two like a piece of butter, straight through the six-inch [sic] armoured plating.

Amazing imagery. They sure built those liners properly.

Reminds me of RMS Olympic and U-103: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Olympic#Sinking_of_U-103

The most surprising thing about WWI is that after the war ended, the respective armies didn't string up every single politician responsible for the conflict.

A complete butchery of Europe's youth for nothing.

Instead, somehow, all the blame fell on the generals (most of whom were doing the best they could given the political goals they were given), while the architects and propagandists of the war got off clean.

In Britain at least, a lot of the young men who fought didn't actually have a vote at that time, "Only 58% of the adult male population was eligible to vote before 1918. An influential consideration, in addition to the suffrage movement and the growth of the Labour Party, was the fact that only men who had been resident in the country for 12 months prior to a general election were entitled to vote.

This effectively disenfranchised a large number of troops who had been serving overseas in the war. With a general election imminent, politicians were persuaded to extend the vote to all men and some women at long last."

and this lead to the Fourth Reform/Representation of the People Act in 1918.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representation_of_the_People_A... https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transforming...

> The Revolutions of 1917–1923 were a revolutionary wave that included political unrest and armed revolts around the world inspired by the success of the Russian Revolution and the disorder created by the aftermath of World War I.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1917%E2%80%9319...

>> didn't string up every single politician responsible for the conflict.

But more than a few dynasties ended as a result of the war. Certainly the Romanovs were not allowed to continue. And there were no more kaisers after the war either.

But isn't that every war, or at least wars since WW I? Even WW II didn't just happen. There were multiple things that could have averted it. If you have Netflix, watch the docu-series on Hitler and the Nazis.

the generals were assholes too. they sent people to fight and die in trenches over and over again for nothing.

If they hadn't, they would have been replaced by the political leaders. Generals don't get to dictate policy.

Also, the generals at the time were dealing with a very new form of warfare they really weren't used to. Basically, I'd say they were mostly incompetent, but it seems like the invention of the machine gun and how it'd radically change infantry warfare was something that took everyone a while to come to grips with. I do wonder why it seemed to take so long for them to adjust their tactics though.

you can be forgiven if you do the same thing once or twice and fail. When you keep doing it and learn nothing you are not just incompetent but purely evil.

The problem is that the generals down the line from them are also doing what seems to be the same thing and succeeding.

What should they have done?

something called negotiations.

That was for the politicians, not the generals.

> "All the brass work on the wreck, like the portholes and the breaches for the deck guns, are all still shiny..."

I'm not a materials science person, but doesn't brass degrade fairly quickly in saltwater? Googling around, I'm discovering "Naval Brass," which is an alloy particularly resistant to dezincification in salt water, but it doesn't sound like it was in use in 1914. But I'm also reading about some brass artifacts from centuries ago that survived relatively well underwater. Wonder if somebody who knows about this stuff could clue me in to how these things do so well underwater for so long?

Oxidation requires oxygen, in this case the wreck seems to have been at a depth with very small amounts of dissolved oxygen. It seems that the depth it was at is generally the least oxygenated, and it may be the case that the water wasn’t moving around much.

https://rwu.pressbooks.pub/webboceanography/chapter/5-4-diss...

Oxygen and heat. This is also very cold water.

Higher temperature does speed up oxidation, but the process doesn’t actually require heat, as it is exothermic.

With the metal immersed in water, i doubt the heat generated from the reaction would hang around long enough to meaningfully impact the rate, not on a smooth surface.

I believe bronze (copper + zinc) is a lot more common in marine applications than brass (copper + tin)

I believe you have those inverted. Bronze has tin and brass has zinc.

Whoops, yes you're correct. Serves me right for looking at some SEO spam link!

Main point was that bronze is much more common in marine applications than brass - I wouldn't be surprised to learn there's been an error upstream as well.

The ghosts of the sailors would never allow the brass to be tarnished.

The ghosts of the officers and NCOs would never allow the brass to be tarnished, anyway.

So much low-background steel!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

> Since the end of atmospheric nuclear testing, background radiation has decreased to very near natural levels,[5] making special low-background steel no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive uses, as brand-new steel now has a low enough radioactive signature that it can generally be used.[6]

Guess we don't need it though

Let's hope Putin keeps it that way!

Would love to see more photos of the wreck

Same. When we say "virtually intact", I'm guessing that means, aside from the torpedo that went through the hull?

"It caught fire, exploded and then disappeared beneath the murky waters of the North Sea off north-east Scotland in less than eight minutes."

So I wonder how much there is

"“All the brass work on the wreck, like the portholes and the breaches for the deck guns, are all still shiny … it’s probably due to the fact that she was just built so well.”"

Seems to be enough left that resembles the ship that it still captivated the finders, instead of just being "we figured out where it went down."

There's some underwater footage on the Sky News website: https://news.sky.com/story/hms-hawke-discovered-wreck-believ...

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