The people I needed to speak with at the GSI were all at a meeting together, so I dashed off a quick email to the one contact listed on the website, the geologist Dr Eibhlin Doyle. The following day I was able to speak to her on the phone after sending her a more detailed email explaining what we were looking for and where it might show up in their MBES dataset. Eibhlin was very accommodating and willing to help, which was great as I’ve often been met by a stonewall of inaction when making similar requests to government departments in the past. I think it helped that as fellow geologists we spoke the same language, but also that I had a pretty good reputation for finding significant shipwrecks, so she didn’t think I was a crackpot wasting her time. The first bit of good news, she told me, was that their dataset did indeed cover all the areas where I thought the wreck might be located. The second bit was that she had already scanned the data and found three possible shipwrecks in the area I’d outlined for her. Wow, could we really be lucky enough to discover Athenia without actually having to go to sea? The only way to be sure was to compare the MBES images for each wreck against what I expected Athenia’s wreck to look like. I asked Eibhlin to send them to me so I could make my own comparison.
I decided not to tell Jane this latest news until I’d had a look at the three possible wreck images myself. There was no sense in getting her hopes up until there was more hard information that one of them could be Athenia. Because there are many thousands of wrecks around the British Isles and Ireland, there were bound to be at least a couple in the area I’d designated for Eibhlin, so it was too early to get excited that one of them might be ours. I had been fooled once before during a search for a wreck on Porcupine Bank off south-western Ireland and didn’t want a repeat performance. On that project we found eleven wrecks in the search area before finally locating the one we were after.
True to her word, Eibhlin emailed me on Monday afternoon to say that of the three wrecks, two looked like interesting candidates and that a colleague was preparing to send me the MBES images and associated data. When the files finally arrived just before the end of the day, however, I could see right away that the first one wasn’t Athenia. The wreck was too small – only 120 metres long – and there wasn’t much mass to it; certainly not enough to constitute a 13,465-ton passenger liner. By the way it was broken down, I also suspected it was considerably older. The second image, of wreck #111, on the other hand, was immediately exciting. To begin with, it measured exactly 160 metres end to end, just like Athenia. Clearly it was also a big ship, with parts of it sitting as much as twenty-one metres above the seabed. There was no mistaking this wreck for a smaller freighter or fishing vessel. It had to be a large ship very close to the size of Athenia, and it was less than ten miles away from the radio officer’s SOS position!
The more closely I studied the image, the more excited I got. Image interpretation can be a bit of an art form, and if you’re not careful, you can visualize whatever positive signs you wish to see. In my eyes, however, there was no doubt that this wreck was broken about two thirds along its length, where it was reasonable to expect Athenia to be broken as well. My enquiry, which had started out as a long shot, was quickly gaining real promise. Maybe this was Athenia and I had discovered her wreck sitting at my desk in West Sussex, nearly 700 miles away. If that was the case, it would be a first in my career, but I needed to be absolutely certain, and that meant flying to Dublin to look at the imagery in the highest resolution possible, using special image analysis software. The GSI could only send me low-resolution TIF files, which were heavily pixelated and nowhere near the quality of image I needed to be sure.
The following morning I called Jane with the news and told her I thought we needed to fly to Dublin as soon as possible. I had first taken the precaution of making sure that the GSI could make the raw MBES data and their computer systems available for the detailed analysis I wanted to conduct. Eibhlin was equally excited to learn the true identity of wreck #111 and was pulling out all the stops to help my detective work. I could tell from her enthusiasm that I was turning her into a wreck hunter. After some initial reservations that things were moving too fast, Jane agreed to join me. Part of the excitement – and fun – of wreck hunting is the chase for the next clue and the urgency to find it as fast as possible. It may seem ridiculous that there could be any urgency about a shipwreck that had been at the bottom of the ocean for sixty-seven years. It wasn’t like Athenia was going anywhere. Wreck hunting, however, is also about being first, and if the BBC wanted to document that instantaneous moment of discovery, they needed to be present. To Jane’s great credit, she realized this and against the odds convinced them to send a small film team with us to Dublin.
Eibhlin was all ready the next day when Jane and I, together with a cameraman and a sound recordist, arrived at GSI’s offices in the centre of Dublin. She had two computer systems running, with large highresolution monitors for both. One computer was running Caris software, which displayed the processed MBES data as a bathymetry map, while the second was running Fledermaus, which is used for sophisticated three-dimensional image analysis. Eibhlin and I wasted no time and sat together to start our review while the cameraman filmed over our shoulders. The first thing I wanted to do was to rule out all other wrecks or wreck-like targets so we could focus on wreck #111. We used Caris for this, and the bathymetry map quickly confirmed that the only wreck to match the dimensions and size of Athenia was #111, which was also the closest to the SOS position. While Caris gave us a top-down bird’s-eye view of the overall seabed, Fledermaus allowed us to visualize and measure the wreck itself from any orientation in all three dimensions.
For the next hour I examined the wreck from every conceivable angle and made a series of measurements to compare against the profile drawing of Athenia I had found in the archives, which included notes about the flooding and damage she had suffered. This wreck was definitely broken, possibly in two locations, and there was a clear dislocation of approximately seventeen degrees between the two main parts. My feeling was that such a large dislocation was likely to have happened at the surface rather than on hitting the seabed. Generally, when ships hit the seabed, their hulls will bend or crumple but they don’t fracture and dislocate to such a large degree. In Athenia’s case, the ship was sinking, but much more slowly than the crew had originally feared. All the damage and flooding was in the after part of the ship, with probably no appreciable flooding of the bow due to the quick closing of the watertight bulkheads. My suspicion was that the difference in loading of the hull, with one part of the ship fully flooded and the other not, would eventually cause it to fail, especially when exposed to the constant motion of ten-foot waves. It seemed likely to me that what had caused Athenia to finally sink was her back breaking, and the remains of that fracture and dislocation were what we were seeing in the sonar images.
My calm and methodical analysis of the MBES images belied the excitement I was feeling inside as it became increasingly clear, in my mind at least, that we were looking at the wreck of Athenia. I knew that without visual proof I couldn’t be 100 per cent certain, but I was completely satisfied that every indication I could derive from the imagery was positive. While the cameraman filmed my exchanges with Eibhlin, Jane listened intently and then began asking questions. At first she wanted me to summarize the analytical reasons why I felt the imagery matched Athenia, but eventually she got to the all-important question from the BBC’s perspective. If I couldn’t be 100 per cent positive that the wreck was Athenia, what percentage would I apply to my level of confidence? It was a tough question, but I didn’t shy away from answering, telling her that even on a conservative basis, I felt that the chances that this was the wreck of Athenia were 90 per cent or better.
She also asked me what this discovery meant for the project. I told her that the risk was now significantly reduced. Instead of having to conduct an uncertain and costly search, with no guarantee of success, we could plan a shorter, less expensive expedition to visually con
firm the wreck as Athenia well in advance of the live dive. During that expedition we could assess the condition of the wreck and determine the best features to film. We’d also have back-up film in the can in case we ran into serious problems during the dive. Given that the BBC had initially been prepared to conduct a full search for Athenia, I thought they’d be over the moon that we had essentially discovered the wreck for the cost of some plane tickets to Dublin.
Jane herself couldn’t have been happier or more positive about the outcome of the Dublin trip. This was a big opportunity for her to produce a series of high-profile documentaries to be broadcast on the BBC’s flagship channel in prime time. Like me, she felt that my discovery had made the decision an easy one for Peter Fincham and Richard Klein (BBC1 controller and commissioning editor respectively), the executives in charge of commissioning the programme. As they had funded the development to determine whether it was feasible to find Athenia, surely the commissioning decision was a no-brainer on the basis that the wreck was now located. We agreed to take no chances, however, and spent the next three weeks conducting more research and getting a better idea of the availability and costs of potential vessels and ROVs for the expedition. We had until the end of February, when the final commissioning decision would be made, to make the strongest possible case for the project to go ahead.
Before I left for Antarctica, I initiated several lines of research that started to yield interesting results. In order to tell the full story of the ramifications of the attack on Athenia, we also needed to know what had happened to Lemp, Dönitz and Raeder afterwards. If Lemp had had any doubts about the seriousness of the mistake he had made in attacking a civilian passenger liner, he certainly knew he was in trouble the next day when U-30 picked up British radio reports confirming that Athenia had been sunk and that the casualties included many women and children. He was shocked by his error, telling his crew ‘what a mess’ he had made, and asking with respect to Athenia, ‘Why was she blacked out?’ In Germany, Dönitz and the naval staff heard the same reports but thought they were false. They simply did not think it possible that a submarine commander would consciously disregard their explicit orders to operate in accordance with the Prize Regulations. Nevertheless, to be sure there was no repeat occurrence, a signal was sent to all U-boats at 23.53 on 4 September: ‘The Führer has forbidden attacks on passenger liners sailing independently or in convoy.’
Lemp’s ill-judged attack was a propaganda gift to the British government. Because of the large number of Americans involved, the attack was covered by all the major US newspapers, thus publicly exposing Germany as a serious threat to the security of the United States. It also allowed Winston Churchill, who had been brought back into the Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, to open direct communications with President Roosevelt, who decided that the US should amend its existing Neutrality Acts in order to allow the sale of munitions to France and Great Britain.
For their part, Germany needed some form of plausible deniability of the fact that it was one of their submarines that had sunk Athenia. The operations division of the naval war staff decided on a policy of ‘atrocity propaganda’: ‘In view of the method of waging war which is to be expected from the British – ruthless, and employing every conceivable means – it might perhaps be maintained that the British staged the sinking by her own mines or by her own U-boats.’ And so it was ultimately left to propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to issue a claim that it was a British torpedo that had sunk the ship, and that Churchill – in an echo of German claims in World War I that he had been responsible for the sinking of the Lusitania — had planned the stunt in a desperate attempt to draw America into the war.
U-30 continued its war patrol, sinking two more ships before returning to Wilhelmshaven on 27 September 1939 in a damaged state. Before their arrival, Georg Högel remembers, ‘Lemp made us swear to keep the Athenia sinking a secret.’ The submarine’s commander knew that the fallout from any public disclosure of his blunder was potentially explosive, so he was determined to keep it under wraps. He met Dönitz as soon as his boat was docked and admitted to having sunk the Athenia in error. After questioning him about the incident, Dönitz decided that he had acted in good faith, and because there was no negligence involved, no disciplinary action was taken against him. But he was still made to report directly to Admiral Raeder, who ordered that the matter was to be kept totally secret. Presumably acting on these orders, Dönitz then had Lemp falsify U-30’s Kriegstagebuch (war diary) to eliminate all references to the attack on Athenia. The dirty deed was actually done by Högel, who was called into Lemp’s private office and told, ‘I want you to change my war diary.’ Lemp then ordered all his men to swear a second oath of secrecy, binding until the end of the war.
Despite this inauspicious start, Kapitänleutnant Lemp (he was promoted on 1 October 1939) actually went on to be a very successful U-boat commander, winning both the Iron Cross and the coveted Knight’s Cross for sinking twenty ships and damaging four others. However, his final patrol in command of his next submarine, U-110, ended on an equally disastrous note. On 9 May 1941, Lemp sank three more ships but in the process was detected by a Royal Navy escort ship, supposedly because he left his periscope up too long. U-110 was depth-charged and ultimately forced to the surface, where she was about to be rammed by the destroyer HMS Bulldog. Facing a barrage of gunfire from the attacking destroyers, Lemp ordered his crew to abandon ship, which he assumed was about to be sunk along with all its confidential material. Seeing that the submarine was being abandoned, however, Bulldogs commander changed his mind and decided to capture it.
Once on board the empty boat, the party from Bulldog found a treasure trove of intelligence material, including an Enigma machine, a short signal codebook and a short weather report codebook. Lemp tried to swim back to his stricken sub to prevent its capture but was never seen again, and U-110 eventually sank before Bulldog could tow it into port. After realizing the importance of the intelligence coup, the Admiralty were happy for it to be known that U-110 had sunk to make the Kriegsmarine believe that no vital information had been lost. All other aspects of the capture, code-named Operation Primrose, were treated with the greatest secrecy. It took some time before the documents captured from U-110 started paying dividends, but eventually they played an important role in breaking the German naval Enigma code.
Although it was always suspected that a U-boat was involved in the sinking of Athenia, the true story wasn’t revealed until the end of the war, when the Russian army seized the Kriegsmarine records from the naval staff HQ near Berlin. That was the first time U-30 was identified as the offending submarine and Lemp as the commander in charge. Lemp did not live to see his secret revealed, but other members of his crew did, and one of them, who was a prisoner in a Canadian camp, spilled the beans when investigators connected with the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremburg came calling. Both Dönitz and Raeder were charged with war crimes and tried by the IMT for waging unrestricted submarine warfare contrary to the London Submarine Protocol of 1936. The charge against Raeder specifically mentions the sinking of the unarmed Athenia, although Raeder tried to pin the blame on Hitler for ordering the cover-up. They were both found guilty, with Dönitz serving ten years in prison and Raeder receiving a life sentence, although he was released early because of ill health.
During his interrogation at Nuremburg, Dönitz admitted that U-30’s war diary ‘was not faked, but there was a clear order that the case of the Athenia should be kept a total secret for political reasons, and, as a result the log had to be changed’. When I found and inspected a copy of the war diary in the UK archives, it was immediately obvious that it had been doctored. In my eyes there were three dead giveaways. The first, and most important, was that the opening page covered too long a period and included just a fraction of the information normally recorded in these documents. This was completely out of character for a submarine conducting an operational patrol during the opening days of war a
nd told me that a whole series of pages, including the attack on Athenia, had been removed and replaced by this single sheet. The second giveaway was that the first page was single-spaced, while all subsequent pages were double-spaced. And finally, the format of the dates on the first page was different from how they were typed elsewhere. Whatever the reason for such carelessness, Lemp and Georg Högel did an incredibly poor job in falsifying the war diary that in the end fooled no one.
By the time of Jane’s big meeting with the BBC, where she expected to get the green light for the project, we had found a lot more background information on the broader historical significance of the sinking of Athenia. In addition to the ramifications for Lemp, Dönitz and Raeder, a researcher helping Jane found a fantastic-looking builder’s model of Athenia, and some American survivors were also located who were happy to speak on camera about living through the ordeal as young children. Being able to tell the stories of these survivors was extremely important, especially as they were American, which Jane thought might help the BBC get National Geographic on board in a co-production deal. The other exciting American connection was that Joseph P. Kennedy, who had been the US ambassador to the United Kingdom at the time, had sent his twenty-two-year old son John F. Kennedy to be present as his official representative when the survivors began arriving on the rescue ships in Glasgow. In addition to meeting the survivors in hotels and in hospital — which was captured on film — the young JFK also carried the promise of money, in the form of a fund organized by his father, to help pay for clothing and temporary accommodation. Jane thought there was nothing like a bit of that Kennedy stardust to stimulate the interest of American television.
The Shipwreck Hunter Page 22