A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (37 page)

The grid reference recorded by Ernst Mendersen of U-101 for the sinking of the
Gairsoppa
was over the Porcupine Abyssal Plain, a huge expanse of seabed between 4,000 and 4,800 metres deep off the Irish continental shelf. It was named after HMS
Porcupine
, a sail and paddlewheel ship built in 1844 – the year before the Franklin expedition set out to the Arctic – that carried out bathymetric surveys
on the edge of the shelf, disproving the theory that life could not exist in pressures below 600 metres by bringing up marine creatures from more than five times that depth. When the wreck of the
Gairsoppa
was found in 2011, it was some 50 miles off the shelf at a depth of 4,700 metres – nearly equal to the height of Mont Blanc and more than half a mile deeper than the
Titanic.

The discovery of the
Titanic
some 400 miles off Newfoundland in 1985 showed what was possible for deep-water exploration around the world, using manned submersibles built to withstand extreme pressures as well as Remote Operated Vehicles, ROVs. The deep-water wreck discoveries that provide an immediate backdrop for the
Gairsoppa
are the German battleship
Bismarck
and the British battlecruiser HMS
Hood
, found in 1989 and 2001 respectively, both sunk less than three months after the loss of the
Gairsoppa
in what was arguably the greatest naval engagement since Trafalgar – with the
Bismarck
also being on the Porcupine Abyssal Plain only 125 miles south-west of the site of the
Gairsoppa
, showing how close she had come to wreaking devastation among the SL convoys. Seeing the bow of
Hood
, which blew up and sank in less than three minutes with only three of her 1,418 company surviving, and the
Bismarck
, the huge swastika on her foredeck still clearly visible, shows the power of wrecks for their emotional impact and for bringing those momentous events back into the limelight, something that has also made the
Titanic
one of the most enduring wreck discoveries of all time.

As the
Gairsoppa
plummeted into the depths it would have righted itself, with the weight of the water that had rushed into the bows and caused the hull to upend balanced by flooding of the rest of the vessel. The force of impact on the seabed caused much of the midships structure to shear away, leaving the bridge and funnel some distance from the main wreck. Nevertheless, the images captured by the ROV show the ship in a remarkable state of preservation, with the railings, external stairs and fittings still intact. Among the most striking images is the ship's gun, a 4-inch Vickers BK Mark IX of 1918 – still in position with its barrel pointing aft, the gun crew having had no time to bring it into action, and the submarine anyway being invisible in the darkness. The jagged hole where the port side had been torn open by the torpedo was clearly visible. Much of the wreck was covered in ‘rusticles', a term coined by the discoverers of the
Titanic
for the rust-like product left by organisms that consume iron, a process that will gradually see
most wrecks of this period collapse and disappear into the seabed.

The team on
Odyssey Explorer
that investigated the site in 2011–13 uncovered a wealth of artefacts, both in historical terms and as bullion. The iron bars that formed the largest weight in the cargo were still in the hold, as well as crates of tea. The greatest historical treasure was a cache of letters that had formed part of the ship's postal consignment from Calcutta, including bundles for delivery in Scotland, south-west England and California. These were preserved in the largely anaerobic conditions of the seabed and could be separated and read during conservation; as we shall see, they provide fascinating insights into the world at the time from the viewpoint of people living in India only a few years before it became independent from Britain. The greatest monetary treasure was more than 170 tons of silver bars, part of the special consignment from India for which the ship had been requisitioned – with the total order of some six million ounces being split with another ship, the HMS
Somali
, that left Freetown in early February. By late 1940 the British Government was desperately short of silver to finance the war and had decided to call on reserves held in India. The loss of such a huge quantity of silver in the
Gairsoppa
could have had a decisive effect on the war, when the ability of Britain to survive was on a knife edge – at a time when shipping losses were almost unsustainable, London was being devastated by bombing, the Germans were poised to extend their blitzkrieg into the Balkans and the entry of the United States into the war was far from certain.

After conservation, the letters went to the Postal Museum in London and were published in a volume edited by Dr Sean Kingsley. The British Government, which owns the
Gairsoppa
and all other British-registered ships lost in the war, entered into an agreement whereby the Treasury would receive 20 per cent of the silver recovered. Part of this was turned by the Royal Mint into coins commemorating the
Gairsoppa
and sold to collectors. These coins not only provide a connection with the wreck, the Second World War and India in the last days of British rule, but also have a global reach – much of the silver had probably been mined in the Americas, where the search for silver and gold had driven European conquest and resulted in the famous silver ‘pieces of eight' that have been found in shipwrecks around the world, and where mines continue to produce the silver that fuelled the world's economies and wars for centuries.

The letters from the
Gairsoppa
give a fascinating picture of the world in late 1940 from the perspective of the British community in India. That period is almost beyond living memory, but until recently there were many alive in Britain who were in India while it was still part of the British Empire, and many families, including my own, can trace ancestors who lived and worked there – my great-grandmother and her brother were born in India as were four generations before them, working as soldiers, sea captains, administrators and merchants. From the foundation of the East India Company in 1600 to independence in 1947 India was a prominent part of the British worldview, first under the company and then from 1858 under direct Crown rule – the period known as the ‘Raj' after Queen Victoria was crowned Empress of India in 1877. The letters give a glimpse of a time when colonial rule by European powers was the norm in many parts of the world, something unimaginable now, but that was a formative period of history and explains many aspects of the world that we live in today.

Many of the letters are from British soldiers based on the north-west frontier of India writing back to their families in England. The East India Company had maintained its own private army, with British officers and Indian enlisted men; under Crown rule the British Indian Army had the same recruitment structure, but increasing numbers of Indians being commissioned as officers. In 1940 the military in India comprised some 133,000 men of this army and 44,000 from British units based in India. The letters represent a cross-section of these units – including, from the Indian Army, the Assam Rifles, the 10th Baluch Regiment, the 9th Gurkha Rifles, Queen Victoria's Own Corps of Guides, the Rajputana Rifles and the Sikh Regiment, and from the British Army the King's Own Scottish Borderers, the Worcestershire Regiment, the Devonshire Regiment and the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, the last two reflecting the fact that one bundle of letters recovered was for the south-west of England with the soldiers being from places such as Penzance and Falmouth in Cornwall.

As in the First World War, when the Indian Army fought the Ottoman Turks in Mesopotamia, in 1940 Indian units were sent to fight the Axis in the Middle East and North Africa. In early August 1940 Mussolini's Italian forces invaded British Somaliland, and by December two divisions of the Indian Army were poised in Sudan for the campaign that would defeat the Italians in Abyssinia and Eritrea. Meanwhile Indian units formed a large part of the British army in
Egypt that defeated the Italians in Libya in late 1940 and early 1941, the first phase of the desert war that would see Indian troops pitted against Rommel's Afrika Korps and then form part of the Allied advance through Sicily and Italy to the end of the war.

Many of the British soldiers in India writing those letters in early December 1940 would have expected to form part of that effort – there was no thought yet of a war with Japan. However, their immediate concern was not the prospect of fighting Italians or Germans but rather the rigours of policing the north-west frontier. One soldier of the 1st Battalion, the Queen's Royal Regiment, writing from Razmak in Waziristan to his parents in Penzance, described a raid by armed tribesmen and sent photos of a village being destroyed; several British soldiers had been killed and he had been under fire twice. Another from the 1
^st
Battalion, Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry described the cold and hardship on mountain patrols, and one from the 1
^st
Battalion, Devonshire Regiment being ‘on our guard every second'. These experiences had been the lot of British soldiers in India since the frontier had been pushed to Afghanistan in the late 1840s, with decades of low-key confrontation punctuated by war in Afghanistan – most recently in 1919 – and large-scale uprisings, including one in Waziristan in 1936–9 that resulted in several thousand casualties. These conflicts seem more at home in the nineteenth century than on the cusp of the Second World War, but they were part of the ‘Great Game' between Britain and Russia in which Afghanistan was a buffer zone, and they have considerable immediacy as a result of recent conflict in Afghanistan and the same border regions.

The letters were not just from soldiers but from a wide range of people in civilian occupations as well, many of them reflecting on the war as they saw it and their view of the future. One man writing to relatives in Los Angeles expressed the hope of many:

… one cannot believe that in the end America will not rally wholeheartedly to help destroy this menace to world peace … May this awful war come to a successful end as soon as possible but not before Hitler and his devils have been put down for good & all. I only pray that America will come in eventually & help do this.

The experience of friends and relatives in England was uppermost in many people's minds, with one woman in Bihar in eastern India writing
‘It's simply amazing how England weathers the summer's Blitzkrieg – and the threat of invasion … like that of Bonaparte.' A man pleads with his wife in Devon ‘… always to sleep downstairs. Look at it from the angle of exits and fire possibilities will you?… Truly we live only day by day by God's grace and this dear is my foremost thought on awakening each morning.' There was little thought of appeasement or a negotiated peace, with people perhaps remembering the Armistice at the end of the First World War and how conquest of Germany in 1918 and the destruction of her army might have been a better outcome, making the rise of Nazism less likely. A woman in Devon is told ‘… we do not want a patch up peace – we must beat the swine. And do it properly. Their women must feel it.' And in a prescient warning of the fate of the
Gairsoppa
, one woman writes that it is ‘difficult to write to loved ones in England … as we do not know when or how letters will arrive, nor under what circumstances you will be when the letters do arrive.'

Almost exactly a year after those letters were posted an event took place that would have reshaped the perspective of those people profoundly – the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, and Germany and Italy joining Japan in declaring war on the United States. The man writing to Los Angeles had his wish fulfilled, and within a few months the American contribution in ships and aircraft to the Battle of the Atlantic was having a significant effect. Simultaneously the Japanese declared war on Britain and invaded Malaysia and Burma, leading the Indian and British armies to fight a brutal jungle campaign for more than three years to keep the Japanese out of India. The men who had written of hardship on the north-west frontier now had to contend with war on a different scale, with the 1
^st
Battalion, Devonshire Regiment leaving India in December 1941 and suffering such heavy casualties at the siege of Tobruk in North Africa in 1942 that they were disbanded, and the 1
^st
Battalion, Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry fighting the Japanese in the gruelling battles of Kohima and Imphal near the Burmese border in 1944. The needs of a global war led the Indian Army to expand to nearly 2.5 million men, a huge contribution alongside the manufacture and shipment from India of vast quantities of arms and ammunition, equipment, foodstuffs and raw materials for the war effort.

At the same time the Indian independence movement under Mahatma Gandhi was gaining momentum, making secession from
Britain all but inevitable once the war was over. That future – the prospect of a new India – is reflected in one letter that stands out among others from the wreck. It contained the completed examination paper for a long-distance learning course by D. Sikar of Rajputana, sent along with his photograph for the certificate to the Hollywood Radio and Television Institute in Los Angeles. The Institute had successfully trained radio operators in more than forty countries since 1929, providing a correspondence course as well as radio kits for home experimentation. An advert for the company in the
Indian Listener
of December 1940, headlined ‘War creates big demand for radio experts', advises that ‘The war will not hinder your H.R.T.I. training for mail is always continued between warring and friendly countries.' The inclusion of TV engineering was very up-to-date – the first live TV broadcast, of the Atlanta premiere of
Gone with the Wind
, had been in December 1939 – and the aspirations of this man seem to look to a future where global reach was not about war but about ideas and technology, making the image of his face after seventy years on the seafloor one of the more poignant discoveries from the wreck.