AFTER SEVEN YEARS BENEATH THE SEA

Shannon News, 5 November 1926, Page 1

AFTER SEVEN YEARS BENEATH THE SEA

Pour months ago began one of the greatest salvage undertakings ever attempted—that of raising the German battle-cruiser Hindenburg, scuttled in June, 1919, between the islands of Hoy and Cava, where she had been taken from the larger waters at Scapa Flow. The Hindenburg weighs 27,000 tons, and she contained about 56,000 tons of water. Before pumping operations could be effective it was necessary to cover the hatches, port-holes, ~and other openings in the vessel with woooden patches affixed by divers. j Pumping began on August 1, and I three times the vessel had begun to lift when a hatch gave way, In rush-\ ied the water, and she settled down ' again. i At length it could bo noticed that ', the Hindenburg was slowly rising. ■ The pumps were working at a capacity of 10,000 tons an hour, and the message Avent round: "We are beating her this time —she has lifted three feet." All night some of the pumps wer3 kept going to maintain her position, and full pressure was resumed next day. Inside the Vessel While the giant steel bulk was still below the sea, I donned the clumsy dress —minus the helmet——of a diver, and from a small boat scrambled down inside, a wooden chimney-stack-like structure called a coffer dam, which was built over the foremost hatchway of the submerged upper deck, writes a correspondent in the "Daily Mail." From there, by vertical iron ladders, guided by a portable . electric | light and with sea water cascading over me and occasionally up to the waist on the floor, I slithered on three slimy decks as low as the armour deck, and as far as the stokehold,which lies beyond the gun turrets,, where one peered down into the still water-logged magazine and fumbled overhead along the rail by which the gun charges travelled to feed the 12-inch guns. Above us stores are still lying in the carpentry department of the armour deck in profession. They are j unrusW still. Planes, files, crowbars, axes, augers, and nails still crowded their appropriate metal drawers and shelves —a slimy greasy memorial to German orderliness. There are neatly-wedged diving gear and smoke-helmets, and hundreds of little oxygen canisters are stacked in rapid dissolution. The,upper 'tween deck was an adventure in investigation. Beer barrels still roll the floor of one store, one barrel attached by a pipe to a small bottle-filling plant. Skeletons of easy chairs float in the barber's shop, and a big mirror gave me back a somewhat foggy reflection. The doors of an empty metal sideboard swing open and shut in the officer's lounge. The framework of once comfortably upholstered seteees attached to the walls there is rotting. Typewritten Orders. . Heavy cups hang in orderly rows from the ceiling of the officers' serving room. Everything of metal or wood, or porcelain is still unbroken and usable despite seven years' submersion. Even the orders typed on stout paper-are plainly decipherable, and some large plans found by the divers have greatly simplified the work of discovering and caulking up all apertures. One set of orders makes amusing reading now. It was prepared for the instruction of the orderly attached to the commandant. He was forbidden to draw the curtain in the officers' sleeping cabin without obtaining permission, and elsewhere on. this long-satura.ted paper, I read another order instrueing the orderly that it was imperative to kuock on the door before entering the commandant's bathroom when he occupied it.