Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Found 77 years on..icy tomb of 58 heroes on sunken sub
Divers stumble upon lost wreck sent to bottom by Nazis in 1940
THE final resting place of 58 British seamen killed when their submarine was sunk in the Second World War has been discovered by accident.
The wreck of HMS Narwhal, sent to the bottom 77 years ago, was stumbled on by a team of Polish divers searching for one of their own vanished subs.
Narwhal and her crew are lying in 308ft of water 140 miles off the east coast of Scotland. She left her base in Blyth, Northumberland, to lay mines around German-occupied Norway as the Battle of Britain raged in July 1940.
But unknown to ill-fated skipper Lt Commander Ronald Burch and her crew, the Germans had cracked secret Royal Navy codes and knew where she was heading. The Luftwaffe sent in a Dornier bomber and she was lost with all hands. She remained undiscovered until earlier this year when the group of Polish deep-sea explorers came across her during their 10-year hunt for the submarine Orzel (Eagle).
She had been missing since the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.
Diver Tomasz Stachura said: “While we were searching for the Eagle we found an unknown sub at a depth of around 308ft. At first we hoped it could be the Eagle, but we soon found that the wreck was 13ft longer than Eagle.”
He added: “Hopefully this can help in confirming the fate of the crew lost with the submarine.
“We are very interested in any contact with HMS Narwhal staff relatives as it would be good to hear their stories.” At
the time the vessel was one of the Royal Navy’s most fierce submarines. She carried 12 torpedoes and also had a 4in deck gun for use on the surface.
She is credited with sinking the German U-boat U-1, the first submarine built by the Third Reich, which vanished while on patrol in 1940.
Underwater 3D radar scans taken from the side and above appear to show the Narwhal is still intact on the bed of the North Sea.
George Malcomson, creator of archives with the National Museum of the Royal Navy, said the discovery marks only one of several British submarines that are still missing to this day.
Mr Malcomson said: “There were lots of British submarines and ships that were lost, not just during the Second World War, but the First World War also.
“During WWI there were 54 that went missing and that increased to around 70 during WWII.” He added: “The problem is that they head into patrol areas, don’t come back, and no one knows what happened to them.
“Finding them involves looking at enemy records, among various other things, and in recent years there has been a steady trickle of submarine and ship wrecks being found.”