BRIEFING ROOM
GOVERNMENTS AND heritage agencies on both sides of the North Sea are again facing scrutiny after fresh allegations that maritime graves of missing naval personnel have been violated by commercial salvage companies and wreck divers looking for souvenirs. Andy Brockman takes up the story, which comes against the background of controversy surrounding the alleged commercial salvage of wrecks in the Java Sea.
In August 1914 the strategic and tactical deployment of submarines was a learning curve as theories of naval tacticians and results of pre-war exercises came up against the dangerous reality of a shooting war carried out in one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet; the sea.
At the sharp end were submarine crews on both sides, crammed into riveted steel tubes, cheek-by-jowl with potentially lethal cocktails of electricity, battery acid, fuel oil and high explosives, and learning how to fight at the cutting edge of contemporary technology in conditions where even officers might be forced to share a single bunk and bodily functions had to be carried out in a bucket.
On 16 October 1914, one of those vessels, the E-class submarine HMS E3, left its Harwich base to patrol off the …
