Steel from shipwrecks

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0:41So you've caught me rifling through my kitchen, reflecting on all the metals in our lives, as I often do. We've got my stainless steel cutlery in here. We've got my moulded steel of my cast iron pan sitting next to the steel of my fridge as well. I'm Anna Podjewski. I'm a material scientist and possibly you don't think about steel as much as I do, but even if you don't, I have got an incredible story for you. And like many good stories, it starts with a shipwreck.

1:14And they called me up on a Saturday morning and they said the ships are gone. Wrecks across the world being broken apart, steel hulls hauled to the surface, Just scars left behind on the seabed. It's one to say it can't be true. This is a mistake. It's some old information. It's a different site. How is this going on? And no one noticed. Rumours swirling about the preciousness of the looted metals. There's money to be gained all over the world. Making money is overruling all ethics. Wrecks that are more than just metal and driftwood. They have taken everything, inclusive the bones. How to protect them raises deep questions.

1:57Can we prove when it started, how long it's been going on for? Can we help the authorities catch these guys? About our laws, about grief. Bad heritage, heritage of bad things is still heritage. It's still very important. We can never put a flower, a dead dad's grave. They're digging it up. This is the documentary from the BBC World Service, diving into the murky world of World War II ship scavenging and meeting those trying to put a stop to the globe's biggest grave robbery. Just imagine you would do the same on land. Why is that not the same underwater? I find it weird.

2:41Hey Giles, nice to meet you. I'm Anna. Nice to meet you, Anna. Hi. I've come to Poole today on a beautiful sunny morning to visit Giles Richardson. we drove from the station through a very nondescript industrial estate and have come to what would look like a warehouse just like any other. There's industrial equipment, there's a forklift truck and then as you look closer the walls are stacked with some very curious objects and I'm very intrigued to find out more. My name is Giles Richardson and I'm Chief Operating Officer at the Maritime Archaeology Sea Trust. and we're involved in all aspects of maritime history and maritime archaeology.

3:24So it's quite a cavernous space we have, but we need a lot of area to work with because some of our objects are absolutely enormous. So nestled beneath this enormous anchor, we've got some really special artefacts. These are from a First World War merchant ship that was torpedoed by a German submarine and sunk. The most impressive artefact is the ship's bell. Can I touch it? Of course you can, it's completely solid. Again, this is made of brass, and brass is very unreactive underwater, so it tends to be very well preserved, and it's very easy to conserve as well. You would never guess that that was over 100 years old.

3:56No. It's in perfect condition. What attracted you to working with shipwrecks? What made you fall in love with these ships under the sea? So it's all my grandad's fault. When I was about five or six years old, he took me down to the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, and to my six-year-old mind, this was a pirate ship emerging out from the mist. And that was it. When everyone else at school was saying, I want to be a racing driver, I want to go to the moon, I always said, I want to be a maritime archaeologist, I want to dive on shipwrecks. We're a very gentle subject, but this is a sailor's pipe. It seems blackened.

4:29Is that literally the smoke from the pipe? That's literally the ash and the smoke from the pipe, always certainly. I think for me, the whole sort of magic behind seeing shipwrecks underwater is they are time capsules. There's very few other instances where an entire structure is lost to humans immediately. And unlike on land where you get salvaged, so after a battle's happened, people will come by, scavengers and looters, and they'll take away the swords, the armour. There's very little to see today, whereas underwater, if there's a battle, almost always everything is exactly where it was left.

4:59I don't mean to be rude, but what's the smell in here? It's not me. It's probably loads of conservation chemicals. Some of it's the rusty smell. It doesn't smell like you might imagine old wood or old metal smelling like. And it's not chemically like my old lab used to smell like either. It's sort of like musty, not like fresh sea. It's like maybe it's ancient sea. Maybe that's what that smells like. My name's Kim Brown and my background is in maritime law and the law of the sea. and my research interest is in the area of underwater cultural heritage, in particular World War II shipwrecks. The waters around Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia are a hotspot for modern-day scavenging.

5:51It's estimated that over 40 World War II wrecks have either been partially or completely destroyed. Wherever there's been military conflict, you'll come across this new emerging criminal pursuit, These metal pirates really prey upon large amounts of metal to just resell to industry or to salvage, which will be buying, unknown to them, materials recovered illegally from the seafloor. So it's quite a lucrative trade. Scavengers use deep-reach cranes and dredging equipment to rip apart wrecks to access steel hulls and other metals. If you look at some of the images, you can see that it's very much like a bulldozer.

6:40But because these historic shipwrecks are underwater, people are not as well aware of what is happening as compared to the destruction of a site on land.

6:59I'm Hazine. I've been diving for the past almost 30 years. I took up applying archaeology and now I'm doing bits of work, forensic archaeology, to do more to underwater investigation and repatriation. Haz lives on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur and regularly dives off the east coast of Malaysia to look at wrecks and underwater life. I find it calmer to stay underwater. I just could not bother about traffic jams, I could not bother about certain people who hassle me a lot, so I would just get them away from me, that's all. Before her involvement in investigating shipwreck scavenging, Haas worked on the repatriation of war remains from airplanes and ships.

7:50And it goes back to my little memory that I have an American grand-uncle. He was lost in Korea. When I asked my uncle, he said that he just wanted his father to be back. And they always had this motto not to leave anyone behind. when they managed to recover the rest of the remains. It touches me a lot. Diver Haz in KL and Giles, our man in the warehouse in the south of England, were brought together by two vessels, HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse. Originally part of Force Z, a World War II British naval squadron, They were shipwrecked in 1941 in the South China Sea, while searching for a Japanese invasion further up the coast of Malaysia.

8:49They were sent out from Singapore, a day after Japan's surprise military attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbour. In repulse, the voice of the commander came over the loudspeakers, saying, we are being shattered by enemy aircraft. And a little later, it was announced that the battleships were now returning to Singapore. They were ambushed by aircraft. They came over in waves, mostly dropping torpedoes. As you know, they did what they had to do. Prince of Wales capsized and sank while still fighting. The captain of Repulse ordered his ship to be abandoned. Two jewels of the British fleet, both nearly 800 feet in length, lost to the depths.

9:34850 sailors were lost from both ships together, about 500 from Prince of Wales, and about 350 from Repulse. The loss of these ships was absolutely disastrous to the British and Churchill described in his diaries later getting the phone call at 2 o 'clock in the morning and he said it was the worst, single worst moment of the entire war for him. They've since been lying on the seabed off the coast of Malaysia, both at over 50 metres depth with only seven nautical miles of sea between them. Every wreck is different, but you always know when you're diving on a wreck that were sunk during conflict and with heavy loss of life.

10:10And as you drop down through the water column, you have a few minutes to think about it. The first time you see any objects, you're really hungry for that information. Your brain's going to overdrive, going, is that the seabed? Yes. Is that the wreck? Yes, we're actually on the wreck. Brilliant. Which part of it is it? I'm not quite sure. And as you get closer to it, things start to come into focus. The first thing you would have seen was just a giant floor of steel and then gradually come into view the propellers. Again, these are bigger than the man. Gradually, you would come down to deck level, very close to the seabed, and if you're lucky, you could peer underneath.

10:45You might see portholes and windows and doorways you can look into. And you might have looked inside and seen the twisted, jagged metal. It is very emotive, and it is very real when you're down there. To see Prince of Wills into reality It really kicks me up for a while because I've never seen a bigger battleship in my whole life, actually. The feeling is that I get that she's a very aggressive ship. It's like you have a step-mom just looking at you and you're not doing anything wrong, but you're just like, I just need to get out from this place. You just don't want to be there. Repulse, she kind of like soft, lady-like battle cruiser.

11:39Visiting her, it's beautiful because you still can see her shells, a live crew boat, but we don't go near them to touch or anything.

12:03Ship scavenging, which Giles and Haz have been investigating, is a highly destructive process. We know that they like to employ divers who swim down to the seabed with explosives and they detonate them to try and blow chunks off the ship to make them loose and detach them. If that doesn't work, they also have enormous chisels which they can just drop down and just try and break it into chunks. Often she leaves almost no trace, just a giant scar on the seabed and a few odd bits of metal that weren't worth picking up. By now, I expect you're wondering why these groups go to such lengths for just scrap metal.

12:39I mean, steel is cheap to produce and readily available everywhere. But these wrecks contain a different type of steel, technically one of the rarest substances in the world. It's known as pre-war or low background steel. Essentially, this is steel produced before the first atomic bomb in 1945, and therefore it's free of any radioactive particles. Low background steel is crucial for certain applications, such as Geiger counters, which are instruments that detect radiation levels. So with a finite supply of pre-1945 steel, these shipwrecks could be a source of this material. Some archaeologists think that this is what's driving the scavengers.

13:20You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service, hosted by me, Anna Pojaisky.

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14:01It was very much a sort of flash in the pan moment. Both Prince of Wales and Ripples had been targets for scavenging back in 2014. I think it was about two or three years where this happened and then for a combination of authorities stamping down on it, price of metals collapsing and running out of wrecks to viably salvage, the problem seemed to go away on its own. In 2023, new reports of scavenging on these two wrecks started to float around, but on a bigger scale. So the first time we ever heard that Prince of Wales and Repulsors were being salvaged in 2023 was when a TikTok video popped up.

14:39So I'm watching this video now and there is an absolutely enormous claw on a crane that is lifting what is unmistakably some sort of cannon or gun from the massive ship onto dry land. There's huge chunks of metal dropping off it. At the same time, Haz, our colleague out in Malaysia, sent us a photograph that she just received of some fishermen who went out and they were chased away by this gunboat, the giant crane in the background. When the photos came to me directly, The feeling was very angry and that's when I started to do the reporting to National Heritage Department. The scavenging barge in the images was familiar to both Haz and Giles.

15:28It was this enormous Chinese built 100 metre long double crane barge called Changkong 68. And rather than having one crane that could lift 50 tonnes, she has a 500 ton crane. At that point, my heart really sank because this is a professional outfit and there was very, very little hope that the ship was going to be intact after this.

15:50The Chanhong 68 is a vessel with a long, confusing history. It sails under the Chinese flag and, at the time of its detainment, was registered to a Chinese company, Fuzhan Yarei Marine Company, who supply salvage vessels. The vessel had been implicated in alleged scavenging on multiple wrecks in the last 10 years. Giles started to investigate Chan Hong 68's movements. The main tool he'd used to use that is automatic information system. It's a safety mechanism that all ships are supposed to transmit so that it can avoid collisions at sea. We knew immediately something odd was up. It quite regularly showed her coming out of Singapore and heading north towards the Prince of Wales site.

16:31when she was about 100 miles south, she would turn it off and she'd just disappear. And she wouldn't reappear again until a week later, went again in the same spot, 100 miles south, heading back towards Singapore. So we knew instantly this is a ship that's trying to hide and they're aware of how the authorities would look to protect the site. Giles also used satellites to fill in the gaps in her journey. We were able to correlate a satellite image that showed that a ship about the right size and shape and colour scheme was over top of Prince of Wales. Quite tellingly, a lot of images as well, when she was over the top of the site, she was surrounded by an enormous oil slick, which could only have been the fuel and the oil from Prince of Wales being released as these fuel tanks being ripped open.

17:11Giles and his team were the first organisation to break the news that the wrecks had allegedly been salvaged by Chan Hong 68. Their reports seemed to show that she'd been operating in the area for over five months, making six voyages to Singapore. Meanwhile, the Malaysian Royal Police raided the scrapyard on land in the Johor state of Malaysia, where the TikTok video had been filmed They found mountains of scrap metal, detained the 32-man crew and seized the barge Chan Hong 68 and its crew were later released and Malaysia's National Heritage Agency are still considering whether to press charges We contacted the company, which Chanhong 68 is registered to for comment, but they didn't respond.

18:00The ships being looted are British, don't forget. So we also reached out to the UK's Ministry of Defence, who said, The Malaysian authorities have primacy over the investigation into the illegal salvage of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Tripulse, and the investigation is ongoing. We strongly condemn any desecration of any maritime military grave. We will take appropriate action, including working with regional governments and partners to prevent inappropriate activity at such sites. I'm Atay Mhanders. I'm an underwater archaeologist. I'm working for the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands.

18:39And in 2016, we got involved in World War shipwrecks found in the Java Sea in Indonesia. and we got involved in them because it turned out that they had been looted. More wrecks. Off the coast of Indonesia, the Reuter, the Kortenar and the Java were targeted. We have a good idea of what might have happened. How do you call it in English? A smoking gun? Martijn Mendes had been tasked with managing a commemorative event to mark 75 years since the Battle of the Java Sea, where 915 Dutch sailors lost their lives. As he was making plans to visit the site alongside the Indonesian government, he heard from local recreational divers.

19:25And they called me up on a Saturday morning and they said, Martijn, the ships are gone. And I started to laugh because I thought, you know, one ship was 170 metres, the Ruiters, the Java is 155 metres long, and the Quartanay, the third ship, is 110 metres long and they were all laying between 60 and 70 metres of depth. So I said, well, you have to look better into your positions because you're probably in the wrong place. And they said, no, no, no, no, no, no. We've been there, checked with our sonar equipment and they're gone. Managing these sites is complicated. Sovereign immunity, a principle of international law that protects state-owned vessels, ensures that ownership isn't contested.

20:13But the idea of a crime scavenging committed at sea complicates this. Maritime lawyer Kim Brown again. One of the challenges is the fact that ownership is really distinct from what we would call jurisdiction. Even though the ship is still owned by the respective state, it doesn't give them the right to really control how these vessels are dealt with. So it's very much relating to this idea of the flag state of the vessel cooperating with the coastal state. The coastal state has that jurisdiction, the authority to determine what constitutes a crime or not a crime. With other forms of transnational crime, we often see nations coming together, particularly when we're dealing with drug trafficking or people smuggling to criminalise these particular types of crimes so that there's a uniform response.

21:16But when it comes to protecting these historic wrecks, there seems to be this absence of law. The weird thing is that there is a definition for war grave. There's also law that supports this. Somebody dies on the battlefield, you can bury that person and you all accept this burial. We can say, well, underwater we have these wrecks and these people have been buried in the wrecks. These wrecks are war graves. But there's no law to support that. to me materials are amazing storytellers when you walk into a museum what do you see you see stuff you see materials things that we've made that tell the story of what mattered to people in a certain time and a certain place but memory can exist in lots of different forms when we're talking about memorializing preserving historic world war ii shipwrecks It's very much a Western idea.

22:19There are other forms of memorialization without having the tangible remains of a vessel. So the spirituality around a space, which may be important to some communities. Given also empires and colonization, nations today may not have significant desire to want to protect these World War II vessels. If we want to understand the world, we have to look at the past. An enormous amount of history is laying on the seabeds, not on land. This is why it is important to protect underwater cultural heritage. If we like the event that had happened or if we dislike the event that had happened. And actually they trigger the memories.

23:12We all might think it's now 80 years ago the war finished. Who still thinks of that battle? Who still feels any emotions to that? Well, a lot of people do.

23:29So I'm Reginald John Greenham, and my dad was on the repose, HMS Repose. Everybody called him Chum. He was a stoker from when they had to shovel coal into the engine sort of thing. Reginald was just nine years old when HMS Repulse went down. It was the one o 'clock news on, I think it was a Saturday, that the two ships had been sunk. We regret to tell you that the two ships, HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales, have been sunk by air power. Six o 'clock in the morning of that morning, my mum woke up and she had an horrible taste of oil in her mouth. And she didn't know it would sunk them either.

24:25How strange is that? I'm Elaine and I'm Reggie's daughter the fact that the war graves are being scavenged makes us as a family very sad because we can't actually go there and of course we've got my dad's memories at the moment and we have a lovely family photograph to remember my grandfather but the fact that he didn't come back had a huge impact on all of their futures.

25:00At the time, he was the engineer officer's runner. When they were going into the battle, the captain needed to know something or other, so he sent my dad down to the engine room and when he came back, he got wounded, I don't know, bullet or something like that. So they picked him up and put him inside. So if he was wounded, he had no chance of getting out. My mum hid it away, I think, quite well sort of thing, you know. My two brothers didn't know him very well, so it left it all, the grief on my shoulders. If it can't be brought up to the surface and those men sent back to their families, if that can't happen, then that site must be protected as a war grave.

25:57It made me feel sad that I can't go and visit it, you know, every year or something like that. I can't go to France and take some flowers and put on a grave. Never going to be able to do that. I'm talking to you now. I feel sad now. just brings back memories.