Sunken Gold - The Story of WWI, Espionage, and the Greatest Treasure Salvage in History

[Music] [Applause] [Music] I'm Amanda Oggy adult education director here at the Spy Museum I am delighted to have you here for sunken gold a story of World War 1 espionage this is a partnership we're having this evening with the Naval Intelligence professionals and we love nip and we have the NIP executive director there he's raised his hand so if you have any very intense questions at do ask Terry but our speaker tonight is Joseph Williams he's the author of sunken gold and he's a librarian archivist someone who had to fit his trip into the National Archives very quickly today because it was closed yesterday he's a historian holding master's degrees in history and Library and Information science from Queens College he worked for several years as the head of collections and assistant director of the State University of New York Maritime colleges Stephen be loose library which specializes in nautical research currently he is the deputy director of the Greenwich library and that's in Connecticut he has published in the fields of maritime history and librarianship including articles in scholarly journals popular see history magazines trade publications and chapters in anthology his work has been presented at national and regional conferences and symposia and in addition to sunken gold he's also written for years before the mast a history of maritime college the nation's oldest maritime training school and 17 fathoms deep an action-packed narrative of the 1927 submarine asks for disaster feel like disasters kind of a big flavor but Joe has really sorry I'm not gonna steal your puns he's really looked at at the espionage I'm not good I'm let leave him off for you he has really drilled down on the espionage angle for this tonight for the Spy Museum so this is a very special angle on sunken gold so help me welcome Joe [Applause] how do I sound good should we just dive right in I'm gonna have plenty of diving puns as we go along okay so our story really begins on January 25th 1917 this is hms lor entik it's the former transatlantic liner of the White Star Line which brought us such ships as the Titanic right so it was modeled similarly to the Titanic triple screwed but it was about third of the size of the Titanic and at the outbreak of the first world war it was converted into a patrol vessel for the Royal Navy and by 1917 it was doing the run from Liverpool to Halifax Nova Scotia now on the run at the end of January it was loaded with a secret consignment of boxes each one of those boxes was labeled metal spoiler alert there's gold in them they're boxes so when the title of this book is called sunken gold it's not a metaphor it's not an allegory there's really gold in those boxes 44 tons of the stuff worth today about 1.7 billion dollars that gold was meant to help finance the war effort by this point in the war the grounding grind the meat grinder of the Western Front and this war of attrition had really ruined the the economies of the Allies and particularly France and Russia and Britain was really kind of backing up the credit of its allies by doing these shipments of gold all around the world particularly to neutral countries like the United States which they would use the gold as collateral for credit and for the direct purchase of munitions the gold that was on board the Laurentiis was eventually it was going to go to Halifax and then be trans to New York City where it was gonna sit in the vaults of JP Morgan to eventually buy munitions to help fund the war on the Western Front so when Laurentiis was leaving Liverpool at the same time the Imperial Germany was mounting its u-boat effort it was it was about to launch an unrestricted u-boat campaign now if you're familiar with World War one at all you'll remember has anybody here ever read Larson's dead wake on the Lusitania okay so a few people so the Germans originally in the First World War they were using their u-boats in an unrestricted manner and this would be mostly to target British shipping and when the war broke out it was using these it was using these u-boats and it was sinking lots of British ships but some of them had Americans aboard and there were objections raised to that particularly the case of the Lusitania and then they were forced to buy American objections to restrict the usage of those u-boats but by the time you get to early 1917 the pressure is on Germany so much that they decide that they're going to roll the dice they're going to unleash their u-boats in an unrestricted manner and really hunt down British shipping irregardless if Americans or other nationalities are on board and they knew that this was going to bring the Americans into the war eventually which it does but they felt that they could knock Britain out of the war and get good armistice terms so what you see here on the left is a typical UB type german u-boat of the first world war you can see in the background that crew member for scale so how small these craft were they you generally ran about a hundred feet long - about 200 feet long very cramped conditions I'm going to show you the interiors of some of these u-boats so you can get an idea of that later on some of them drop mines like the one that you see on the right over there and these that's a typical World War one German naval mind the idea is you see the brackets around the side that acted as an anchor it would go down to the bottom water soluble plug dissolves and it would float up on a tether and then any vessel that struck one of those horns that you see at the top would set off a chain reaction that would explode the mine the Laurentiis was a victim of two of those mines off the coast of Northern Ireland off this really dramatic coastal field called Lough Swilly and it went down into 20 fathoms of water fathom is six feet so that's 120 feet of water and it was just on the outer mouth of the of the North Atlantic so one part of this book is really about the disaster of the Laurentiis and the sinking of the Laurentiis and how of the 475 aboard De Laurentiis most actually made it to lifeboats but because the lifeboats were these open affairs and it was January a winter storm came in and by the morning these lifeboats were scattered all about the law and they found that 354 of the men had frozen to death in the boats so that's one part of it so they couldn't evacuate this gold so I went down and word got back to the British government about it and there was a general freakout about it and the first thing that they did was they went to the private salvage firms and they asked them would you be able to get the gold for us so the private salvage firms said some said no and then because the conditions are too difficult but others said yes but only if we get fifty percent of the value of the gold that we recover so this was unacceptable so they ended up turning to this man here now his name and I love I love his name is given Chesney castell de menthe he was a lieutenant commander he's a blueblood from the Isle of Wight he was a gunnery officer in the Royal Navy and by a quirk of the service gunnery officers were placed in charge of divers and when he received his training at HMS excellent which is a training school for for gunnery officers he was given a crash course in diving and he actually got to go in the suit and do all that fun stuff and well he took to it like a fish into water and he became he became one of the most renowned known knowledgeable experts in hardhat deep-sea diving in the early 20th century and he's a prominent figure in the history of diving but largely unknown because of his own modesty and such he never was a self-promoter and alike but before we really get into like what he did both you know a little a little bit with the lorente ik and also allow what he did with the u-boats you got to understand how difficult the type of work that these divers are going to undertake so what you see here is a traditional diving dress of the Royal Navy now there's a couple of things that I like to point out about this I'm sure you know we're all kind of familiar with this type of diving dress the diving kit it's essentially a dry suit air gets pumped in throughout the suit so this pocket of air develops and air gets pumped into the helmet you see the connections at the top you'll also notice that you have two lines that connect the diver physically that would connect them physically to the surface that's called the lifeline in the air hose or what they were called the breaststroke and the air pipe that is a problem especially when you're working on the interior of wrecks and such so let me give you an idea see this see this book here this beautiful book what I want you to do is I want you to imagine two strings coming down that are attached to a diver working on the bottom over here so in order for the diver to do work it's important that this boat remain as still as possible any rocking or rolling any movement like this is going to yank at those lines when those lines get yanked a diver working on a rack or inside of Iraq liable to get pulled or the lines could get caught into wreckage and alike so in order to compensate for that the tenders at the top they would pay out more of that air pipe and breast rope to compensate for it but that was a problem too because that created these belly like lines in the water that's renter fowl into things right what they called felon demands himself he saw a diver working on a wreck and he saw his air pipe get fouled in that direction and his life line get fouled in this direction and the diver was caught like a marionette they could he couldn't move he couldn't help himself a rescue diver went down to go get him they managed to bring him up to the surface but then he later died because he had been underwater for over three years he was like underwater for three or four hours or so which very dangerous at the time you also notice on this dress that there's weights you'll notice that you have a chest weight and that you haven't went on the back you also have weights on the on the those leaded souls on the on the boots and the copper diving helmet to all that weight altogether it amounted to between 175 to 200 pounds in the air now in the water are you getting all this compressed air getting pumped into the suit so you're more buoyant but you can imagine you know you that's as much as the knight in shining armor it's gonna be walking around with so that is all meant especially those lower weights to keep the diver as upright as possible these divers are not scuba divers they are not swimming freely through the water they are rather like Mountaineers they are like spelunkers so you got to think about you know if you land on a wreck they're walking around they're liable to fall and they will fall and things like that happened to them but the weights are meant to keep them upright so they don't capsize because if that diver flipped upside down and then there was any tear or compromising dress was compromised in any way water could flood in and get up to the helmet when that happened it only took a quart or two of water to drown a man inside of his helmet one of the other problems that they had during this time was the delivery of air itself air has to get down to the diver and this is done through the use of compressed air you have to compress air to get it down lower to the diver now they had by the time of the first world war you had steam-driven air compressors but they were unreliable so divers often relied on manual pan cranked pumps so you can see there on the right a gang of six sailors turning at these pumps and now would build up the compression so they're going around room building up the compression and you have to build up more and more and more to get deeper and deeper so requiring more compressed air so you can imagine that this always limit how much a diver could dive in terms of the technology to get that air down to them then there were other problems with the suit now for example does this here looks kind of funny right unless you're the guy inside the suit this is called a blow up so the air comes in into the suit and it has to get out of the suit now if there is an obstruction in any way erricka back and this causes the suit to blow up when that happens the arms go akimbo and that tight canvas that they're wearing stiffens so that they can't reach the controls in by the helmet to release that air the diver then who's on the bottom starts to go up because they're being they're being drawn up as they go up the gases in there the guests inside the suit it expands even more and more and more and as they come up this is the diving boat remember they come up boom they usually hit the diving boat this ruptures the dress and those weights that 200 pounds of weight brings them right back down to the bottom and they drown in their helmet the opposite of the blow up was called the squeeze and then I didn't I don't have a picture of the squeeze and you can be grateful for that so you're a diver inside the suit isn't built up quick enough to counteract the water pressure around you so what happens is the water pressure squeezes the body it's cracks the ribs it ruptures the organs generally forcing the body up into the diving helmet I don't have a picture of that so sorry they really didn't like the squeeze but the most insidious the most insidious of the dangers that divers faced was called divers palsy it was called caissons disease it was called decompression sickness it was also called the bends all right so the bends are there any divers by the way okay so you you're the oh wow there's a few of you so you guys had to keep me real on this right so the idea with the bends is that to Kenna is it okay if I use the soda water analogy the you know the bottle Seltzer thing is that that's okay all right good all right so the diver goes down they're breathing in compressed air right and they're working at the bottom they don't notice a thing now if you come up too fast what's going to happen is the air that's compressed inside you're by which is in solution it starts expanding out sort of like if you take a bottle of seltzer water and you open it up right so when the when that sealed you know its firm this compressed air inside the war you rip it open the gasses inside start expanding and they form bubbles and those bubbles particularly nitrogen starts traveling around the body it lodges into the spine joins it floats into your organs brain heart all that sort of stuff causes blindness paralysis could you could kill you very very dangerous now the way that you treat the bends and it was also called caissons disease if you ever want to read a really good book read David McCullough's Brooklyn Bridge where that's where they first diagnosed caissons disease were in the caisson workers I love that book so they all they by the time you get to World War one they know what the they kind of day by the time you get to your early 20th century they know about the bends of more causes it and they can treat it what you see is one way of treating it a diver comes up they have the bends they stick them into one of these this was called a divers oven it's a recompression chamber you can see tanks that are attached to it you take the diver who's having to bend you shove them in this thing your release compressed air into the tank and that forces those bubbles that are formed in the blood back down into solution the other thing if you don't have one of those things on board don't worry you're not screwed what you do is you send that diver back down over the side and you send him back down to the bottom so he gets compressed there and it puts those bubbles back in and then you got kind of have to figure out how to get him back up so what they said like around around 1900 or so yeah early 20th century they knew what caused this but the best way that they had to prevent it was to bring up a diver slowly in steadily at a time that never worked that never worked divers got the bends all the time because of this so the Admiralty got this guy involved his name is John Scott Halden he was a physiologist a professor from Oxford University and with demands they developed what's called stage decompression in which a diver this is the executive summary for it they come up in stages and steps slowly and steadily they come up and wait they come up and wait and they found that this was a successful way to prevent the bends and divers use this today and they had their computers and they come up to a depth and they have to wait and then they go up to the next level in fact using these types of methods the world record for diving under compressed air was set by an Egyptian in 2011 which was something about 1,100 feet or so and it took him I think it took him about 30 minutes to get down to that depth but then it took him hours and hours to get to the surface it's very very slow slow type of process so okay so anyway back to the story here so demand by the time of the World War one breaks out he's considered to be an expert in diving he's worked with all day and he's worked with dica knows all about decompression and diving and all of that and the Admiralty had contacted the private salvage firms and they said no so the Admiralty calls Demant down to Whitehall in London to Admiralty headquarters and demand goes down he's a lieutenant commander and he walks into this ornate chamber called the Admiralty boardroom and all around him are the brass Admirals and some of the heads of the Royal Navy these guys called the sea Lords and he doesn't know what's going on so he sits down and they say to him uh and I can't do a British accent I'm a Long Island native so you know you're just gonna have to roll with me on this and they say Lieutenant Commander DeMint's have you heard about the Laurentiis and he said yes I have heard about the Laurentiis but he knew about it but was a tragedy it was one of many sinkings that were going on during that time and so they say - I'm well Lieutenant Commander demand you are about to be privy to a secret there are 44 tons of gold bullion on board the lorente ik that were meant to finance the war effort it would be a blow to the national economy it would be a national tragedy if we cannot get that gold back so our question to you Lieutenant Commander is is it practicable to use Royal Navy divers to get that gold so he thought about for a moment and he said yes so the Admiral say we'll go get it so off he went to Lough Swilly to go get that gold this is our treasure map this is where the gold of the Laurentiis is that's that little triangle on the top so the divers get down there they locate the wreck and they find it generally sit sitting in this condition that's the the port side is actually on the right so you're looking in Reverse and what the divers do originally over the course so they go deeper deeper into the wreck until they finally get down to the gold room and their chief diver you're gonna see a picture of him in a little bit his name is dusty miller Charles Ernest Miller he manages to recover three boxes of gold in two days time and demint is so pleased with this that he pens off a letter to the Admiralty saying that he thinks that within two weeks that they'll recover all the bullion well then a storm comes in you know you always have to have a good storm in any sea story so this Gale comes on and the weather is just awful for for a couple of weeks going out and to pass the time demand starts taking walks around the block and so you know it's it's nice country he needs to be able to do something it's going to take this off so he takes these one he starts taking these walk they start seeing things washing up on the shore of Lough Swilly he sees things like parquet floor tiling he starts eating furniture things deep inside the lure ntek something's going on down there so when his divers get back to get back down to the wreck they find that's been crushed like an accordion so the gold which is generally about here so what they decide to do is they decide to excavate vertically and by removing a deck plate after deck plate through the use of explosives underwear highly highly dangerous work because in order to do it they would open up a deck plate and some incidents happen but you know you could always pick up the book and read it if you're interested in some exciting sea stories finally in June 1917 the divers get in touch with the gold and they managed to haul up an incredible 542 individual ingots of gold pretty good so what's the what's your natural question here well there was a total 3211 bars gold on board that rack so there's work to do but there was actually more important work to do so demand was expecting full well to come back in 1918 to complete that work but the Admiralty had other plans for him and that involves this man here this is William original Hall he's a Rear Admiral he is the his nickname was blink because of a facial twitch that he had they need them blinker he was the head I love that nickname by the way he was the head of Naval Intelligence that so the Naval Intelligence and which also included room for T the code where the code breakers were now to give you an idea a little bit about Hall there's really doesn't really I haven't really got that here okay so an American envoy once described Hall as a perfectly marvelous person but the coldest heart a proposition that ever was he eat a man's heart and hand it back to him it wasn't above any skullduggery he used double agents spies all over the world he also had a little bit of an vindictive street there was this a there's this interesting story that was passed on by the roof 40 historians names hatchet easily and blinker Paul always told the story about how he was how he had provided intelligence on a German spy that was in England that had targeted some factories and then the spy went on for trial and the judge gave him a light sentence on the grounds that these factories were not really a particular military quarters so as a story that all says he said that he then took information about the location of other factories miss Bennett through his spy network back to Germany and then these depth lines came over me then they ended up bombing that judges house so that he was at dinner with this judge a few weeks later and you know the judge was complaining about the whole thing a halt by the city and well they were it was really a target of military importance now was it so now like I said he had agents home and what are that when people think about the Naval Intelligence Division was that they were the preeminent spy organization at that time you know really of forerunner of mi6 and their code breakers the Cobra community in particular was remarkably effective for that time the code breakers of room 40 for example they decoded the Zimmerman telegram so if you're not familiar with that is that was communication from the German ambassador to Mexico that offered an alliance and the giving back of land lost during the Mexican War if the Mexicans would side with the Germans of war broke out and that actually was one of the contributory causes that brought the Americans into the floor so they they had information on that they had information on u-boats that they can tell almost in real time where these u-boats were moving and going and such and where were these sources of information from sources were from eventually his agents but there was also radio intercepts there was also captured code books and Cyprus so the Germans in World War one were not as particularly effective with their intelligence operations as other countries they early on in the war in 1914 the British got their hands on three key code books from the Germans from captured a German surface fleet vessel and those code books actually remained in force until 1917 so you know you fed this information over to the room 40 breakers and they were very easily able to decipher Jeremy transmissions even when things were cycling so you take a code in the new site for transposing one liner over for another and such and so forth but the Germans were very sloppy with some of this for example a captain of a German ship might be operating on an old cipher key the Germans might be had switched their cipher over and then the captain would send the signal out in the old cipher and then request it back in the new cipher and then this would get intercepted by the British and then this would just passin the decryption of German intelligence transmissions all throughout so there was radio intercepts but I'll called unit what they did they actually they went and searched the remains of down Zeppelin's in England and they were able to recover valuable information they pulled it from a variety of start sources now one of the most effective agents that they had worked in Berlin in the Imperial of German Navy offices now this was according to demand and this was a in demand immense Mammal offices he said that hall had a spy in Berlin working in the Imperial German Navy offices and he would just collect any sort of information not terribly discerning but a lot of but and get it get it over to halt unit and this would include things like cipher keys and you would use these cipher keys to decrypt and especially track the movements of u-boats however by late 1917 or 19 or early 1918 that operative vanished we don't know his name we don't know what happened to him but that source of information dried up and it was slowing down the intelligence operation of the Naval Intelligence Division so all needed find a new source of intelligence materials to feed into his code-breaking unit so they had a brainwave and people will know knew about the secret operations going on board the Laurentiis to get that gold back and how those divers were working deep inside the rack at various times and the expertise of demand so he started to man to his offices in at the Admiralty and he proposed to him he said lieutenant lieutenant commander demand do you think it is practicable to sate your divers go to freshly sunken u-boats and get the divers inside and search their contents for intelligence materials in particular we want to get materials from freshly sunken u-boat the best being those are outbound from Germany because they would have the freshest cipher keys and signals so DeMint thought about this for a moment if he was all caught up in the war entity was planning on going back to it but then we heard this opportunity that came up he thought it's the most exciting proposition in the world I guess he wanted his majesty's secret diner or something like that so for me a squad a secret squad of his Laurentiis divers he set up his base in Portsmouth in UK with the idea that they would get reports in of sunken u-boats and that they would go around from point to point to go to these u-boats an idea that they were going to go inside now what this is over here this is a map of the various locations of where a demanded his diving on these you goes you can see these little blind areas those are the mining fields are so with the minefields the guy keep in mind that most of these freshly something you both they wouldn't happen some in in my mind in my mind and the divers are going to be required to dive in mine killed some of my death the diving that Syria you know which is you know diving in alive I feel that's not that insane world so ok so if you're a if you're a diver and you're on the side right and you're just on your diving boat and you're looking down you might be able to see a couple of feet down and then you go into the water and you go you know you don't go terribly deep you might go you might go like 60 feet or something like that and then you lay it on a u-boat or next to it you go and then the divers looking around and they look up and because the lighting is better so you can see up better and they'll steep swing above these minds on their tethers it goes forward it would only take like a strike with the sole of women those leather boots are so to set off in mind even if a mine went off five miles away six miles away because of the way that that explosion was conducted under water it would could rupture a diver here's rupture there or like very very dangerous work and things did go off while they were under water quite a distance giving these divers was shocked so they so they set up camp and they were first they were first called to a wreck in May of 1918 now this is a demand on the right and on the left is to start before dusty Miller Charles Ernest Miller he was uh if there's a whole thing for historic diving they made my divers know if there are if there is whether or not he would have been elected in the first round because of his work that was done on the OL or entick and his work that he's going to do here so in this particular case the diver goes down and it's almost unbearably Miller is the first to go down and they land on this wreck and they confirm that's an actual u-boat and they see on the u-boat that there's they're looking for a way to get into it so a u-boat let me flip back over early on just for reference here okay so to get to this u-boat this is the conning tower so the idea is that the diver is going to try to squeeze through this conning tower so Miller goes down and he goes conning-tower hack she opens up these steps and so he tries to squeeze lead but it's dying just in stop so as he's working it and his feet are dangling there's kicking something he's kicking something soft and he looks down it's a body so he guided the crew is on board he's Hugo's so in this particular example they haul up the the the body to the surface and the I they they take a look at the body the first curious thing about this body that they hope is that he was shot twice once in the head it wants in his stomach it wasn't suicide with a and the guy they eventually found because they had a ring of his that they were able to track back to some pictures that that blinker Hall had that he was the commanding officer they think that he was shot because they felt that he was trying to escape through the conning tower had one of his men hard to shop so in that particular instance okay so lots of mysteries keep on pounding on each one of these you goes the so they go back to the rack and the divers can't fit inside so what to do what to do what to do well demand is very good at blowing things up underwater so the diver goes down and they stuck this whole curling top hatch with a hundred pounds of TNT and they blow it up if this log is it and they are able to eventually move it aside and then the thing opens up and the dagger can go in and they start searching through the contents now this is when things get really creepy things guys because the first thing that you're going to find is you're going to find all the bodies and you're going to find the sea life is already that is they're working their way to roof the divers also in this particular in this first case as they're doing work all of a sudden like in the distance of a mind goes off but a little bit too far but also the world starts in there so the gathers as quick as possible it's sent off one of the torpedo so let me get back to here just to show you about the to do to do show you what some of the interiors of this you both look like so we're in their way through these different chambers going down this here's the and where the divers where the the boat is compromised it actually can crumple up that the deck plate downward so that's longer than a few feet so that they often have to work by hand to remove stuff so all through the summer of 1918 the divers are working these wrecks so a couple of different stories one story is that they go to this rack now I should also mention about the half the time that they go to these racks their what their what the mental mayor's nests they would go to a spot and it actually wouldn't be a wreck it would be a service ship that went down and they thought it was a rack or it might be a new boat that was too old to have any intelligence value but then half the time they were valid wrecks so they would go down into these things and usually through the conning tower hatch and work their way slowly through the ship searching its contents now in one case they went down on one boat and they felt the daggers go in and the water around them is really hot really hot and the reason why was because that boat was so freshly sunk that sea water mix freely with the batteries rather than interesting case on another case that they went on they found that the whole back of the u-boat was crumpled up and telescoped in with another view book that was an older wreck and then they go through Adam and himself went down on this thing and they found that inserting compartments and you but they were largely untouched so that the diver went down and demand songs up in a full-length mirror by the captains quarters just staring out of the Sun and these guys they had their lamps and stuff and they had telephone communications at the top there's another shuttle so another case that they had was one in which they're going down looking for these various you know various optimism and they found there among the bodies a German who is in civilian clothing as opposed everybody else was in sailing from the delight the likelihood is with that one that was actually a German spy that's going to be dropped off on the first Shore so there is all that sort of thing too but a lot of that in speculative events probably what it was now in another instance they went down and they were able to recover a boatload they recovered a boatload of intelligence material cipher keys code books that are like all sorts of stuff like yeah and in some of these they were mining field planes that were kept in these flat form boxes right hey the divers coming up they got these two mine kill plants and then a third buck the diver dropped it by accident it kind of floated away so do man waiting came back the next day waiting for the same tide and waived and current as when they lost that a particular box he went down he followed it down for most of us it was great fun it's up happened they matched levels of guns and experimental magnetic pistols that were being used on board the summer that were being used on board summary that they were munitions ordnance apart so they were being they were very very successful but they also had a lot of difficulties in any stress no way simple was with these minefields so there were periodically these blasts that occurred throughout the waters because they were at one time this diver his name was Blackford he was working inside and they were him removing bodies and stuff from the rack and packing it up to another diver who was up at the top when all of a sudden is blasting off and in the hatch on the conning tower down trapping them inside the u-boat they hadn't send down rescue guards together came out of that one in another instance god remember also that they were also I mean these types of books too but this is a you see Tigers now this is a captain you see you both see these grapes here that's where those mines would be tapped that's a reminder captain this was a mine and there were many many you see tight boats that they don't wanna know the first you see tight that they don't want they went down and they found that the conning tower need we're going to have to so they knew that the problem with they're in a minefield with a mine layer and they're about to use explosives to try to blow up in that cotton powder hatch so Domanick goes out there and he they stuffed the conning tower with TNT and they do the explosion and everything happens the plan except that when the divers get down there after the water cools they find that it's still kind of wedged in there so the man decides what he's gonna do is he's gonna double down and he goes down himself and he sets up a charge of gel ignite around the the compound hatch and he surfaces and then a couple more divers go down and they do some work and they're on this light they come up and they're on this little diving boat and what they do is they start drifting away on the current because they want to get clear of the wreck and they have you know physical no radio connection down there so they have this long line and they have a plunger like you can see the cartoon with and it's a technique these are like Marlon spikes and stuff so it's unreeling it's unreeling as they're drifting away that's meant to go out as far as 500 feet or so they ended about 150 feet it jacks now the work that they've done it takes days and to do this so demand didn't want to lose time so what he decides to do is he's going to set off that explosion and about hundred feet away from the u-boat boom he presses it down is a little explosion everything seems fine and then there's a tremendous boil as all the minds go off in the you go boom up it goes and it creates this wave for anything like a - tsunami soda man soon in their neuron is like thinking about they're on a rowboat basically like a big rowboat and he's fine because he's out of his diving dress and he can swim but he has two divers that are still partially dressed with all their weights on them so if that boat capsizes they're going to go right back down to the bottom of the wave comes comes comes comes comes links them up and then they come back the man said a bit of luck that so they were doing work right until the end of the first world war and their last case never gave many successful intelligence faculties from this particular boat was actually scapa flow which is where the very royal navy base was and this one this particular boat it's kind of an interesting story this is came to the end of the first world work and there was a group of officers who took a submarine with the idea that they were going to make one fatal blow last for the Imperial Navy well they couldn't so they went into they went into scapa flow and it set off all the my gun boat goes down so they called it the man so the man goes down there and they they start doing work on this on this you go but believe her holla wants to keep this as secret as possible so he gives orders at the bodies that would that they found from the Sun up in the you book should be just buried at sea now you to the circus so they would tie weights and anchors weights to that and just lean down which is considered to be at the monocle burial except that a Presbyterian minister is sure wanted to give them rights to it so eventually the the Admiral who was in charge over there he ends up calling a Bennett Colin pall of condiments in for a conference and he's he comes the minute comes in to the Sabbath office and the Admiral starts bawling bawling the mouth say I have been shocked to hear that Jimmy guilty of revolting barbarism conduct that which is the most degraded savages would be ashamed and of which thank God I could never have believed a naval officer would have been capable in some mad frenzy you have a ladder and cards are meant to insult and mutilate the bodies of those poor Germans who were doing no more than their duty so demand didn't know what was going on and then he found out that the Presbyterian minister had gone over to the canteen when the divers were hanging out and he started asking this diver about what they were doing with the German bodies the diver said well lines have been secured to him so the minister said that took this to mean that the bodies had been skewered like larks on a spit so the mayor got that straightened out and they said that that the minister going back to his others founded back in spiritual loss and such so anyway so it's Armistice Day there so they died given on Armistice Day still bring up intelligence material when the peace breaks out so at that point they they go to the minute they give him an order of the British Empire they give him a promotion and they say very good to man now why don't you go ahead and go get yourself demobilized the man thought about this for a moment and he said no there's another strength to my foe and that's the Laurentiis gold so he ended up going back after the war to continue the gold Salvage which he conducted for another six years a very very harsh conditions of very date you know blow lobs things like that going on where you had the war before and the threat of u-boat attack you had at this point the Irish Civil War broke out followed by the sorry the Irish boarded the tennis ball by the Civil War there were threats of piracy to it all sorts of things happen but in the end I usually and you know I usually want to end my talk I usually say you know I'll say what I usually say something like this that still out there today under under 20 thousands of water if you have the means of wherewithal anyway so they were highly highly successful they were covered over 99% of the treasure today there are 20 bars of gold where it's about 11 million that was still somewhere know that wait but I will say this because the international focus on when I can you to give it to manse daughter was still alive and I asked her what was the thing that demand was most proud it was his work on the u-boats and maybe even known later some more recent writers of nicknaming them that you know openers they weren't called that back then that's like a like nineteen eighties nineteen nineties appellation they were just simply called those they were a special section of Salvage and he he had really tremendous stories to tell from you his favorite being when diver and when Blackard goes down on that last wreck and he searched through searching through the contents when he sees to cold and dead and holding the cipher keys and he rested so most proud of this work and no no no they were unlearned annal oriented operation which was also a secret operation the Germans had no idea there was gold aboard that they thought it was a huge ship which is a d' question mental or you go to the same deal i would say was the case when they were working on you you both we just had these little boats or like mid sights hugs and stuff the Germans that were active in the area possibly thought them as huge ships note that they did not know that in fact it was largely unknown that type of work was largely unknown until the yeah all my goodness I forgot to say they were highly successful but most importantly she had no debts no debts some cases of the bends but no serious injuries and I credit that for demands in his leadership and his expertise and I hope hold on hold on sorry okay trying to capture it sorry thank you you reference dead wake and I did read it I was wondering you know towards the end they sort of paused the the idea did Churchill and the British group deliberately not come to the aid of the people from the Lusitania in order to encourage the Americans to enter the war what do you think to bring the Americans aboard I based that on my research especially for Padgett these probably was the best expert at reforming the decrease and there's no reason to doubt otherwise turtle was very cloak-and-dagger Asst pretty ruthless I don't really I did six to it's plausible to me and I just see no reason why that wouldn't be the case you also think about like this they were very willing to use the Zimmermann telegram British ever tried to actually salvage one of these vessels and pull it up off at the bottom and drag it or drag it into safe water so they could not have to blow it up and then also not work in danger and how much how much of the material was lost do the explosions that they were setting themselves that that they were finding pieces of it took so long to get to the surface and get sure that the intelligence material had very limited value so you wanted to get the people in there quick and that's where those that's why you've sent divers the next question you have to do with the contents as to if if you're using all those explosions what happens to the intelligence material that that example I told you about with the rolling wave of them nearly nearly capsized interestingly enough when they came back after that they found all around the baldest Bloxom floating around and they were there's papers with Cyclopes not damaged by the explosion and demand wrote to the Admiralty saying this is this is remarked something to the fact that this is remarkable that explosions can happen within a few feet of these sensitive documents and they'll come out unharmed well then sorry it's what they was his first successful recovery of intelligence information about boats so those are 15 different wrecks and then and then you know more think about the other half of time they would find out that they were invalid that they would services yeah so the divers obviously there that's like really difficult work but I imagined that the boat drivers that would be incredibly difficult work because you're working you have to stay on station with the divers and you're operating in a minefield so what kind of vessels were they operating off of and also like who who were these were they also naval officers that were manning these boats well they were doing the work that you boats the primary vessel was was a harbor tug called the movie fleets and that was that was the one that they did the most work with but they also worked with the steam yacht called the chorus seal which was actually this converted vessel that they used as an auxilary because by the time by the time you get into the summer of 1918 Admiralty so pleased with demands and debate starts to complain about room on worth of tub then they give them this yacht that actually had a stability crew or that they have like three meals and yeah if most of these submarines went down because they had a mind and often I would guess they wouldn't have had time to report that hey I'm being sunk how do they know where to look for a wreck if especially what happened tonight and no one was around how would they know where to look or no no he was even there search the water to hook something and then they contacted the men they would hop on a train to go and then the diamond would go with the permit so in the case there was one case that they don't lock where you had this this you gonna come up to the surface and was kind of looking straight ahead of the target with a British patrol vessel saw the saw the u-boat came over a random and then sends it right down yes so there is all different types of pieces and you know they were most pleased when they actually had a direct verification that it's set then with Cuba yes sir do you know if these activities resumed in World War two I know that the I know that I don't think that they did or if they did they were limited scope DeMint came back and he headed up the salvage section for a little while before going over to the managing salvage work there but in my research there was no I did not that's not to say that it did occur but this was this was very well but it would be surprising the other thing is it might be that where the u-boats were sinking in the first world war versus the second world world were a different doubt and something a little bit more because the conditions needed way that your submarine war in World War two it was different than you did in world war one world war one it was typically a single you bow versus a single ship we're in World War two you use more it was packs yeah there was the both packs full packs of you both versus a convoy right the you momentous didn't really you know the view boats nearly knocked heard enough war 1917 it was really only because they adopted convoy in late 1917 that finally dried up the the German because again that they couldn't figure out well I don't have any something gold for you guys there are wonderful books that you can buy and Joe will sign them so thank you so much wonderful talk thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: International Spy Museum

Views: 5,895

Keywords: Navy, International Spy Museum, Spy Museum, gold, treasure, treasure hunt, WWI, spy, spies, spying, espionage

Id: q89q00mhwQA

Length: 64min 51sec (3891 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2018