AUTHOR: ZORAN VITAS
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PHOTOS: WRECK HUNTERS ADRIATIC
Explorers of undersea treasure - There are a number of valuable sites in the Adriatic Sea that are extremely popular with professional and amateur divers, the Baron Gautsch, an Austro-Hungarian ship from the First World War, is probably the most famous such destination. However, it is not the only one. There are numerous points on the Adriatic that serve as destinations for 'wreck diving', researching sunken ships or crashed planes that are found there. This is nothing, there's much more to it, but so far only rare individuals carried out this kind of research, and rarely or almost no one organized it, say’s Zoran Delibašić from Wreck Hunters Adriatic, a group of six diving enthusiasts who are engaged in the hobby that so far could only be seen in documentaries. If in the past few years you heard the news about the large bronze cannon unearthed in Molunt near Dubrovnik or about the Ju 87 Stuka found near Žirje, it is the result of the research of Zoran and his five friends, Mislav Podnar, Dragutin Šimatović, Marko Hranilo-vić, Damir Mlinarić and Jerka Macure. None of them, we found out, has less than 20 years of diving experience. This means, this is no less than about three thousand dives at different depths, which often reach 80 meters. So, it is a 'sport' only for the best, but the goal here is not just to dive as deep as possible. We are interested in the story surrounding the findings. It means nothing if you find something at the bottom of the Adriatic, but you don't know what it is exactly, and if you don't even know how it got to the bottom of the sea. We are all interested in what it is about, how it was sunk, why, who were the people who were at the helm, and whether anyone is missing them, Dragutin Šimatović tells us. Indeed, when you think about it, would Baron Gautsch really be so interesting if the story behind the shipwreck wasn't as interesting as it was tragic. Well, probably not. Because, in such a way, professionals, guest archaeologists and historians come to the Adriatic water area, such locations become places of commemoration. If none of that is known, then the location is simply a tourist diving spot where the only interesting thing is that you saw that there was something there. And it will disappear from your memory very quickly. When there is an authentic and verified story, supported by documents, then it becomes an attraction, Mislav Podnar tells us. And the guys from Wreck Hunters Adriatic have dozens of such stories. Indeed, dozens. The most attractive so far is the story about the Ju 87R-2 Stuka that was found near Žirje in the Šibenik area. It is one of a total of 52 Ju 87R-2s that the Italian Air Force had acquired from the Third Reich, and which participated in the April War, the attack of the Axis Powers on the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1941. The Stuka near Žirje was shot down on April 12, 1941 by anti-aircraft defense defending the town of Šibenik. We located it with partners from the Croatian Restoration Institute, on the anniversary of the Battle of Šibenik from the Homeland War, on the occasion of which several dives were made at locations pointed out by the local fishing community. And it turned out that in one of those locations is the Stuka that was a big sensation when the find was announced, Zoran Delibašić tells us. A good question is how such discoveries are actually made. The most famous in the last couple of decades is, of course, Apoxyomen.
New discovery of the B24 bomber, near the Union
New discovery of the B24 bomber, near the Union
Cannon from the 18th century, found near Molunt
One in a million!
It was pure luck, one in a million! We work differently, we have distributed responsibilities within the team, so, for example, Zoran is the one who deals with collecting information from the local community and researching various archives. For example, we knew that there was an ancient shipwreck somewhere in the Zadar Islands near Molat. We dived in conditions of poor visibility, we also had some unforeseen technical problems with the equipment. The first diving pair failed to locate the site, and only at the end of the second pair's dive, when the pressure gauges showed us the values
WE TURNED AROUND 15 METERS AWAY AND THERE IT WAS! AN ANCIENT WRECK FULL OF TEGULUS AND IMBEX, ANCIENT BUILDING MATERIALS, ALL UNTOUCHED AS THE DAY THE SHIP SANK. SOMETIMES YOU NEED A LITTLE LUCK
We have settled lives and are not interested in archaeological poaching. The diving community is relatively small, everything is known quickly, even when someone steals an amphora. Such procedures narrow the space for new discoveries for all divers. Believe me, we currently have more than a dozen of them, many of them will really resonate, says Mislav Podnar. The necessary permits are requested for each research, each finding is reported to the competent institutions responsible for the protection of cultural heritage. They don't have any special desire to find their own Titanic, and they are only interested in the Adriatic, other maritime countries already have organized teams like the hero’s of this story anyway. Information about locations is not shared, our interlocutors say, some take their secrets to the grave. And that's a shame, because every such site is really valuable, so it needs protection. Ever since man has been diving with the help of technology, things have been stolen from the sea. That's right, there’s nothing to be done about it. The authorities regularly declares ours and other valuable finds as protected cultural property, but unfortunately it does not go much further than that. We know, for example, that the state of Italy is ready to give millions for the Stuka, they consider it their heritage, but we still claim that right because international and national laws say so. And if that Stuka is to be restored, it would have to sit for about a year in the desalination pool, but after that it could be completely restored. And it is a world rarity, namely, no more than five thousand Stukas were made, and very few of them have been preserved. I believe that the Italians would make a whole event out of it, a tourist attraction. We are happy that the authorities recognized the find and put it under their protection. We ourselves took literally nothing from the locations we confirmed. We didn't earn anything and we're not in it because of that, so the cannon carriage we found at Molunt was the most expensive in the whole story!, say our interlocutors. This cannon is truly an exceptional find, in perfect condition, with inscriptions and engravings that testify to the time and place where it was cast, in 1758 in the Turin foundry of Giovanni Battista Cebrano II. And then there is the identification of the secret of the Šibenik canal, which was in front of the eyes of the people of Šibenik as well as one of their famous fellow citizens for decades. A German torpedo boat, Schnellboot S-158, was sunk just below the cliff above the Šibenik canal where the house that once belonged to Ivan Ribar is located, which is still there today.
Wreck Hunters Adriatic - Mislav Podnar, Dragutin Šimutović, Zoran Delibašić, Jerko Macura, Marko Hranilović, Damir Mlinarić (not in the photo)
The story of the torpedo boat
I found a picture of its shipwreck on the Internet and decided to check this fact with our partners from the Croatian Restoration Institute. And indeed, the torpedo boat is there. It was, in fact, about a torpedo boat seized in the Netherlands, which was built in the Schiedam shipyard under a British license. In total, the Germans found eight such boats there, from which they made the S-151 class. The boat lying at the bottom of the sea in Šibenik participated in the sinking of the British warship HMS Lightning in Algeria in 1943, and then in the same year, during the Allied invasion, it also participated in the sinking of the American destroyer USS Rowan, which sank in less than 40 seconds after the torpedo hit fired the ammunition chamber. However, as the fortunes of war turned, the S-158 reached the Adriatic, took part in several battles with partisan and British vessels, and in 1944 was badly damaged in an attack by allied aircraft on the camouflage mooring where it was moored. A direct hit in the bow and it starts to sink bow forward. Vital parts are removed from it and then the Germans sink it themselves. The S-158 is still there today, under the camouflage link where it was hit, says Zoran Delibašić. Another interesting war story from the Second World War concerns three sailing ships built in Italian shipyards, which after the capitulation of Italy entered the service of the Nazis and served in a flotilla of ships intended for supply. However, they were sunk in the shallow sea in the Bay of Pag across the road from the now well-known beach Zrča on Pag, and they went to the bottom of the sea after being hit by rockets fired from allied planes, first two, and then the third, which was detected even though it was masked. The events as well as the discovery of the three sailing ships are described in the Military History, Zoran Delibašić directs us, and there it is once again well described how the discovery was made at the bottom of the Adriatic. "We received the first information about the existence of some kind of ship wreckage in the shallow sea from people from Zagreb who have a summer house in the town of Pag. At one of the club gatherings of the ZG-SUB Diving Club, they told us how many years ago, in their younger days, they used to dive on the remains of ships in the shallow sea, on the beach near the town of Pag. That story really interested me, and by studying the War Diaries of Admiral Jadran, we came across information about the sinking of three sailing ships in the Bay of Pag by allied aircraft. As we then received a historical source about the war event on the one hand, we also consulted the flight logs of the Royal Air Force (RAF) squadrons on the other warring side and figured out the circumstances of the sinking of these three ships. To verify all this, all that was missing was a trip from Zagreb to Pag in August of last year, as well as a dive and photo documentation of the find itself. The exact location of the sunken ships was shown to us by an aviation enthusiast from the city of Pag, Igor Kurilić,” wrote experienced diver Delibašić in Military History, which also had the story of the sailing ships on its cover in that issue. Wreck Hunters Adriatic exclusively for Večernji list reveal a find for which the documentation is complete, i.e. a wreck found at the bottom of the sea next to the island of Unije near Lošinj.
Zoran Delibašić and Dragutin Šimatović in diving suits before another great discovery in the Adriatic
Zoran Delibašić and Dragutin Šimatović in diving suits before another great discovery in the Adriatic
Discovery of an ancient cargo ship with intact construction material
That's another great story. Our latest discovery is related to the story of a sunken American Air Force plane discovered by our friend Davor Buršić from the partner diving center Shark diving. In order to identify the aircraft, two very demanding dives were made in conditions of poor visibility, with gas mixtures specially made for the occasion. Arriving at the location, we determined that the wreckage of the plane was devastated by trawl nets beyond recognition and represented a field of scattered and bent sheet metal. In the pile of that metal, we were able to recognize some parts characteristic of the B 24 aircraft, and we were lucky enough to find a complete Browning machine gun lying on the sand not far from the wreckage. During those two dives, we managed to clear the serial number of the machine gun under the sea, and this opened up the possibility of identifying the aircraft. This is a more precise way, because due to heavy damage during the war, which strained the military industry to the end, it was no longer possible to monitor the pace of losses, so the planes were often assembled from several similar ones, so the serial number on the tail of the plane would not actually have to match the records in the military archives . Armament, however, did, the American Air Force recorded every piece with great precision, so then with their so-called MACRs (Missing Air Crew Re-port), a database containing the fates of American airmen. And we determined that it was a B 24 that, interestingly, the Americans thought had fallen near Portorož in what was then Italy, however the serial number of the Browning that we were able to clear shows that Unije is the place where the B 24 crashed into the sea due to a malfunction on the engine, as evidenced by the reports of other aircraft in the formation, not the report itself of the surviving crew members of that lost B 24H, which was nicknamed the Termite Chaser. Following the events, we informed the office of the Military Attache of the American Embassy in Zagreb about our discovery of the fate of the sunken plane. After our application, they started the mechanism of further verification and confirmed our statements.
IN THAT PILE OF METAL, WE MANAGED TO RECOGNIZE SOME PARTS CHARACTERISTIC FOR THE B 24 AIRCRAFT AND WE WERE LUCKY TO FIND ALSO A COMPLETE BROWNING MI-GUN
They praised our work and initiative and asserted, like us, that there are no remains of crew members among the remains of the plane. When this is known, there is no more interest in further searching for the remains of the airmen, Zoran Delibašić tells us. The Wreck Hunters' account of the Termite Chaser lying 51 meters deep next to Unije and which was part of the 450th Bombardment Group is again extremely interesting, as are the other stories we described earlier. Thus, the 450th Bombardment Group as part of the US 15th Air Force was formed on April 6, 1943 for the purpose of supporting Allied activities in the south of France, the Balkans and Italy. The first base of the group was in Alamogordo, the American state of New Mexico, where the 720th, 721st, 722nd and 723rd squadrons of B24 Liberator bombers were formed. At the end of November and during December 1943, planes and crews set off on a journey via Herrington, Kansas, Florida, South America and Africa, to Manduria, the city in the very heel of the Italian boot. The old base of the Italian Air Force from the 1930s will become the base of the 450th Bombardment Group until May 1945. Operations from Manduria began on January 8, 1944 with the bombing of the airfield in Mostar, with a total of 265 combat missions until the group was disbanded in May 1945 and returned to the USA. A large number of missions were aimed at bombing railway communications. With the advance of Russian forces in Romania, the strategic importance of railways in German supply lines to Hungary and Romania is increasing. The mission on April 7, 1944, i.e. on Good Friday, extremely beautiful and sunny weather, aimed to bomb the marshalling yard in the Italian city of Mestre, which controlled all traffic to the industrial zone and the port of Venice. 35 B 24 planes of the 450th Group took off from Manduria at 10:30 a.m., each with 12 227 kg bombs, and at 10:18 a.m. joined the 98th Bombardment Group which led the attack. The bombing was carried out at 13:00 and 11:00 from a height of about 6,100-7,000 meters. The resistance of the German forces was minimal, with weak and imprecise flak fire. The two formations of Messer-schmitt Bf 109 fighter planes that the bomber crews noticed did not attack the B 24 formation. The B 24 of the 722nd squadron flying in position 2 of the first wave lagged behind, dropped the bombs and returned to the formation. Soon the plane left the formation again with a right turn and at 13:06 it began to rapidly lose altitude above enemy territory in a spiral. In the official report, Missing air crew report MACR 3886, no problems with the engines were mentioned, although the notes of the other crews mentioned the appearance of smoke from the outer left engine. The lost aircraft was a B 24H, serial number 42-52141, manufactured at the Ford plant, Willow Run, Michigan. Termite Chaser had tail number 43. The aircraft with a total of 10 crew members was commanded by 2d Lt. Robert W. Nutt
ACCORDING TO THEIR NOTES, ON APRIL 4, 1944, THE AIRCRAFT HAD THE ENGINE REPLACED, AND ON APRIL 5, IT DID NOT FLY A MISSION DUE TO OIL PRESSURE PROBLEMS IN ENGINES NUMBER 3 AND NUMBER 4. ON APRIL 6, 1944, THERE WAS NO COMBAT MISSION, AND ON APRIL 7, 1944, A NEW CREW TOOK OFF ON ITS FIRST MISSION IN THE MISSION FROM WHICH THE TERMITE CHASER DID NOT RETURN
It was their first mission. All crew members jumped out of the plane and landed in the sea. Navigator James H. Paulsgrove drowned and gunner George W. Williams was not recovered during the rescue, due to malfunctioning or improper use of the life jackets. The other members of the crew were captured by the crew of the German seaplane and were transferred to the reception centers Dulag Luft I, the Air Force Command Center in Verona and to the camp Stalag Luft 1, Barth Vogelsang Prussia, 54-12. All of them saw the end of the war and were retired. Interesting records were left by members of the 722nd Squadron, 450th Bombardment Group, Adam E. Wood and Walter J. Kostro, who were part of the original crew identified by the Wreck Hunters as B 24 42-52141 Termite Chaser. According to their notes, on April 4, 1944, the plane had an engine replaced, and on April 5, it did not fly a mission due to problems with the oil pressure in engines number 3 and number 4. On April 6, 1944, there was no combat mission, and on the 7 April 1944, the mission from which the Termite Chaser did not return, a new crew took off on their first mission. The original crew took over B 24 serial number 42-99805, tail marking 47. It was the plane of the lost crew named Madame Shoo Shoo. After the loss of Liberator 42-52141, the aircraft was re-designated Termite Chaser II. It's certainly interesting, the story is perhaps even more impressive than the damaged find itself, but you won't have to wait long, and we will have several sensational announcements that could go around the world again, say Wreck Hunters Adriatic.
