A veteran Greek diver who specializes in locating sunken ships announced Wednesday that he has found a British submarine that went missing during a World War Two mission in 1942.
Kostas Thuctaridis told the state news agency ANA that his team located the wreck of the HMS Triumph at a depth of 670 feet in an undisclosed location in the Aegean Sea.
The search for the submarine began in 1998 and was “the hardest job I’ve ever done.” Thoctarides said in a Facebook post. He also posted videos and photos of the shipwreck showing the wooden steering wheel, compass and cannon.
“The right torpedo plug, located at the height of the turret, has been opened, and the MK VIII torpedo is halfway out of the submarine!” Thoctarides wrote.
He added that a search of archives in the UK, Germany, Italy and Greece helped unearth the submarine’s final resting place.
The 84-meter Type T submarine was launched in 1938 and carried out twenty missions, including attacks against Axis ships, landing British commandos and rescuing Allied soldiers.
Thoctarides – who located the British submarine HMS Perseus that sank in 1941 – said an Italian pilot last saw Triumph near Cape Sounion near Athens.
It is believed that the ship’s final attack was against an Axis cement cargo ship.
She was officially declared missing with 64 people on board in January 1942.
Thoctarides told ANA that the submarine’s periscopes and hatches were down, indicating that it was in a deep dive during its final moments.
He said that it appears that the explosion was drowned out by a strong explosion in the front section, but the cause of the explosion is still unclear.
Thuctarides said his team recently discovered several torpedoes of the same type used by the submarine near the shipwreck.
“This fact leads us to believe that Victory fired more than one torpedo” during its final mission, he wrote.
Thoctarides said HMS Triumph is the fifth submarine found off the coast of Greece. Last year, he announced that his team had found Jantina’s wreckan Italian submarine that sank on July 5, 1941, with 48 crew on board, after being hit by torpedoes fired by the British submarine HMS Torbay in the Aegean Sea.
Triumph’s discovery comes less than two months after a team of explorers announced it Found a sunken Japanese ship She was torpedoed off the coast of the Philippines in 1942, resulting in Australia’s largest naval wartime naval loss of 1,080 lives in total.
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