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German Battleship to Be Raised in Uruguay
A multimillion dollar, several-year effort to raise large parts of the German battleship the Graf Spee - scuttled off Uruguay in the opening days of World War II - should begin late this week, a salvage expert said Tuesday.
"Senor Admeeral! Mighty Uruguayan Navy finally gets a battleship!"
"Most excellent! Will it fight as hard as our glorious peacekeeping forces?"
A symbol of German naval might early in the war, the ship - officially named Admiral Graf Spee - prowled the South Atlantic chasing and sinking as many as nine allied merchant ships before it was crippled by British warships in a December 1939 naval engagement. Scuttled by its captain who feared losing the ship in a battle with the larger British force, the Graf Spee has remained for decades in waters less than 25 feet deep only miles outside the port of Montevideo.
Sounds like a great tourist attraction...
Work on the Graf Spee was slated to start Thursday but high winds and choppy waters on the broad waterway separating Uruguay from Argentina were expected to delay the operation until Friday. Hector Bado, a spokesman for the salvage team, said the recovery team first would try to remove a 27-ton communications tower equipped with an early radar and what was then sophisticated sighting equipment for its 11-inch guns. "The radar was one of the first to be used in that era," said Bado, whose group has private funding and Uruguayan government backing for the operation which could take years. The Argentine daily, Clarin, reported Jan. 15 that the team would like to raise as much of the warship as possible for display in Uruguay.

Feared by many navies at the outset of the war, the Graf Spee - a "pocket battleship" which carried less powerful guns and was smaller than a conventional ship of that class - was tracked down by British forces off the South American coast. The "Battle of the River Plate" began on Dec. 13, 1939, near the mouth of the river as the German warship was pursued by a British battle group consisting of the British light cruisers HMS Exeter and HMS Achilles, and the HMS Ajax of New Zealand, under the command of Commodore H. Harwood. The Graf Spee was crippled in the fight after receiving several direct hits and Capt. Hans Langsdorff decided to take refuge in Montevideo harbor. The ship was unable to make the necessary repairs within the 72-hour period afforded in a neutral harbor by international convention. In a decision that avoided the Graf Spee’s capture, Langsdorff took the limping craft out of the harbor and sank it on Dec. 17, 1939. The crew was taken by ship to Buenos Aires and the captain committed suicide days later.
German surface fleet never did learn that it couldn’t go up against the Brits and win (the Hood being the single exception).
Posted by: Steve White 2004-02-04
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=25576