We waited a long time.
The Germans had not boarded the Stefano before we left and we had not seen any of them.
Perhaps we had to wait too long because they had a good dinner waiting for them.
While we were standing by, the submarine came nearer and nearer until we could see it plainly with its red and green lights flashing.
For a moment I thought it was going to hit it.
I mean, I knew that it wouldn't, but for a moment I couldn't help but wondering if it would hit us as it came nearer and nearer.
It must have been about 08:00 when the submarine began firing.
It fired 30 shots.
We counted them straight into the Stefano, but she did not sink.
Then there was a crash amid ship and the Stefano began to slide into the water, habao grazing high into the air.
I'd seen pictures of sinking ships like that, but I never knew what it was until I saw the Stefano outlined by the moon going to the bottom.
Just before she disappeared, steam escaped into her siren, gave two shrill cries, just like the cries the human being and then it slid into the gap.
Those were the words of Sylvia Carru, one of 84 passengers who were aboard the SS Stefano which was sunk by the German U boat U 53 on the 8 October 16.
The passage was read by Gen Ciletti of the dive vessel Tenacious, whose team have retraced and discovered the Stefano and four other ships sunk by the U 53 on that day.
The wrecks of the U 53 today on Shipwrecks and Sea Dogs.
Welcome to Shipwrecks and Sea Dogs.
Tales of Mishaps misfortune and Misadventure Today I have a very special guest, jennifer Ciletti from the DV Tenacious, and she's based out of Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey.
And we're going to talk today about a very interesting story that occurred during World War I.
Thank you so much for having me.
Why don't we start with a little bit about what you do and what you do with your team aboard the DV Tenacious.
DV Tenacious locates dives and salvages artifacts from vessels in the North Atlantic and does expeditions to shipwrecks in the North Atlantic and around the world.
So what our team does is we do the research on a shipwreck, try to find a shipwreck and then do our best to document it and retrieve artifacts that we think members of the public may want to see and enjoy.
Now, it's interesting how we were able to connect because I interviewed Andrea Murdoch Alpini for the Andrea Doria episode and he mentioned during that episode that he did his dive trips with you aboard the DB Tenacious.
What was your experience like with Andrea? Andrea is amazing.
And it is really just amazing to see somebody so passionate about shipwreck diving, shipwreck diving in general, and in particular the great Italian ocean liner, the Andrea Doria.
So we had met Andrea through one of the salvage holders on the rack, steve Gatto, who does a lot of diving off of our boat and dives the Andrea Doria regularly on Defeat Tenacious and connected with Andrea through him.
And we found out that Andrea was coming over, and we just thought that it would be a tremendous experience to have this renowned Italian wreck diver to come to the United States and come out with us and experience one of the famous Italian ocean liners.
And we just had a great time and can't wait to die with him again.
Now, this story that we're going to talk about today, it occurred during World War I.
It involves Hanz Rosa, a German UBoat captain, and his UBoat.
The U 53.
How did you get involved with this story? So Captain Eric takasan, who is a legendary shipwreck hunter from Fair Haven, Massachusetts, he's discovered about 60 or 70 shipwrecks in our waters, has worked with our crew for a long time, and he, in the 1990s, had begun researching and looking for Hans Rosa's casualties.
And I know we'll get into the story of what happens later and in the 1990s found four of the five U 53 casualties and did some preliminary efforts to identify them in about 2018 2017, around that time frame.
We went back to try to finish making those identifications, documenting some of those wrecks, to try to figure out which of the wrecks had not yet been found.
And then to do the research and the work to find the final victim of Hans Rosa's exploits off the coast of Nantucket.
So we became involved through Eric within the team, became quickly obsessed with kind of finishing the final chapter of this story, which was to find the last remaining Hans Rosa casualty.
And we're going to talk more in depth about how you found those wrecks and how you did those dives and what you found.
But let's jump into the story of what brought us here and that's of Hans Rosa.
So tell us how it all started out.
So, in October of 1916, on October 1716, hans RUSA came over in his German U boat, U 53, and showed up in Newport, Rhode Island, at the naval base there.
And this was sort of alarming for everybody because it was World War One, but America had not yet declared war.
So we were in this period where World War One was raging in Europe, and yet the Americans had yet to declare war.
So when a German UBoat showed up on our doorstep, we were kind of like, hey, wait, this guy is not technically an enemy.
But it was a little weird that he was there.
And what Rosa did was come in, he announced that he was there.
He met with the admiral.
The admiral gave him the rules.
He said, we can't give you any aid.
We're neutral in this war so far.
You can be here for 24 hours.
After that, we're going to start asking questions.
So he had 24 hours in Newport.
And what he did with those 24 hours was fascinating because what he did was he started to show off his UBoat.
He gave people tours.
He invited the military on board to give tours.
He invited society girls.
There's these wonderful pictures in the newspaper of young women in their finest dresses going out in little boats and surrounding the UBoat and getting on board and getting tours by the German soldiers.
And Hans Rosen made sure that those German soldiers spoke perfect English, that the UBoat was immaculate.
And he greatly exaggerated the UBoat's capabilities because what he was trying to do was kind of assert this German show of power, in a sense, to scare the Americans from wanting to get involved in the war.
And one of the funny stories is Admiral Gleaves was the head of the Navy at Newport and his daughter was one of the people who got a tour, and she went on board the boat.
And Admiral sorry, Hunt rosa gave her a very special tour, his own personal tour, and he showed her the periscope of the hubo.
And he put her father's ship in the sight of the periscope and had Admiral Bleeds, his daughter looking at her father's ship through the periscope of this German hubo.
And Hans Rosa, in his memoirs, later said that she didn't really understand the joke because he thought that she was interested in more than his periscope.
So he's, like, flirting with the admiral's daughter, showing off of the newspapers.
The crew is posing for the newspapers to really show German might and kind of flex German muscle to prevent America from entering the war.
So that's how it kind of all started.
That is terrifying and exciting at the same time.
I'm trying to picture myself being in that situation on shore, seeing this German submarine just surface and come right up to the shore.
I think I'd be first terrified, but then I'd probably keep walking closer because I want to see it.
Yeah, the pictures are great of all these little boats surrounding the U boat and people taking their tours and the German sailors very proudly smiling and posing for pictures in the dock.
It was really something.
And one of the things that's so intriguing about this story is that Hans Rosa himself is just such an enigmatic character.
He really was such a large character in World War I.
And this kind of shows his personality and his audacious nature.
To be able to kind of have the balls to show up and do this is really something.
He's showing off a little bit, but also trying to be diplomatic as well.
Even though they were at war, not with us, not with the US.
I should say, nevertheless, they were touring the Atlantic Ocean specifically to sink ships that were aiding his enemies.
So after the initial meeting and greeting and the fun and the tours that were given, that's really where the the fun starts.
So tell us what happened next.
Yeah, so after he gave the tours, he was there for roughly 24 hours.
He wasn't there for very long.
He because he was watching his time, he knew he didn't have a lot of time.
The rules of war at the time, where if you were in a neutral court, you could be there for 24 hours, otherwise you had to be damaged or injured or things like that.
So he's there, he says his goodbyes, and then he asked for one thing before he left, which was copies of some of the local newspapers.
And the newspaper reporters were more than happy to oblige, but what he was using those newspapers for was to look at the shipping tables to see what ships would be crossing in the waters off the coast of Nantucket after he left.
So Rosa gets in his U boat, he rides off into the sunset, and then the next day starts sinking ships off the coast of Nantucket.
So the first thing he does is he pulls over a ship called the Cansin.
And the cansin was an American ship.
He checks to see if they're carrying war materials.
It turned out he was satisfied that the ship wasn't carrying the materials of war, so he let them go.
But he jammed their telegraph signal so that they couldn't radio support his activities.
It turns out that the Kandom was actually carrying ammunition.
He just didn't see it because it wasn't on the manifest.
So the next thing he does is he comes across a ship called The Strathene.
And The Strath dean was a UK flagged ship.
And he stops her.
He believes that she's part of the war effort, and she indeed was.
And he stops her with six shots.
And back then, they didn't just sink ships.
Right? It was very gentlemanly.
So what he does is he boards the ship.
He says, I'm going to sink your ship, put your men in lifeboats and start rowing towards the Nantucket Lake.
So they row toward the Nantucket Light ship.
And then once he's satisfied that all the humans are off the ship, he sank it.
And that one, he torpedoed her Ask.
Her stern dropped, but she didn't sink.
So you can imagine now the strategy is like hovering in the water with her bow out of the water and her stern hanging heavy.
And then another ship comes by called the Christian Nutsen.
And the Christian nudsen was a ship from the Netherlands.
It was carrying fuel to London.
The captain did the same thing.
He ordered people off, he put them in the boats and he sank that one by grenades.
It didn't sink.
So he torpedo her ask as well.
She didn't sink, so we hit her with a second torpedo.
Just so people listening know that often ships carrying oil or carrying fuel don't sink right away because the fuel is lighter than water.
So it's a little bit harder to sink a ship full of fuel.
So now we've got the strategy bobbing around in the water and the Christian nose and bobbing around in the water and a whole bunch of men on lifeboats rowing towards the nantucket lightship.
That might have been the last era of even remotely gentlemanly war as we know it now.
There's no such consideration given.
Back then, he at least gave the opportunity for the people on board to get off in lifeboats, at least some of them.
Yeah.
When you look at the difference between the way warfare was in world war I and world war II, there's a market difference where, at least in the Atlantic in world war II, merchant seamen were the largest loss of life.
Even above the marines and the navy, you had more merchant mariners dying in world war II because they weren't afforded the same kindnesses.
Right.
It was just different.
And Hans Rosa was really a gentleman's gentleman.
He went above and beyond.
There's many instances of him, even outside of this, going above and beyond to make sure that people survive and even kind of going above and beyond what they were doing in world war I.
He really was, by all accounts, a person who was kind in that regard as well.
So the next ship that Rosa gets his eyes on is a ship called the west point.
And this was also a ship from the United kingdom.
It's a British ship, a furnace woody liner.
And the west point started to send telegraph signals.
So the west point was getting out a bunch of she was being a little feisty, so she was getting out some telegraph signals back to port, and they hit her to silence her radio.
And then after they start firing on the west point, a ship called the bloomer stick comes along.
Bloomer stick was a Danish ship, and that was there's now this fierce wireless traffic that's kind of happening.
So at this point, Hans Rosa decides to dive and to kind of think about what's going on, because he starts to realize that the American ships are coming.
And it's interesting.
There's a wonderful book called Dirkavitan that is his memoirs, and the person who wrote this book got unfettered access to his family memoirs and and diaries and things like that.
And he talks about being underwater, trying to decide what to do now that he knows the American navy is coming.
And he kind of goes through the analysis, and he says, look, if I leave, I'm good.
I've done a lot of damage, but they might think I'm chicken.
And of course, I'm paraphrasing, right? But if I surface, I very well.
Creep would be the German UBoat commander that pulls America into world war i.
So he had this huge decision to make when he was diving and thinking about what to do next.
And ultimately, he decided to surface, and he decided to sink the bloomer stick.
And when he comes to the surface and he opens the hatch, there are 17 United States destroyers in the water.
So now, can you imagine this scene, right? There are ships on fire because they're still sinking.
There are men in lifeboats rowing to the Nantucket Lightship and now rowing to the destroyers, and there are 17 warships, American warships, sitting there, and one guy, 30 dudes in a U boat, and he says to one of the destroyers, get out of the way so I can sink the bloomer sick.
And when that destroyer moved, he knew he could do whatever he wanted out there.
You know what? A different time, for sure.
I'm I'm just thinking about now or even in the last 50 years, if another country's ship or or submarine were sinking ships off the coast of another country, I am fairly certain that would be blown out of the water.
But times were a lot different back then, and the neutrality of the United States was very important to most Americans.
They had no desire to join the war.
At first, it was quite tense, and Germany absolutely did not want the Americans to join the war.
Like I said before, the gentlemanliness of the proceedings are such that I I can't understand it.
I don't think most people now could possibly understand how the American destroyers wouldn't just sink the ship.
Now, you said it even asked one of the destroyers to move out of the way, and it did.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
I picture him like a director, right.
Like, popping up out of the hatch and kind of just now starting to direct people around.
You move this way, you move this way.
Get out of my way.
He came so close to one of the destroyers, he almost collided with one of them.
That's how close the destroyers were to him in the water.
So, again, you go back to just the audacity of it all, to be willing to come up and surface to that and say, I'm going to give it a shot.
Yeah.
I think Hans Rosa may have actually been a good film director.
He seems like he has a flair for the exciting yeah.
Good director and actor.
Right.
One of those people who could do both, probably.
Yeah.
So after he sinks the Blumendick, he wasn't done.
He was not done.
So then there was one more ship that came by, and it was a ship called the Stefano.
And the Stefano was a UK flag ship.
But she was different from the other ships because the Stefano was a passenger ship and she was a passenger ship from the Red Cross line.
Not to be confused with the ambulance, the emergency services Red Cross.
Red Cross was actually the name of a line of ships, british line of ships, but they ran passenger travel from Canada to the East Coast and it was carrying not only was it carrying passengers, it was carrying a very large number of female passengers because a lot of them were joining their husbands in New York.
Their husbands had left to join factories that were producing goods for the war.
And so there were a lot of women that were coming to visit their husbands or to join their husbands in New York.
So the ship was coming from Halifax, I believe, to New York.
And he actually thought about the Lusitania when he was trying to decide whether or not to sink the Stefano because he thought, this is a passenger ship.
And as he was thinking about it, the captain of the other ship starts boarding the lifeboats.
So he was like, Well, I might as well sink it now because everybody's getting off.
And there were a lot of women who were accredited.
There was one young woman named Sylvia Caru who was coming to New York to be an actress and she helped a lot of the other women get their children into lifeboats.
And she was considered a bit of a heroine in this situation.
Helped everybody board the boats, moved to a waiting destroyer and then it was from the deck of the destroyer that they watched as the Stefano sank.
Another funny thing about Stefano was that it was a really long time from the time that he stopped the ship and they boarded it until the time that it sank.
And Sylvia Carilla waiter joked and she said it was a really long time.
Perhaps we waited so long because they had a good dinner waiting for them because they had left the ship at dinner time.
And it turns out that that was absolutely true.
They stopped and they ate the whole dinner before seeking the ship because the food on German Uboats is notoriously bad and it gets worse the close the further you get from your port of departure.
So by the time they got to New York, there was not a lot of good food going on on that U boat.
So they ate the food on the passenger ship and then they wound up sinking that one also.
Well, that was smart thinking by the captain to get everybody off.
I don't know if he possibly saw all these other ships or heard about them getting sunk, but he probably figured the jig was up and he needed to get everybody off.
Yeah, it was quite a calamity out there.
There were a bunch of ships sinking.
There was smoke.
I don't know exactly whether they could see everything but certainly some of these ships could see the other ones sinking out there.
We're going to drop anchor right here for an ad break.
And what came next for Hans? So after he sank to Stefano, he was like, okay, our work is done here.
It's time to go.
And he started to head back he head back to Germany, and there's an entry in his diaries of them singing songs.
Right.
They're on their way back to Germany.
Imagine he's got about I think it's about 31 men and his crew.
They're all singing like these victories German victory songs on the way back.
And the only one who was not singing was Hans Rosa, because the whole way home, he thought to himself, I might have just gotten the Americans to join World War I.
He was very concerned about that on his way home.
And of course, it didn't help.
The next day, the newspapers were outraged and filled with articles about, you know, what this guy had done, but it wouldn't be for another year, I guess another year, 1917, that we eventually declared war on Germany.
You know, it's interesting to to consider, had he not sunk all of those ships and assuming the Lusitania still was sunk, had would that have been enough to cause the Americans to join the war? Now, there were a lot of other things going on, and you can point to some other incidents that drew the United States into the war, but that was still a big part of it.
And I wonder, if all of those previous ships were not sunk, what would have happened? Just speculation, but interesting to think about.
Yeah.
There were four or five ships that in early 1917 were sunk, and one of them was an American ship called the Husatonic.
I don't know if it's pronounced housatonic or Hussatonic.
It spells H-O-U-S atonic.
And that was one of the five that were sunk in early 1917.
That was a ship carrying grain, and it was one of this group of ships that was sunk and further angered the Americans.
And actually, Hans Rosa that sunk that ship sank that ship as well.
He's quite prolific.
Yeah.
He also went on during World War I, when the Americans were involved in World War I, he sank the Jacob Jones.
So the first American destroyer to be sunk by a German UBoat was sunk by Hans Ruza, and it was the longest single torpedo shot in World War I.
And don't ask me at the length because I forget now, but it's on record as the longest single torpedo shot in World War I.
And in that case, what Hans Rosa did was he sank it, and they were American soldiers in the water.
He brought one on board his UVO and treated his injuries.
And then at great peril to himself, he radioed the Americans and told them where that Jacob Jones was sinking so that they could get help to the ship.
He got out of Dodge at that point.
But that's what I mean when I said before that he did some things that were even above and beyond, and almost giving up your own position to get help for people who are stranded in the water really is kind of above and beyond, even in World War I.
Perhaps not a humanitarian, but he still had a little bit of a conscience to try to save all those people that were in the water.
So we can give him credit for that.
And he did actually earn a lot of awards and medals from the German government military, I should say, as a result of his actions at the detriment of the Allies in the United States.
But for the Germans, he was a hero.
Absolutely.
His war record was very prolific, and after the war, he wound up working for the military and doing training, and he was an officer there.
So, yeah, definitely a well decorated member of the German Navy, for sure.
I think one thing people don't understand about German U boat commanders, even as we go into World War II, is that many people went into UBoat service to sort of avoid the politics of war.
And Hans Rosa, he was retired by the time World War II came, but he was very quietly opposed the Nazi regime during World War II.
There's one story about him where he was asked by Hitler, I guess, had assembled a bunch of people and asked them to put on their naval naval uniforms and to take a picture, and it was the only time he did it, and he always hated that picture.
And I remember I came across the picture at one point, and I don't ever use it in presentations because I know how much Hans Rosa would have hated it.
So I think sometimes German UBoat sailors are misunderstood, and I'm certainly not an apologist for anything that determines state of World War Two.
I mean, please don't misunderstand me, but I think it's complicated, and war is really complicated, and the politics of war are very complicated complicated.
And I think we have to look at a character like Hans Rosa not only for all of his energy and audacity, but also for both his successes and his imperfections and faults.
Something I always like to remind people when we talk about German U boat commanders.
So if we fast forward about, I don't know, roughly 100 years to the DV Tenacious, what was it like when you first tried to find these ships that were sunk by the U 53? So we had numbers for four out of the five of them, and that was because Captain Eric Takasian, like I said, who's just a tremendous shipwreck hunter, had found these ships in the had done a lot of work and historical research to find these ships in.
The problem with the 90s was that the state of dive technology was not where it is today.
And these ships are very far offshore, so they're about 120 miles from the tip of Montauk.
So to get there into water that is dark, that is cold, that is relatively deep, and is full of current, the current kind of rips through the area that these ships are in and to be on traditional dive gear.
So he was on traditional recreational dive gear, the kind that you might be on when you go diving, open circuit where you're limited by the amount of air in your tank.
So he was really only able to go down to these four ships, kind of take a quick look see and come back up and give his best guess of what these ships were.
So for the longest time we weren't exactly sure which ship was which and what we had set out to do in 2017, 2018, and Eric worked on this with us as well, is figure out for certain what four ships he had already found and then to find whichever one was still missing.
So that's what we started to do in 2017.
What happens when you're down there trying to identify a ship? What are you looking for? So we're looking for things like length and width and engines.
Engines hold up pretty well.
Like what kind of engine does it have on a ship? Like the Christian Nutson that was carrying oil.
A good indicator that it's that ship is if it's flipped over, we call it turtle.
And the Christian nudsin was flipped over completely because the oil is lighter than the water.
The ship flips and it stinks upside down.
So one of the telltale signs that the nudsen was the nudsen was that it was upside down and not very exciting to dive then because it's like a turtle shell sitting in the stand.
We were very fortunate with the Stefano because one of our divers, Mike Judith, found the letters Phano and then P-O-O-L liverpool, because you go to Liverpool.
So it's a pretty good indicator when you can find half the name.
And just to give you an example because one of the things that people talk about a lot is salvage from shipwrecks and whether people should take items from shipwrecks.
DeStefano is a huge ship.
She was a passenger ship, a passenger liner almost totally buried.
There is very little of her sticking out in the sand because the sand just shift and the current just shifts out there.
So the sands will just completely cover a ship over.
So there's very little of her even left after 100 years.
As opposed to ships that are in really deep water or ships that might be in a channel or in clear water and things like that that hold up better over time.
So that was how we identified the Stefano.
The Strafting, we knew was carrying cartridges.
We knew it was carrying artillery and we found the artillery holes and we found all the shells in it.
So we were able to identify the Strastine that way.
It was also carrying some metal that was from a particular place and we were able to get the name off of that metal.
So we were able to identify the strategy that way.
And then we kind of set to determining in the boomer stick.
Because of the location, we knew where that one was.
So then we realized that it was the west point that was missing.
And Eric actually had written a book called dangerous shallows that goes ship of cape cod, and in it, he believed that the strathene was the ship that was missing, because at the time, he had identified the strategy at the west point based on what he knew.
He was making the same guesstimates, and he was doing things, but because he had so little time underwater, he wasn't really able to go into the holds like we were and to pull all that stuff out.
So this was really kind of taking what he had done, trying to sort it out, and then trying to figure out what's missing.
And once we figured out what was conclusively what was missing, we went straight to work trying to find the final victim, which was the west point.
Now, back during that point, when you made those initial discoveries, how long could the diver stay down at one time? And I know it's already a very difficult dive.
It's deep, the currents are strong, it's cold, but how long could they stay down? So then you were limited by the amount of gas in your tank.
So, there I mean, you're talking like, maybe a 15 minutes dive.
You're also talking about a time before what we call scooters, which are little propulsion devices that help you fight against the current.
They didn't dive with those back then.
So you're fighting a current with the strength of your legs, and you're limited.
You don't want to run out of air on your back, where now, with what we call closed circuit rebreathers that recycle the air, you're really only limited by how much time you want to spend decompressing, so our divers can spend more time.
And we have these little scooters that allow us to fight against the current.
So unless the current is ripping, which sometimes it is, and then you just got to wait it out, a normal offshore of nantucket current, we can fight against using the scooter.
So, we also did multiple dives on these wrecks.
So we would go out, we spend like three or four days on the wreck.
So if you've got five or six divers each doing two dives a day and we're out there for three or four days, you're getting a lot more dive time in than eric, who was kind of running out there and hitting these wrecks real quick and trying to make some identifications.
Because it's like I said, it's very far offshore.
And it was really far offshore in 1990.
It's still far offshore today, but it was really far offshore back then.
And then you set out to find the west point.
So what led you to actually find it? Obviously, shipwreck hunting is a lot of research, a little math and some luck.
So we looked at the historical records.
We gather historical records from newspapers, from German UBoat, logs from all sorts of different sources wherever we can find it.
So it's always there's a lot of work in libraries and working computers and doing a lot of research.
And then we kind of map that over places where ships have hung up their nets, because if a ship hangs up their nets on something, it's probably something sticking out of the bottom, and that may be a shipwreck.
And then we have a side scan sonar.
So we actually bought a sonar system specifically to find this wreck.
We had used sonar before, but we made the investment in sonar because the crew was really passionate about finding this.
So we bought a sonar system in August of 2020.
We read the how to Use Sonar book on the way to our first search for this Rap.
I mean, there are pictures of us sitting up with the red lights on the ship reading that how to do sonar.
Didn't find it the first time.
I wonder why.
That was August of 2020.
And then we went back in September of 2020 with a little bit more of a refined plan and a little better knowledge of our new sonar system and were able to find it.
And it was actually really exciting because we were out there and we they call it mowing the lawn, because literally what you do is you just drive back and forth, towing the sonar at three knots.
So you go slow.
You drink a lot of coffee, eat a lot of food, and you just go back and forth, and you go back and forth, towing the sonar along and hoping you see something other than what we call the Rock and Sand Show, right? Like rock and sand coming up on the screen.
Rock and sand.
And we were getting to a point where we thought there might be something, and we radioed to a ship that was we saw a fishing boat out in the distance.
We said, hey, you ever hang up anything out here? And they're like, yeah, right about where you are.
We've hung up our net, and then the next thing you know, we pass over what is very clearly a shipwreck, and you can see it roll across the sonar.
And then we stop and we dived it to make the confirmation that it was the West Point.
So when you made that initial dive to verify that you found the West Point, what evidence did you see to confirm it? There were certain winches in a certain location.
The type of engine matched the size.
You can measure size on a side skin toner, so the width didn't match because the ship was slayed open, but the length matched almost perfectly.
So you look for as many clues as you can.
You look for visual clues in the sideskins owner, but also visual clues underwater.
And then we also found one of the helms, and we have since brought that helm up.
So we went back this summer.
We brought that helm up, and the helm was manufactured by the same company that manufactured the helms for the West Point.
So you're able to make that connection as well, that you see the name of somebody who made something for the ship on the item that you bring up.
We'll be right back with the story of the U 53 after the short advert.
What are some of the other artifacts that you found from all of the racks combined that you were most excited about? I think it's really the West Point.
We brought the helmet.
We brought some gauges from the engine room.
There were some portholes that were just kind of laying in the sand, so some things like that.
This is a wreck that has kind of been damaged a lot by fishing and currents.
And even from the time that we first scanned it in 2020 until when we went back in 2022, the wreck changed because draggers and fishing nets have hit it.
And I think that's another important thing that a lot of people don't understand is that a lot of people say, well, you should leave artifacts where they are.
They should stay with the shipwreck.
There are not many people.
I mean, we are the only people who have dived this wreck since 1917 sorry, 1916.
So there's not very many people visiting it.
It's really far offshore.
It's in really deep, tough water.
And the artifacts that you see could be gone.
They literally could be ripped off the rack or buried by the sand.
This time next year, then we see that with the Andrews Doria.
We're talking about the doria before.
Every year, part of part of that ship collapse, it gets buried.
Whole rooms that you were able to swim through are just gone the next year.
So if people want to experience artifacts from a shipwreck and we want members of the public to see and appreciate and learn from history, these things have to come up.
Otherwise, they may not even be there when the next person gets there.
Andrea Murdoch GALPINI when I interviewed him, he described it very much the same way, in that those items tell a story, and if those disappear, then there's no more story, and they'll be lost forever.
So by bringing them up, you're allowing the story to be told that this item belonged somewhere and these people were on board the ship, and this is what happened to them.
And if we don't bring them up and look at them and tell these stories, then they will be forgotten.
Of course, he said it in a much more poetic, passionate way.
He's very good at that.
However, that is essentially what we're looking at here, and that's what you just described.
And personally, I agree with that.
I don't think there's anything wrong with taking artifacts from a shipwreck, assuming that they're not owned by somebody else or claimed by somebody else or, you know, human remains, I think would probably not be great to do.
It's interesting to note what you and your team do with the artifacts that you find.
Why don't you explain a little bit about that? So we restore all of our artifacts.
We do some of the restorations ourselves, and any restorations that we're not capable of doing ourselves.
We work with artisans of various types to help restore those artifacts, including this guy, Scott Cerdi at Brass in the past in Massachusetts, who's just a master with stuff that has been under the water for a really long time and immersed in salt.
And he can turn it up shining and looking like new.
So we work with people like Scott and a number of others to restore this stuff as best we can, and we look for opportunities to share that.
Whether it's sharing a story of a video of it on Facebook.
Or on our website or things like that.
Or taking it to a museum to have people see it or loaning it to a museum for a period of time.
We are firm believers.
I think if there's one thing there's a lot of things we're about, but I think if it's one thing we're about, it's promoting to people the importance of salvage and artifact restoration and that it's not robbing and it's not robbing anyone of the opportunity to see it.
It's precisely the opposite.
It's preserving these things before they get lost forever and allowing people to connect to the story.
But these are our connection.
This is our connection to that shipwreck.
Bringing up that artifact is the connection, like you were saying, to everything that happened on that ship.
So we're really firm believers in that and look for every opportunity we can, opportunities like this one, to talk about the story, to show the artifacts, to show pictures of the artifacts whenever we can.
And I just want everybody to know that you don't sell any of the artifacts that these are brought up for you to restore, share, but you're not profiting from it whatsoever.
And I think that's important for everybody to hear.
Yeah, we do not sell artifacts very often.
We might post something on Facebook and somebody will contact me in a message and say, hey, can I buy that thing? The answer is no.
I mean, we don't bring anything up that we are not planning to restore.
And even if it's to restore it, for it to be in someone's personal collection, it's not sold right.
It's something that means something to the diver who brought it up, and it's shared in whatever way we can share it in all the ways that we just discussed.
I mean, a great example is we brought the foghorn up from the Andrea Doria in 2017, works with people around the world to restore it.
I mean, the foghorn horn maker was still in business.
We sent parts of the horn to sweden, had them restore parts of it, had scott, an iron worker named eric zendati, a number of people working to create and refurbish that horn and then blew it on the 65th anniversary of the sinking with survivors in attendance.
It was amazing.
You want to talk about A powerful movement.
It's like seeing those survivors hear this horn and ring the doria bell.
There ringing the doria bell and having all these divers and historians and survivors come together to commemorate the event.
It's like, sure, could we commemorate it without the horn? Yeah.
But there's something like this visceral connection that you get to the story through the artifact, and it's really amazing when you see people actually be able to see and feel and touch the thing.
It's just different.
It's just different Than hearing the story.
One of the reasons Why I started this podcast was because of the stories.
It's not just that a ship sunk somewhere because of something.
It's that there's so many stories behind that.
All of the people that were on board and the circumstances in the world and geographically at the time, those stories are important.
They weren't just people that disappeared from the planet.
They're important stories to learn from, to not forget.
And these artifacts definitely help us do that.
The andrea doria foghorn.
I believe I saw that on your facebook page.
That was something else.
That was fantastic.
You mentioned the currents, the cold, the depth.
What are some of the biggest challenges as a dive team searching for shipwrecks? I think some of the biggest challenges for us is that we're working really far offshore.
So in new jersey, we're very lucky.
We've had a really rich tradition of shipwreck diving.
Going back to the andrea doria is really responsible for that.
The andrea doria was the first big one that went down around here and got people excited.
And there are so many people who flocked to diving to dive the andrea doria.
But there's a real rich tradition in new jersey.
And the wrecks that are closer to shore.
I'm not saying everything's been found.
There's always something to find.
But the wrecks that are closer to shore, especially in new jersey, there have been a lot of teams working over the years that have documented those wrecks.
So to find new shipwrecks, we're often going a bit further offshore and diving anywhere.
Whether you're just diving wrecks really far offshore or you're hunting wrecks really far offshore and you have divers in the water, if anything goes wrong, there's no help coming.
The coast guard right.
It takes a long time for the coast guard to get to you when you're 100 miles offshore, and particularly if you have an incident involving a diver that far offshore, help is not going to get there before there are going to be serious medical consequences to someone.
So with our team, all of our team is trained in all sorts of life saving procedures and inwater recompression and all sorts of things to help us minimize risk out there.
And I don't mean to say that to be like, oh, it's so dangerous, right? It is a dangerous sport in and of itself.
And you calculate risk.
So we're constantly calculating the risk of something, the risk of putting people in the water, the risk of being offshore, and doing our best to plan for any contingencies that happen while we're out there.
Because we are sort of all we have out there.
So if it's a mechanical failure, people better know the boat, right? If it's a radio failure, people better know how to get in contact.
If it's a medical emergency, we need to know how to help ourselves.
So the far offshore stuff, that's the challenge.
Diving itself in this area is what you said, it's the tides, it's the currents, it's the cold and it's the dark.
Our visibility, if you get offshore, the visibility gets better.
But visibility right off the coast of New Jersey is terrible.
We'll very often have 5ft of visibility, 10ft of visibility.
Some of our divers joke that when they got a good visibility today, it was like the first time they saw a wreck, because they saw the wreck five foot at a time for years.
I mean, our backyard in New Jersey, where if we can't get offshore because of the weather and we're just diving close to home, it's called the mud hole because the water there is a run off and it's just mud.
So we have a bunch of wrecks in a place called the mud hole before we die.
Sounds lovely.
Yeah.
We're not used to seeing very far, which can be a blessing and a curse sometimes, I think.
So, lots of challenges and we just do the best we can to rely on each other to keep each other safe and to stay up on whatever we need to stay up to, to make sure that we prevent anything from going wrong out there.
Now, I am not a diver, just for the record.
However, I would say that the sport of diving, or professional diving even, is inherently dangerous.
But people like your team, Andrea Murdoch, Alpini and others are professionals and you know what you're doing.
And I think that is important to remind everybody that this is not something that anybody can just go do.
You have to train, you have to research, you have to know where you're going, what you're doing, have everything planned out.
Yeah, you do.
You have to always be learning, you have to always be looking at what's the newest procedures, you're learning from mistakes and really watching each other.
It's a huge family, right? Our crew, we're just one big family.
And we're out there for days at a time, like three or four days at a time on a boat.
That's 45ft, right? Sleeping together, eating together, going into the water, watching each other's baths.
But at the end of the day, we have each other's baths and everybody out there has to know that every other person in our crew is there for them, has their backs and is qualified to take care of something if something goes wrong.
Where can people find you on social media? Yes, absolutely.
We are at DV Tenacious, so, like dive vessel Tenacious, and we have a website which is www.dvtenacias.com.
If anybody has any questions or anything, I'm always happy.
I'm always taking questions for people on Facebook or via the website.
So if you just hit the private message button on Facebook, we're happy to answer any questions that you might have or to share more information with folks.
Well, gen, Soledi, it was a pleasure to have you here.
Thank you so much for talking to me.
Thank you so much for having me.
Rich, that's going to do it for the U 53.
Thank you so much to Jen Celti and the whole crew of the DV Tenacious.
I really appreciate Jen spending some time talking about this fantastic story.
Shipwrecks and Sea Dogs is written, edited and produced by me.
Rich Napolitano original theme music is by Sean Sigfried and you can follow him on his YouTube channel at sean secret.
Additional music was provided by Kevin McLeod.
You can find shipwrecks and sea dogs on social media on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at Shipwrecks Pod.
And you can also find the show on Mastodon at shipwreckspod at sea.
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