Graf Zeppelin found
Warsaw - Poland's navy said on Thursday that it had identified a sunken shipwreck in the Baltic Sea as almost certainly being Nazi Germany's only aircraft carrier, the Graf Zeppelin - a find that promises to shed light on a 59-year-old mystery surrounding the ship's fate.
The Polish oil company Petrobaltic discovered the shipwreck on July 12 on the sea floor about 60km north of the port city of Gdansk.
Suspecting it could be the wreckage of the Graf Zeppelin, the Polish navy sent a survey vessel on Tuesday, navy spokesperson Bartosz Zajda said.
"We are 99% sure - even 99.9% - that these details point unambiguously to the Graf Zeppelin," Dariusz Beczek, the commander of the vessel, ORP Arctowski, said after returning to port on Thursday morning.
At sea, naval experts used a remote-controlled underwater robot and sonar photographic and video equipment to gather digital images of the 260m-long ship, Zajda said.
"The analyses of the sonar pictures and the comparison to historical documents show that it is the Graf Zeppelin," Zajda told The Associated Press.
Waiting to find the name
Zajda said a number of characteristics of the wrecked ship exactly matched those of the Graf Zeppelin, including the ship's measurements and a device that lifted aircraft onto the launch deck from a lower deck.
The experts were still waiting to find the name "Graf Zeppelin" on one the ship's sides before declaring with absolute certainty that it is the German carrier, Zajda said.
The Graf Zeppelin was Germany's only aircraft carrier during World War II.
It was launched on December 8 1938, but never saw action due to Hitler's disenchantment with his navy and political squabbles in the Nazi high command.
After Germany's defeat in 1945, the Soviet Union took control of the ship.
'What-if'
On August 16 1947, Soviets used the ship for target practice, filling the hold with munitions before practicing dive bombing techniques on it.
The ship eventually sank, but its exact position has been unknown ever since.
Nick Hewitt, a historian at the Imperial War Museum in London called the Graf Zeppelin "a fascinating what-if".
"Nobody really knows that much about her," Hewitt told the AP.
"You get a look at what she was like, whether she had an armoured deck and all that sort of stuff, and you can figure out what she might have achieved."
Hewitt said the carrier could have had "an enormous impact" on the war, likely wreaking havoc on Britain's convoy lanes in the North Atlantic.
News source: www.news24.co.za
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