- MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay (Reuters)
- The scuttled Nazi battleship "Admiral Graf Spee" has withstood
the silt and currents at the mouth of the River Plate for more than 60
years while waiting for someone to salvage it.
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- Most of the Graf Spee survivors have died and only octogenarians
in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo can recall watching one of the first
naval clashes of World War II unfold on their sleepy shores.
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- But the legend of the pride of the Nazi fleet continues
to inspire younger generations, and this week a team of divers will begin
raising pieces of the pocket battleship -- a smaller, lighter version of
a conventional warship -- out of the River Plate estuary in a project expected
to take years.
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- "It was a masterpiece in its time," said Mensun
Bound, a marine archeologist from Oxford University weaned on tales of
the Battle of the River Plate.
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- "And it doesn't have a dark history. Its captain
was a man of great dignity and honor. It was a battle in which both sides
came out with their honor intact."
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- Under the command of Capt. Hans Langsdorff, the Graf
Spee sank nine commercial vessels in the Atlantic in late 1939 but always
gave the crews time to evacuate the ships.
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- The British navy dispatched three ships -- HMS Exeter,
HMS Achilles and HMS Ajax -- to the Uruguayan coast and on Dec. 13, 1939,
they sighted and attacked the Graf Spee.
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- Langsdorff took his badly damaged ship to port in Montevideo,
where he was allowed to bury 36 dead sailors. His loyalty to Nazi leaders
was questioned when he gave the old German naval salute at the funeral
instead of the Nazi salute.
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- Neutral Uruguay, under intense diplomatic pressure from
Britain, then ordered the Graf Spee out to sea after 72 hours.
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- "I went down to the port the morning they left,"
said Maria Eleonor Ramis, 83, one of the estimated 750,000 people who watched
events on the shore that day. "It was very sad because the sailors
were all so young, 18 and 19 years old."
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- 'THE WHOLE WORLD WAS WATCHING'
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- Believing he would be met by a beefed-up British fleet,
Langsdorff evacuated his men to ships headed to Argentina, then sank the
Graf Spee with explosives to stop it from falling into enemy hands.
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- "It was an event that the whole world was watching,"
said Cristina Maldonado, a historian at Montevideo's Naval Museum.
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- Two days after scuttling his ship, Langsdorff took his
own life in Buenos Aires.
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- Survivors who stayed in Uruguay and Argentina often spoke
of recovering the Graf Spee, located 4 miles off the coast in waters no
deeper than 36 feet.
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- In 1997, Bound and Uruguayan partner Hector Bado found
the ship was in much better condition than expected as they extracted one
of the guns.
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- On Thursday, they will attempt to raise the range finder,
a component 34 feet wide and 20 feet tall that held the first radar antenna
installed in a warship.
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-
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- The team will study how to lighten the Graf Spee until
they can raise the ship's hull, which is in two pieces, one 490 feet long,
the other 98 feet long.
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- The divers declined to discuss the cost of the project,
but they say they are working to bring on salvaging experts from Brazil,
Argentina, the Netherlands and perhaps Germany. The ship will remain in
Uruguay.
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- "It will be rebuilt on land and will be the best
ship museum in the world," said Bado. "This is the last salvageable
German battleship in the world and it has an amazing story."
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