Status of The Survivors and Wrecks
In the years following the battle the wrecks were slowly discovered. Invincible was found by the Royal Navy minesweeper HMS Oakley in 1919. After the Second World War some of the wrecks seem to have been commercially salvaged. For instance, the Hydrographic Office record for SMS Lützow (No.32344) shows that salvage operations were taking place on the wreck in 1960. In 2000–2001 a series of diving expeditions involving veteran shipwreck historian and archaeologist Innes McCartney located the wrecks of Defence, Indefatigable and Nomad. It was discovered that Indefatigable, too had been ripped apart by salvors at some currently unknown time. In 2003 Innes McCartney led a detailed survey of the wrecks of for the Channel 4 documentary “Clash of the Dreadnoughts”. The film examined the last minutes of the lost ships and revealed for the first time how both 'P' and 'Q' turrets of Invincible had been blasted out of the ship and tossed into the sea before it broke in half.
On the 90th anniversary of the battle, in 2006, the UK Ministry of Defence belatedly announced that the 14 British vessels lost in the battle were being designated as protected places under the Protection of Military Remains Act. The last surviving veteran of the battle, Henry Allingham, a British RAF (originally RNAS) airman, died on 18 July 2009, aged 113, by which time he was the oldest documented man in the world and one of the last surviving veterans of the whole war. Also among the combatants was the then 20-year-old Prince Albert, second in the line to the British throne, who would serve as King George VI of the United Kingdom from 1936 until his death in 1952. He served as a junior officer in the Royal Navy.
One ship survives and was still in commission until 2011 as a Royal Naval Reserve depot in Belfast, Northern Ireland: the light cruiser HMS Caroline.
Read more about this topic: Battle Of Jutland
Famous quotes containing the words survivors and/or wrecks:
“I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it. That is why the children of survivors are so tragic. I see them in school. They don’t know how to handle their parents. They see that their parents are traumatized: they scream and don’t react normally.”
—Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)
“History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the the movements of the world gave a chance for it.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)