As an American, i truly finds this act disturbing. It would be same as robbing from USS Arizona. This act should not go unpunished. I hope that one day that my government and the British government, the whole world makes it illegal to disturb any war grave that's in ocean.
@@lukum55 I know its illegal, but sadly there is no way to enforce this law, even battlefields in Pacific and Europe are disturbed every day but its difficult to prosecute the criminals
The ship that dealt a critical blow to the Bismarck and ultimately stopped it from raiding vital merchant ships which kept Britain in the war. We owe this vessel and those that served on her our respect.
You just might want to read your history books again it was a plane that dropped a torpedo that hit the Bismarck’s rudder jamming it that hit the critical blow if not for That lucky torpedo hit the Bismarck would’ve gotten away to fight another day.
@@JOHNSMITH-ym2dk That’s right. The hit which forced her to abandon her original mission and make for port, where she was eventually hit by torpedo bombers then attacked by ships.
@@JOHNSMITH-ym2dk The Pilot who flew the Fairey Swordfish that dropped that Torpedo was invited to The Last Official Dinner aboard the Ark Royal, before she was decommissioned in 2011. He was beside himself because The Royal Navy would no longer have an Ark. The last serving Captain, said it was such an honour to have this Gentleman aboard.
One of the names on the list of men to give their life was my grandfather PAGET - FREDERICK CHARLES PO - Let them all rest in peace for there sacrifice for us all .....
@Claude Bedard same like british empire whom stole our earth resources from our country for a long fucking time. Rubber, gold, spices, steel and every fucking thing they see they want to steal. Fuck off
I cannot believe that there are such people who can steal from a ship that is a war grave. I was also a sailor and there is no worse fate for a sailor than this, but in my country there is a saying for such thieves "GOD SEES EVERYTHING, GOD WILL JUDGE THEM" Very sad ...
You need to understand where the ship's hulk is located -- the people of Indonesia (formerly the Dutch East Indies) or Malaysia have little regard for the war wreckage of their former colonial masters. Scrap metal can be very valuable, especially in Third World countries where scavenging war graves has been common for years.
well portugues and Spanish ships full of gold pearls and silver,, got with infinite hardlabour of that people should also be respected.!!! YOU REAPT WHAT YOU SOW
That's disappointing to see. What a magnificent ship, and a war grave. People that destroy them for profit are the lowest scum that deserve punishment. RIP HMS Prince Of Wales and all who died aboard her.
The ship has been consistently stripped of its valuable resources, all the propellers were taken some time ago and explosives were used to recover armor plate The British Government has asked local authorities to enforce the international law dealing with recognised War Graves, sadly the exploitation of this and similar ships of all nations continues.
It's the non-radiated steel that holds more value for the scum who're breaking the ships up. It's highly sought after for use in medical & precision tools.
@@navnig it used to be sought after..... now days not so much.... Sadly graves are being desacrated and wrecks destroyed for the scrap vallue alone 😞😞😞
It looks like since it capsized the Prince of Wales has had her propellers only salvaged. My guess is that you aren't likely to find relevant records for that amount of brass when it was probably sold to a salvage yard at the ship breakers in India or Bangladesh. They recycle a lot of material without the sort of bureaucratic accounting we think of as common in the West
@@tomdolan9761 Asked the question about this, on a facebook page with a lot of old heads, some were saying the RN removed the props themselves to stop them falling into scavengers hands....Seems plausible but I can't find any hard info on it online.
It’s probably an unpopular opinion but it would be great if a properly managed team could somehow raise the ship and preserve her. She’s an important and fascinating part of history that I believe can’t just be left to rust away and be left to be taken to bits like she is being. It would also be nice to give the remains of the men onboard a proper burial, that’s even if their bodies exist anymore. Some may see it as disturbing a war grave but I see it as preserving the ship and the memory of the men, you wouldn’t leave soldiers lying where they died on land, you’d bury them properly if you could.
Right, I see many presumably UK/British commenters here screaming about how graves should not be desecrated (which I do 100% agree with). I believe there are some Egyptians who want their items from some of their country's graves returned though.
@Matthew Lund Well, 2 things. 1. As stated, I do agree with leaving war graves alone and as a ship fan, I would like to see them intact aside from the war grave question. 2. Its not about the ruler's right to lay undisturbed (it could be some genocidal conquerer for what its worth). Its the fact that its some sovereign nation's heritage. And I definitely do not doubt money is a factor because that mummy being where it is, helps with the tourist dollars. As for the 'Sins of the Fathers' bit, well, if I was saying that PoW and Repulse were enforcing colonial rights when they were sunk, then yes, but I did not. The Egyptian stuff, well, they are there, right now. If it was Colonialism I wanted to go on about, I would be talking Chagos Island, not Malaya.
I think this scavenging is a cultural misunderstanding between what we see as a grave and what they see as scrap. We need to get out there and chop some hands off so they understand.
Great Britain is dead, you're now a 3rd world country, you will get nuked by Russia soon, you will know how it feels to be conquered, you 500 years old murderers
ay mate its off malaysia not china those scrappers couldve come from anywhere lets not get sinophobic really i mean im sure every race has bad and good peeps like how some brits looted the heck out of china back in the days anyways i think the problem is that malaysia should increase its fine cuz the current fine for stealing from a wreck is just £191
They must know who's robbing these war graves ! It's no small task to work and retrieve objects of that size and weight from a wreck at that depth. It's a professional outfit with plenty of very expensive equipment and salvage vessels
Perhaps the time has come to salvage these two mighty ships and bring them home,dare I say it for preservation. If we wait as long as Mary rose they will be gone sooner or later.
Maybe someone should bury some 'devices' around the wrecks that'll be triggered by anyone removing sections of the hull. ' DIVERS KEEP OFF' signs could be affixed to the remains of the hulls or to buoys anchored around them.
I’m just about to start my POW model on my channel. Sad to see her under the waves, but I’ll do her honour with the build. Great video! To bad people have to take from a grave!
reglamentariamente y por leyes internacionales,todo naufragio es una tumba y deberia ser intocable,se trate de estos de batalla o cualquier otro,pero es sabido que a nadie le importa el respetar las leyes....sino,basta ver lo que hicieron con el titanic,fingiendo investigar las causas para encubrir el saqueo de su caja de seguridad creyendo que tenia joyas...
Though we Indians felt happy that the Brits had lost their Navy flagship and their nose to the Japanese at that time, (because the Brits ruled us and we did not like it), it feels bad that the ship and the brave men that went down with it are being disturbed and disrespected by thieves.
And still you don't understand the nature of that rule. Ask yourself HOW the Brits managed to control India for so long. Hint: Sultans and Princely State rulers went a LONG way to allowing the British in. Selling the country out as long as their own wealth was left untouched.
Churchill did not know at the time of sinking the Task Force had even sailed from Singapore. Also there was air cover available, due to a Miscommunication The Admiral commanding did not ask for it.
@@mickdyer5310 captain philips still held onto the premise that air attack was not capable of sinking a capitol ship. royal air forceappeared 1/2 hr after bothships were sinking. repulse sank after prince of wales. churchill was capable of judgemental mistakes. when he was sea lord in ww1, he knew 2 german subs were operating off kinsdale, but lusitania steamed slowly on, a boiler room shut down, and no escort. the english chain of command not clear all the time, many american examples also.
How could a relatively small naval base and the dispatch of two ships effectively deter the imperial ambitions of a militaristic Japan and the might of its armed forces? In reality, the plan, design and construction of the naval base in Singapore, reflected an overstretched British empire by the dawn of the 20th century. Britain had to rely on an alliance with Japan from 1902-1923 to help defend its possessions and military interests in the Pacific and in the Indian Ocean, and later switched to dependence on a greater industrial-military power in the USA from 1923 onwards. Out of national pride and perhaps nostalgia, the Brits still sing "Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves" today, more than a century after Pax Britannica had begun to wane. It did not help that WWI killed more than 700,000 of British troops and severely drained its economy, incurring a heavy national debt. More significantly, in the years between WWI and WWII, British public opinion reflected popular revulsion against war and did not want to shoulder their empire defence burdens. Instead, the electorate preferred their governments to focus on social welfare spending. So their inter-war civilian governments slashed defence expenditures. Sir Winston Churchill, for one, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924, made deep budget cuts to the Royal Navy and opposed the construction of a naval base in Singapore in 1926, believing that it Japan would not go to war with Britain over the following 20 years. This reduced the shipbuilding capacity, upgrading and firepower of the Royal Navy (RN) ships by WWII. The folly of Churchill's false assumptions in the 1920s would later haunt him because the reduced number of limited RN assets had to be prioritized to keeping Britain's Atlantic lifeline from the USA free of the German U-Boat menace and to match the combined German-Italian warships to keep the Mediterranean free of Fascist control during WWII. So Churchill's WWII global strategic priorities, in the face of a multiple-front war and his token support for Russia against a Nazi invasion, dictated that Britain's Far East possessions could not effectively be reinforced with RN ships, army (including tanks) and aircraft in sufficient quantity and quality. He relied on the USA being drawn into a global war to fight Britain's Nazi and Japanese enemies. Thus, his priorities undermined the Singapore Strategy, which required the British and allied army and airforce to defend the Singapore naval base long enough before RN could reinforce it from thousands of miles away. Despite persistent pleas from his Chiefs of Staff, especially by his Chief of Imperial General Staff Sir John Greer Dill and generals in the Far East and Malayan Command, Churchill refused to reinforce Malaya (including Singapore) with adequate defences time and again. And so Churchill played a leading role in the fall of Singapore; which he termed as the "worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history". This was a reality that Churchill wanted to hide from the public. He never fulfilled his promise to hold a full public inquiry into the fall of Singapore during and after WWII when he became PM again from 1951-1955. This would have not only undermined his legacy as a lionised victor of WWII in Europe, but also ruin the careers, vested interests and reputations of many more personalities in the British establishment who had contributed to the fall of Singapore. Even then, he had wanted to confine the terms of reference of the inquiry to the Battle of Singapore island itself; not for peninsular Malaya, when it was long recognised that the defence of the two were inextricably bound together. He had wanted to deflect the spotlight to put the blame on the men on the ground, such as Percival. In his defence however, Churchill explained the (British) House of Commons that he bore full responsibility for the fall of Singapore. In justifying his actions, he indicated that the empire risked ruin if limited imperial defence resources were spread too thinly to cover the Far East and the Pacific. Perhaps, the justice that Churchill got was that he could not emotionally get over the loss of Singapore years after the war. In the case of Prince of Wales, in whom he had earlier sailed to meet US President FDR for talks, he could put names and faces to many of the dead, these were young officers whose wardroom he had shared, with whom he had watched That Hamilton Woman, and been so proudly filmed and photographed only 4 months before he sent them to their deaths. According to his doctor, it was these ghosts that were still haunting Churchill’s dreams in 1953.
First let me say I'm formerly USN and I understand your reaction to what you regard as a desecration of a war grave. These wrecks lay in waters of former European colonies and were sunk 80 years ago. Your not likely to find a favorable response from people who were subjugated by Europeans to protect these sites. You also have a tough time with the wargraves argument when you have been salvaging Uboats and other warships in European waters.
Alot of U-boats that are salvaged were sunk with no crew on them after the war from what i see. How would your country like it if Arizona or any other wreck was cut up for scrap?
@@zzirSnipzz1 that's not what he said. He didn't say he didn't care. He said that local authorities wouldn't care less if the ship was stolen altogether.
One of the desecrated ships is the USS Houston, a heavy cruiser. I care but I understand how futile it is and those Uboats getting scavenged are generally wargraves not post war scuttling
Seems a common occurrence in that part of the world unfortunately - The US Navy has documented extensive illegal salvaging of the wrecks of the USS HOUSTON and HMAS PERTH, both sunk in the Sunda Strait in 1942.
Is that the infamously sheared prop shaft that sealed her fate? According to Drachinifel she was very unlucky to be lost. A victim of poor military Intelligence.
Dear Nigel Sinclair , I am make a video for HMS Prince of Wales model unbox , I want to talk about some people robbed this War Grave , can I use your video in my video?
Anyone got any updates on the wrecks? Last update was in May this year when the Malaysians detained the Chinese salvage ship. Where is that ship now? One source i saw stated that Prince of Wales was visited 5 times by that salvage ship before it was caught. Thousands of tonnes of steal must have been taken recently.
Only thing that matters in this world now is money. These brave brave men gave their all .as the monument says at Singapore for your tomorrow we gave our today. Sad Scummy people who do this.
The same has happen with Dutch and British warship lying in Indonesian waters. Update: they have now completly disappeared as of February 2018 including the crews remains.
Larry Sherk check again. Under international law, laws of the sea, warships (even sunken ones) still belong to the nation that commissioned & crewed them, and warships sunk in battle with loss of life are considered war graves which are not to be disturbed by anyone (except with explicit permission from the nation which still owns them per international law). The problem is that international law is meaningless unless some nations are willing and able to step up and enforce it themselves. There is no international enforcement arm of the UN (or any other international organization) other than that which member nations provide. But, should anyone wish to take up the cause, yes, this looting is clearly a crime under international law.
Removing those props had to be noisy. Historic ships like these need a hidden burglar alarm, a device that's detect thieves at work and send up a buoy that'd alert authorities.
One of the few blunders made by Churchill to send capital ships into an area where the enemy had complete control of the sky. You would think the lessons of Pearl and Taranto wouldn't be forgotten that quickly.
Not really. The brits sent an aircraft carrier to provide cover but it had to stay back to repair. They also arranged for land based cover, but it was cancelled. Not a blunder, just circumstances.
While Churchill was built up via the propaganda media as a great leader and military genius, he was regarded by some at the top as an interfering ignoramus who often didn't know what he was talking about.
Hello- I'm currently working on a documentary for RU-vid on the illegal salvaging of the wrecks in the Java sea. Would you be happy for me to use a clip from this video in mine? With credit of course
The Indonesian government HAS DONE NOTHING to prevent the desecration of this vessel, the Repulse, and any other allied ships sunk in what is now their territorial waters. Because they dont care one bit. If I were the PM in Britain, I'd be giving the Indonesian ambassador shit every damn day about this.
Would be easy to track down a sale of that much high quality material.. even if broken up.... simple public punishment.. am not going to say what.. as it wouldn't be very pleasant....
The prince of wales did a hell a job on the bismarck only to met her fate with japanese torpedos its a shame she now a war grave like many other war ships on all sides
Even the basic steel of the ship is valuable today - it was manufactured prior to the atomic age, and has no radioactive contaminants in it, like today's steel. That old steel is needed when making extremely sensitive radiation detectors, or space probes, and so needs material that has very little to no contamination.
that's not actually true and hasn't been for decades. Steel for that is produced with a stream of pure oxygern into the smelter. Have a look at the Period tables videos from the University of Nottingham, it's in one of them.
How is removing those props a "disgrace"? If anyone else cared before then they could have raised money for extrication and had then put on display in a museum or whatnot. As it was only a few people would have ever seen them. This way they are probably preserved somewhere and in time will probably be donated to a museum. Taking offense so easily is a disgrace.
becasue MORON, it's illegally desecrating a wargrave. Theft as the warship still L:EGALLY belongs to the UK government. You should have paid a lot more attention in school.
@vince benson Those Royal Marines and saliors that managed to scramble ashore were either executed by the Japanese or in the case of the Royal Marines joined units such as the Argylles and Southern land Highlanders fighting their way through Mayalisa and eventually surrendered when Singapore eventually fell .
I am Bulgarian who lives in Germany and as far as I know my dad was in the army and I greatly care about every war grave even axis once because all they did was follow orders and it breaks my heart seeing one very little piece removed from a war grave. I wish we could Form some sort of Organisation to protect the this Graves that rightfully deserve to be left alone I would probably some day go as far as protesting infront of any governments to protect this things and not let those humanoid devils just come in and ugh I can't write anymore. If any of you meet anyone like that those please do me a favour and kick their balls it would make me feel much better
Honestly...how could they do that to her. Unless its a significant artifact of some sort, I can't see justifying taking anything off of a wreck like this. What a shame. In retrospect, I find it kind of funny that we get so worked up over something as little as her propellers and shafts being scrapped, but at the same time I cant help but think of how She isn't just any kind of ship. She is a warship. She is the culmination of great minds and hard workers who managed to design and build some of the most powerful weapons mankind could make at the time. She was made for a purpose and She, like many other warships, has served that purpose. She served her people and She severed her country. Leave her be. Let her rest. She's earned it.
The torpedo hit....caused a bearing and casings to break.....the propeller shaft wobbled...causing further flooding! The shattered steel. It’s mostly intact from what can see. It’s upside down.
Chinese no doubt. They would sell there mother for money. So many people such little value on life so money becomes security & respect takes second place.
ay mate its off malaysia not china those scrappers couldve come from anywhere lets not get sinophobic really i mean im sure every race has bad and good peeps like how some brits looted the heck out of china back in the days just saying i mean i love these ships and i really hate those grave robbers to but yknow...dont be mean
Sam Dresden etc being flattened....yes what about it...I have been there & Hiroshima it's called war & guess what....the Germans needed to be flattened......all countries do bad things what's that got to do with this video....I know many Chinese I dated Chinese girls I'm going to China in 2 months....I'm not against the race but I'm aware of the facts China has such a pollution smog there but guess what....they don't care because money comes before life...there cars mostly can't be exported to other developed countries because....they don't pass the safety tests...but it's ok in China because...life is less valuable...respect is less it's all about money...this is why I said what I said about this video...because it's true....they would rip up a ship to scrap it without thinking...
ouii8 my point exactly....look at the pollution. & Chinese cars not passing safety tests so there hardly exported....what does that say....I'm going China soon I dated Chinese girls I'm not against people but I'm aware of the value system they put to money & life & history....I was referring to this ship not England's history every country has history I'm talking about respect & value placed on it....nobody sensible would say China has any sort of reputation for civil rights or value of life vs almost any other place except undeveloped countries..like Somalia...or actually any Muslim country actually...I can quote some facts on that if you like..
Billy Lauwda prince of your brain?... That doesn't make sense can you say it in my language...or go to school & learn how to complete sentences like an adult...
You would think in England's police state there wouldn't be any crime. Only goes to show what happens when you disarm the citizens the whole country goes to hell in a hurry.
The English never were "armed." And until recently the "police" never carried firearms. They still have one of the lowest rates of homicide by gun deaths. (Japan is liwest.) You seem to have a need to make everything fit your paranoid ideology.
WTF does that have to do with this video? Look what happens when you ARM the citizens like in the U.S.: A bunch of reich-wing lunatics fuelled by megachurch pastors with delusions running rampant.