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Wednesday 31 December 2014
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HOME NEWS WORLD NEWS ASIA MALAYSIA

Celebrated British warships being stripped bare for scrap

metal
Scrap dealers scavenge wrecks of British battlecruisers HMS Repulse and HMS Prince
of Wales sunk off the coast of Malaysia in 1941, with damage intensifying in recent
months
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HMS 'Repulse' was deployed to the Far East in the Second World War where she was sunk, together with the battleship HMS
'Prince of Wales' by Japanese air attack off Ceylon in December 1941. Photo: GETTY

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By Julian Ryall, Tokyo and Joel Gunter

12:57PM BST 25 Oct 2014

The dull reverberations of the underwater explosions are clearly audible

from the surface. The scavengers have returned, laying home-made
charges to break up the hulls of two of the most celebrated British
warships of the age, sunk in December 1941 and the last resting places
of more than 830 Royal Navy sailors.
No-one would countenance such desecration on land. But the wrecks of
the HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales, just a few miles off the coast
of Malaysia, are now being stripped bare for their scrap metal.
Recognised war graves, they are disappearing, with the damage
intensifying in recent months, according to those who know the wrecks
and try their best to preserve them.

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"We noticed the wrecks were being salvaged when we dived them in May
2013," Stuart Shaw, who operates from the TechThailand dive company,
told The Telegraph. "They removed the remaining propellors from
Repulse and the four propellors from the Prince of Wales sometime
between September 2012 and May 2013."
Mr Shaw said he had repeatedly chased off scrap metal scavengers from
above the wrecks, but if they continued their work unchecked, Mr Shaw
there would be nothing left of the vessels in as little as a decade.

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Made of phosphor bronze, the massive propellors would have earned a

bumper payday for the scrap metal merchants. The scrap price for
phosphor bronze is around 3,800 per ton, with each of the eight
propellors weighing an estimated 15 tonnes.
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But having stripped the wrecks of those components, the scavengers

have now started to take other ferrous metals, primarily brass and
copper, as well as large chunks of steel, such as the propellor shafts,
and high-grade aluminium.

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"There are no longer any propellors or shafts left on either of the wrecks
and there are now a number of locations on both ships that have been
extensively damaged by the use of explosives," Mr Shaw said.

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In a video taken as recently as May of this year, a propellor shaft is

clearly visible on HMS Repulse, with the White Ensign of the Royal Navy placed by divers as a mark of respect to the dead - floating in the current
in the background. Both have since been removed.
Video footage of the wrecks shows some of the damage - including thick
steel plating peeled outwards under the force of detonations within the
hull. Coffee tins are packed with explosives by scavengers and forced
into cavities in the vessels' hulls.

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"Up until this salvage work began, the wrecks were in fairly good
condition," Mr Shaw said. "But now there is a lot of loose plating and
many areas where all the rivets have been blown out."
While Mr Shaw and the recreational divers who have visited both ships
do not enter the wrecks, it is likely that blasting the bottoms out of the
vessels will expose the remains of their crews. Some 508 officers and
men went down with HMS Repulse, while a further 327 were killed aboard
HMS Prince of Wales, which sank just a few miles away.
The destruction of the vessels - just days after the Japanese attack on
the US base at Pearl Harbor - came as a major blow to the British in the
Far East as they attempted to resist the invasion of Malaya and,
ultimately, the occupation of Singapore and Indonesia.
Identified as Force Z and comprising the modern battleship Prince of
Wales, the battlecruiser Repulse, which had been launched in 1916, and
four destroyers, the flotilla had been dispatched to intercept Japanese
invasion convoys in the South China Sea.
Critically, they put to sea without air cover and the fleet was attacked by
waves of Japanese aircraft on December 10, with eight torpedoes
striking their targets.

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The Prince of Wales and Repulse became the first capital ships to be
sunk solely by air power on the open sea, rewriting the military tactics of
the day.

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HMS Prince of Wales

Both ships turned over as they sank, with Repulse now at a depth of 183
feet and the Prince of Wales in 223 feet of water. The wrecks are still
Crown property and designated as a Protected Place under the
Protection of Military Remains Act 1986.

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The bell of the Prince of Wales was removed in 2002 by a team of Royal
Navy divers because there were fears that it would be stolen. It is now on
display in the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool.
"We have twice turned up at the Repulse at around 7:30 in the morning
to find what looks like a fishing boat moored up, but they don't have
fishing nets on board," Mr Shaw said.
It appears that the crews of the smaller boats are placing charges on
vulnerable parts of the wrecks and, once a sufficient amount of
salvageable metal has been broken off, a larger vessel with a crane
arrives to collect the debris.
"They have always seen us coming and managed to cast off and make a
run for it before we get close enough," he said, adding that he has to
bear in mind the safety of his customers and crew - "And I'm pretty sure
these guys will be armed."
Some men survived the sinking. James Wren, a former Royal Marine,
clung to a piece of flotsam until an escort ship picked him up. He said
that protecting the wrecks was a "a vast job".
"It's very distressing to everyone but there's very little we can do about
it," said Mr Wren, who was 21 when the ship sank in 1941 and is now one
of only a few remaining survivors.
"We could do with more protection out there but you just can't have
someone sitting there 24 hours a day."
Maurice Pink, another Repulse survivor, was just 19 when he was
plucked out of the water by a British destroyer. He is now chairman of the
Force Z Surivivors Association.
"You just can't stop it unless you patrol all the time," said Mr Pink.
"You can turn round and say it's a grave for the people that gave their
lives for the country. It's alright saying that but people aren't interested in
words.
"If they want to dive down and pinch something they are going to. You
can't prevent robbers robbing a bank if there's no one there to stop
them."

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Given the large number of military maritime gravesaround the world, the
Ministry of Defence does indeed have a vast job on its hands. There are
60 wrecks designated under the Protection of Military Remains Act, 12 of
which are 'controlled' - meaning that diving them is strictly prohibited and 58 which have the lesser designation of "protected", including the
Repulse. These sites can be dived under a "look but don't touch" policy.
Short of actively patrolling the wrecks the MoD, which owns them, can
only attempt to prevent the sale of salvaged items.
In May this year, it confiscated a number of parts stolen from the wreck of
the Repulse - including the ship's Morse telephone - from an Auction in
Australia and returned them to the British High Commission.
A spokesman for the MoD said it works closely with foreign governments
and others "with the aim of preventing inappropriate activity on the wreck
of HMS Repulse".
The Malaysian authorities have intervened in the past to stop wrecks
being pillaged, but with hundreds of sunken vessels in thousands of
square miles of the Pacific to monitor, it faces the same problem.
"We are very concerned to hear that the wrecks are being plundered by
scrap metal merchants and I have asked for a plan to be drawn up for a
survey of HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales," Rossid bin Musa,
director of the Marine Department of Malaysia, said.
"Our department cannot carry out patrols as we do not have the vessels,
but I have asked the Coast Guard and the Maritime Enforcement Agency
to provide assistance and to patrol the area," he said.
But any scavengers who are caught are likely to get off with minimal
fines. A charge of violating Malaysian maritime laws and operating
without a permit usually incurs a fine of around GBP19,100, according to
the Malaysian newspaper The Star, while the cost of stealing from a
wreck is just 191.

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