Saving Southeast Asia’s Sunken Warships

Some 2,000 war and merchant ships were sunk in the waters of Southeast Asia during the Second World War, constituting around ten per cent of the estimated 20,000 vessels lost globally during the conflict. Many of these wrecks – American, Dutch, British, Australian and Japanese – are still there, lying in the territorial waters of what is now Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Timor-Leste.

Eighty years on from the end of the war, many of its battlegrounds and graves have become solemn sites of national remembrance. This is not the case for the sunken warships of Southeast Asia. Today they constitute some of the most challenging heritage sites in the world: politically sensitive, environmentally unstable and long neglected due to the complexities of managing sovereign craft, unexploded ordnance, leaking oil and human remains in foreign waters. It has been all too easy for both flag and coastal states to simply ignore these wrecks. Quietly corroding on the seabed, the vessels are out of sight and out of mind; a problem that was simply too complicated to address in the immediate postwar period.

Deep water

Rather than simply going away, however, the question of how to manage these wrecks has only become more urgent with each passing decade. This is partly due to technological developments that allow access to deeper waters for longer periods of time. Wrecks at depths once considered inaccessible are now within striking distance of divers and underwater robots. Such technologies recently enabled Australian researchers to locate the Montevideo Maru, a Japanese passenger vessel sunk in July 1942, at a depth of 4,000 metres – deeper than RMS Titanic – off the coast of the Philippines. The ship was carrying around 1,060 prisoners of war, more than 850 of whom were Australians, when it was torpedoed en route to Hainan island by a US submarine. The Montevideo Maru was not marked as carrying POWs and its sinking made it Australia’s largest loss of life at sea.

One issue that complicates such ventures, however, is the fact that Southeast Asian waters are not what they once were. Their importance, geopolitically and commercially, has grown exponentially in the postwar years, with consequences for the protection of maritime heritage. Coastal developments, the installation of seabed infrastructure such as pipes and cables, the clearance of strategic shipping lanes and the expansion of extractive industries including fishing, oil and gas all threaten heritage preservation, which is often deprioritised by maritime states. In Indonesia’s Banten Bay, for example, researchers have studied the deleterious impact of entangled fishing nets and marine litter on the wrecks of HMAS Perth (I) and USS Houston, both destroyed by Japanese torpedo fire in early 1942 with the loss of more than 1,000 men.

Metal pirates

Far more devastating than any commercial or strategic activities, however, has been the salvaging of Second World War wrecks, which has grown from opportunistic looting in the 1960s to industrial-level salvaging in recent years.

The fate of HMAS Perth (I) – and to a lesser degree USS Houston – embodies the increasing scale of these profit-motivated activities. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Perth was targeted by so-called ‘metal pirates’: salvagers working for retired Indonesian military officer Major General R. Soehadi, president and director of Indonesian salvage company Senabrata Putra. With limited equipment and experience, the salvagers focused on recovering high-value objects such as the ship’s bronze propellers and its two bells, a working bell and a ceremonial bell.

Around the same time, and in response to media reports about the activities of such ‘metal pirates’, Australian diver David Burchell undertook a solo expedition to Indonesia to locate the Perth wreck, hoping to recover the two bells and return them to Australia. In 1967, with the help of local fishermen, Burchell successfully located Perth. However, he was unable to find either of the bells. Instead, over 30 dives he brought 24 other objects to the surface.

By 1974 the fate of the working bell had become clear. It had been recovered by an Indonesian diver known as ‘Harry’, who worked for Senabrata Putra. Aware of its symbolic resonance for Australia, representatives from the salvage company presented it to the Australian Embassy in Jakarta at a small ceremony – in exchange for an aluminium diving boat worth around AUD$3,000. The working bell is now displayed at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, alongside a selection of other objects recovered by Burchell.

The whereabouts of the much larger ceremonial bell, meanwhile, remained unknown until the mid-1980s, when it was offered for sale to the Royal Australian Navy and the Australian War Memorial. Both declined, but did not rule out accepting it as a gift. Behind the offer, and keen for financial compensation, was Australian salvager David Barnett, who had sub-contracted his services to Soehadi in the 1960s. Aware that one of the two bells had not been recovered, Barnett had offered ten million Indonesian Rupiah to any diver who could find the second bell and deliver it directly to him, rather than Soehadi. The incentive had the desired effect and the bell was soon located by an Indonesian diver. Barnett oversaw its repatriation to Australia and eventual sale to the City of Perth, where it is displayed in the town hall.

A similar fate befell the bells of USS Houston, salvaged by the same company active on Perth. In August 1973 Soehadi presented the bell ‘on behalf of the Indonesian people’ to the American ambassador Francis J. Galbraith, who accepted it ‘on behalf of the American people’. Again, Soehadi was given a large quantity of diving gear in exchange. The second bell, meanwhile, appears to have been removed from the ship before Houston’s sinking and to have – somehow – come into the possession of the Philippines government. This bell was presented to President Lyndon B. Johnson by his Filipino counterpart, Ferdinand Marcos, at the Manila Summit Conference in October 1966. Today, both bells are in Houston, Texas.

Missing in action

Over the years, the scale of such salvaging activities has only increased. A 2017 survey by Indonesian and Australian archaeologists ascertained that more than 60 per cent of Perth had been indiscriminately detonated and removed by a claw barge. In 2018 Indonesia introduced a protected zone around the wreck, which protects fish and other marine life while also serving as a proxy for the protection of (what remains of) the vessel itself. Similar protection for Houston is yet to be enacted.

It is the mistreatment of human remains, however, that has proved to be the most sensitive issue surrounding the wrecks’ fates. Such desecration is a clear violation of the sentiments embodied in the ‘Naval Ode’ often attributed to the English poet Laurence Binyon – that sailors lost at sea are already in their final resting place, their grave ‘the cruel sea’, their tombstone ‘a rusting hulk’. Despite the presence of human remains, however, sunken warships are not, strictly speaking, official war graves. This is because they do not comply with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s definition of a war grave which must, among other criteria, have a tombstone. As such, human remains on Second World War wrecks have been largely overlooked among efforts to repatriate, or legally protect, those killed in foreign territories.

Illicit salvaging has also caused diplomatic problems. In 2016 a team of international divers set out to locate and identify the wrecks of Dutch warships lost during the Battle of the Java Sea before the 75th commemoration ceremony planned for February 2017. Instead of finding the wrecks, however, all the divers found was empty seabed. At least two of the ships – Hr.Ms De Ruyter and Hr.Ms. Java – had completely disappeared and a third, Hr.Ms. Kortenaer, had partially disappeared. Following a meeting between Indonesian president Joko Widodo and Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, the two countries agreed to work together to determine what had happened and to preserve similar wrecks for the future. A three-track cooperation agreement was developed, focused on verifying the disappearance, establishing what had happened and agreeing to future co-operation on the management of remaining maritime heritage.

The disappearance, determined to be caused by illegal salvaging operations, also led to concern among other flag states including Australia and the US, who feared for the fate of their own vessels. At the heart of these tensions was the question of who is responsible for protecting and preserving the wrecks: the flag states, who retain sovereign rights over the vessels, or the coastal states in whose waters they have lain for decades? The answer to this question is deceptively simple but has proven notoriously difficult to implement: both parties must work together.

Surfacing

As the wrecks continue to deteriorate, other issues rise to the surface. Leaking oil is a particularly pressing concern, as is the presence of unexploded ordnance. In the Pacific, organisations such as the Major Projects Foundation are working with regional governments to identify the most ‘at risk’ wrecks. Their aims include raising awareness of the consequences of a major oil leak for local waters in places such as the Federated States of Micronesia, Solomon Islands, Marshall Islands and Papua New Guinea. No such efforts have been made in Southeast Asia, despite the region’s reliance on fishing.

Compared, say, to the wartime sites of Western Europe, the sunken warships of Southeast Asia are easily overlooked in the legacy landscape of the Second World War. But these wrecks are – and will continue to be – sites of enormous historical, emotional and, increasingly, diplomatic consequence. 
 

Natali Pearson is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney.