During World War II, in 1940, the Dunkirk evacuation occurred, during which the Allies managed to save more than 338 thousand of their soldiers surrounded by German troops in a port in northern France. Then many ships perished - from warships to fishing boats. Today, scientists are trying to find and identify them all in order to get a complete historical picture.
More than 80 years have passed since the British destroyer HMS Keith sank in what Winston Churchill called a "miracle of salvation." The 100-metre-long vessel was among 1,000 military, merchant, fishing and civilian "small craft" that helped rescue 338,226 Allied soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk. It managed to evacuate 992 soldiers to Dover, but upon returning to the shores of France it came under German bombing and sank to the bottom of the English Channel.
Now, almost nine decades later, this World War II warship can be seen again: scientists used sonar to create a 3D model of it lying on the seabed. This was made possible thanks to a project involving Historic England and Drassm, the French Department of Underwater Archaeological Research.
The purpose of the study was to search for unknown shipwrecks associated with the Dunkirk operation (also called Operation Dynamo). During the evacuation, 305 ships and more than 30 thousand military personnel were lost. Scientists were able to discover and study a total of 27 sunken ships. The location of 12 of them was unclear before the start of the study, and four were destroyed or covered with sand, so they could not be found. Experts believe that they may have discovered three more ships related to the evacuation from Dunkirk and previously unknown. "This is so "It's heart-warming to see new details emerge for the first time since Dunkirk in the Second World War about the thirty shipwrecks associated with Operation Dynamo," says Duncan Wilson, chief executive of Historic England. "The findings give us amazing insight into our a common heritage that still lurks beneath the waters off the coast of Dunkirk." The scientists used a multibeam echo sounder as their main instrument.
