Mystery over World War II ship torpedoed by Nazi Germany finally solved
A World War II ship torpedoed by Adolf Hitler has been discovered along the coast of Rio De Janeiro using sonar imaging.
More than 100 soldiers were killed when a German submarine U-861 sank Brazil’s ‘Vital de Oliveira’ in 1942, becoming the country’s only vessel to be destroyed by enemy forces.
This piece of history was believed to have been lost forever despite efforts to obtain the exact location of the wreckage.
That is until brothers, Jose Luíz and Everaldo Popermeyer Meriguete, got a strange call by a fisherman.
It was all by chance. The pair were trying to assist the man whose net had become stuck at the bottom of the ocean.
Unable to solve the issue themselves, they Jose and Everaldo drafted their friend, deep-sea diver, Domingos Afonso Jório, who eventually found that the net was entangled in a cannon.
They informed Brazil’s Navy upon the discovery in 2011, but heard nothing about the ship.
Authorities finally confirmed that the wreckage of the ‘Vital de Oliveira’ has been traced using sonar imaging.
A multibeam echo sounder and side scan sonar were deployed to map the ocean floor and create three-dimensional models.
The discovery of the hull of the sunken ship took place on the morning of January 16, about 50 miles off the coast of Macaé, and was aided by local divers.
‘Vital de Oliveira’ was built in 1910 and incorporated into the Brazilian Navy in 1931.
It remained active until it was attacked on the night of July 19, 1944, by the German Navy, becoming the only Brazilian military ship to be sunk during World War II.
Its role in the war was mainly in transporting military personnel and also supplies along the Brazilian coast.
Similarly to this ship, there are more than 500 World War II-era wrecks off the coast of Brazil.
Similar sonar technology is being used more and more to identify such vessels.
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