Saving Southeast Asia’s Sunken Warships
Shipwrecks are an easily overlooked material legacy of the Second World War, but they are rising to the surface as diplomatic issues.
S ome 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.
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.
