Drain the Oceans MEGA Episode | Secrets, Lost Giants, & Pearl Harbor | National Geographic

NARRATOR: The Black Sea. Home to lost tales of ancient mariners that only now are coming into full view. DR DAVIS: It's like finding a dinosaur with feathers. That's how rare it was. NARRATOR: What can a surprising shipwreck reveal about the men who ruled these waters for a thousand years? DR BRENNAN: These ships were feeding and maintaining a whole empire. DR DAVIS: And it helps turn the empire into one of the greatest ever known. NARRATOR: How does a glint of precious metal reveal a battle to decide the fate of two empires? DR DAL: This event changed naval warfare all around the world. NARRATOR: And what does a lost U-boat say about Hitler's plans to build his own empire here? Three mysteries. Three expeditions. One sea of secrets. DR DAVIS: The Black Sea is filled with mystery. There's always been warfare, strife and battles taking place on or near the Black Sea, contesting for that territory. There are so many connections to be made, but there's so little evidence to go from. NARRATOR: Between Europe and Asia six countries crowd around the shores of the Black Sea with just one small outlet connecting it to the world's oceans. The vessels that plied these waters over a thousand years ago have long been a mystery. Historians have only a handful of descriptions in ancient text. Finding an actual shipwreck could change everything. DR DAVIS: In 2007 I received an invitation to come and take part in an expedition to the Black Sea. And this was very exciting. DR BRENNAN: It's really been kind of unexplored. And so only a handful of expeditions have really done surveys looking for shipwrecks in these waters. The Black Sea's right in my first-year expeditions and so it's where I started to learn the process of how we locate ancient shipwrecks. NARRATOR: Archaeologists have long suspected the Black Sea could be hiding a treasure trove of wrecks because of the unusual properties of its water. DR DAVIS: Well the Black Sea chemistry is unique because from about 600 ft all the way down to the very bottom of the Black Sea there is literally no oxygen in the water, in the so called Anoxic layer. Everywhere else shipwrecks are not preserved, mostly because of a very nasty little sea worm. They eat everything. Meaning ships, rope, all of the stuff that you would find on an ancient wooden ship, usually gone everywhere else except the Black Sea. NARRATOR: No-one had ever searched for shipwrecks in the deepest layers of the Black Sea until 2000. DR DAVIS: The explorer Robert Ballard set out to explore the bottom of the Black Sea, like it had never been done before. DR BRENNAN: Dr. Ballard is the world-renowned ocean explorer who found Titanic in 1985. On his very first expedition to the Black Sea no-one was ready for what he would find. Ballard's expedition found shipwrecks near a town called Sinop. DR DAVIS: They found three Sinop shipwrecks right off the bat, A, B and C. They were in an area of the Black Sea that only partially preserved shipwrecks. And it was only, like all archaeological excavations are, on the last day at the last minute that they decided to look in deeper Anoxic waters and that's when they found Sinop D. The team on the ship must have been quite confused. They were looking at multiple vertical timbers sticking out of the mud, one of them quite large. And all of a sudden, the realization must have dawned on them this is an ancient shipwreck. They saw structural features that had never before been seen intact on an ancient vessel. Only in illustrations. Prior to this shipwreck no other ships had been found in the Anoxic layer perfectly preserved. This meant that archaeologists, for the first time, could look at a shipwreck in its full dimensionality and now there's nothing we have to guess at. Sinop D was an unprecedented find. It's like finding a dinosaur with feathers, that's how rare it was. But in 2000 all the team could do was look at what they were seeing on the seabed. They didn't know the date of the ship. It could have been an ancient Greek ship. It could have been Roman. It could have built 200 years ago. They just didn't know. There was an obsession to go back. DR BRENNAN: How old was the ship? Where was it sailing to? Where was it coming from? A lot of these things were still a mystery. NARRATOR: When Dan and Mike join the 2007 expedition, they hope that new technology will bring new answers. DR BRENNAN: The 2007 expedition was specifically designed for us to spend a week really investigating this wreck in depth. In these waters that we're exploring it's way too deep for scuba divers, so we need to use remotely operated vehicles to get down to those depths and get good, high quality video of these sites. DR DAVIS: We had a workhorse, state of the art, remotely operated vehicle named Hercules that could help us explore the wreck in multiple ways and take high definition video of the entire operation. So, I remember this view approaching Sinop D for the first time in 2007 and just being blown away. DR BRENNAN: And here you have it, the well-preserved wooden shipwreck, the mast still standing. DR DAVIS: But the only one we have. They're very rare. DR BRENNAN: And you've got a piece of rope still wrapped around the top which is unheard of. DR DAVIS: I saw the mast for the first time and it was a magic moment for me. It was emotional. NARRATOR: Hercules allows the team to measure every inch of what's left on the sea floor. Before they can figure out the ship's purpose, they'll need to analyses the wreck's size, shape and design. DR DAVIS: What we find is a 45-long ship. A single mast that probably carried a square sail. There's no evidence of decking in the middle of the wreck, so we can assume it's a cargo hold. And lucky for us there's cargo still on board. Typically, when we stumble upon an ancient shipwreck the first clue, we look for is the cargo. Usually these clay jars called amphoras. Amphoras carried everything. They carried olive oil, they carried fish sauce, they carried wine. diagnostic amphoras that can help us put a date on the wreck and tell how old it is. DR DAVIS: Recovering an artefact from a shipwreck is not a simple process. They use a little sucker that the ROV put on the amphora to pick it up without damaging it. So, they would move it over to a net. Once we have artefacts in these nets, we get it on board as carefully as possible. Watching the ROV pilots handle these artefacts and put them carefully into these baskets and then send them up to the surface is really nerve-racking because we don't want them damaged. NARRATOR: The hope is that a close study of the clay jars will establish the age of the shipwreck. DR MARANZANA: An amphora holds a lot of information about the ancient world. Amphoras can be dated quite precisely because they're everywhere and they are very well studied. So, the amphoras can be dated through their physical characteristics. Normally the handles and the neck, but also what we call the foot, which is the bottom part. People can compare the new find with the already studied one and establish a quite precise date. So, for Sinop they are fairly small. They are mostly carrot shape and some of them have grooves that go around the entire body of the amphora. And so those are quite distinctive characteristics that a give a clear idea of the date when Sinop D was sailing on the Black Sea. DR BRENNAN: The amphora that we documented were dated to the 5th and 6th centuries AD. We had never before had a shipwreck that is 1500 years old in its entirety, preserved on the seabed. NARRATOR: The dates mean Sinop D is sailing at the tail end of the Roman Empire. What can it reveal about a new power that's rising to take its place? DR DAVIS: Now that we knew what the date of the ship was it was exciting because Sinop D dates to this pivotal moment in world history. NARRATOR: By the 5th Century the once mighty Roman Empire is crumbling, except in the east which breaks away to create the Byzantine Empire. It's capital no longer Rome but the great city of Constantinople, modern day Istanbul. DR MARANZANA: The choice of Constantinople as the capital is mostly because of its strategic position. It was located in-between the two continents, Asia and Europe. It was by the sea so it could easily transport goods and troops. And so, Constantinople at the time of the Byzantine Empire became the largest city in the world and the most wealthy. NARRATOR: Constantinople's wealth depends on Black Sea ports like Sinop. And Sinop D may have played a pivotal role in Byzantine history. DR DAVIS: Now we had some fundamental questions that we needed answers for. Among them how does this ship connect to the history of the Byzantine Empire itself? How did it contribute to the growth of the empire? NARRATOR: One way to answer those questions is to investigate the ship itself. DR DAVIS: The wreck was so enticing, but the ship is so deeply buried in sediment it was giving up its mysteries with such great difficulty. We knew that we would have to start excavating the shipwreck. With Hercules now we had the capability of removing silt in large volumes. And exposing more of its timbers. Oh yes! All the mud. Look at this Black Sea mud. DR BRENNAN: Yeah. It's really sticky and almost like Jell-O the way it moves. DR DAVIS: I remember just thinking, "What a strange seabed." Never seen anything like that before. Removing the silt was a painstaking process. The upper layers very easy to remove, but as we dug deeper into the mud the more thick the mud became and at that point our work slowed way down. We managed to explore a little bit of some of the planking but we were not able to dig as deep as we wanted to unfortunately. We did not find anything that would give away how the ship was constructed. It was a disappointment. NARRATOR: The Black Sea's stubborn mud dashes the expedition's hopes. The secrets of Sinop D remain unknown. Then comes news of a stunning archaeological find. One that reignites the stalled investigation into Sinop D. DR BRENNAN: Since the discovery of Sinop D in 2000, what have we learned about ship building? DR DAVIS: We've been really fortunate to find this graveyard of shipwrecks in modern day Istanbul, ancient Constantinople. The old harbour that served the city was buried in silt over the centuries and as they were clearing it out to build a subway, they found 37 ancient shipwrecks. Lucky for us the discoveries in this harbour called Yenikapi all date to the Byzantine period. And what you see at Yenikapi is an evolution of Black Sea shipbuilding techniques. Sinop D is right there in the 5th and 6th Century which is about the midpoint between those 37 wrecks that were found. Yenikapi provides all the evidence for the lower part of the ships because their upper works were not preserved. Sinop D provides almost a perfectly preserved example of the top to the middle. DR BRENNAN: Yeah. DR DAVIS: So now we can bring those two together and get a full comprehensive picture for the first time. There was this earlier tradition in which shipwrights lock planks together edge to edge and then they peg them together so that they can't slide and they can't come apart. And then inserted the skeleton to help stiffen the hull. And then there's this later tradition, it switched completely. It's where you build the frames or the ribs of the ship first. And then you plank it all around it to create the shell. Edge joinery is still being used, but it's not on the elaborate scale that we had in the earlier tradition. So, the result is cheaper, faster ship construction. Fewer people needed in the shipyard. Fewer trained people. Fewer skilled people. probably less wood too. DR DAVIS: Less wood. Cheaper. Faster. DR DAVIS: Because of the dates suggested by those amphoras we now know that Sinop D fits within this transition between those two ship construction techniques. So now we could piece together all this evidence to finally see what's under the mud and tell the full story of Sinop D's life. Sinop D is a cargo vessel. A merchant ships. Filled with amphoras. It was likely trading between the very prosperous port city of Sinop and the capital city itself, Constantinople. It might have even been heading to the same harbour where that earlier graveyard of shipwrecks was found at Yenikapi. NARRATOR: The ability to construct ships faster and cheaper is a game changer for the Byzantine Empire. And the secret can be seen in the Sinop D wreck. DR DAVIS: With this cheaper way of building ships, a middle class emerges who's able to buy the ship, captain the ship, act as the merchant and actually create their own wealth. So, in this sense the Sinop D shipwreck is a wealth creator. It's a type of economic engine for the middle class. DR BRENNAN: I don't think it's a coincidence that a new type of shipbuilding starts to arise at the same time that the Byzantine Empire begins to flourish. These trading ships, like Sinop D, were feeding and And this is the beginning of a long period of lucrative trading. DR DAVIS: This was one of many ships that helped generate the extreme wealth of the empire. And it helped turn the empire into one of the greatest ever known. NARRATOR: Sinop continues to be a key port along the Black Sea long after the fall of the Byzantines. And its waters conceal other secrets. RASIM: I have lived in Sinop all my life. And being underwater is my passion. The Black Sea is as its name suggests a black, dark sea. In other seas you see a dark shade of blue but this blackness of the Black Sea is one worth seeing. The darkness really fascinates me. NARRATOR: Yasar Tarakci has been finding relics in Sinop harbour ever since he started diving as a boy. He's found ancient Roman and Byzantine artefacts and even old canons. But one discovery proves to be the find of a lifetime. RASIM: In the early 1980s, because I was a professional diver, I was called by a local fisherman to rescue some snagged nets. During the dive I couldn't see anything because of the mud. But using our hands we realized the nets were covering an old ship. NARRATOR: The curious wreck consumes Yasar for 40 years. What is this ship and how did it end up on the sea floor? RASIM: I dived the wreck several times and could see it was made of wood. I knew I wasn't looking at a modern ship. It was well preserved and in shallow water. That meant it couldn't be ancient. That left open the possibility that this wreck could be something from the time of the Ottoman Empire. NARRATOR: During the 1300s the Ottomans wrest control of the Black Sea from the Byzantines and here they build an empire that lasts for six centuries, creating one of the largest and most feared navies in the world. However, there's almost no archaeological evidence of it. DR DAL: There should be many shipwrecks in Yenikapi but we don't have an Ottoman's war ship. We know so many things about the ship building activities and traditions and complex in Ottoman Empire, but we don't have an evidence to show people that, yes, we got the correct information or no, the information was not correct. That's why shipwrecks are so important for very Ottoman naval historian. NARRATOR: One reason the empire's warships are missing today has to do with an Ottoman tradition of dismantling and recycling old vessels. Yasar's find is a big surprise. He believes it's Ottoman, but is it? NARRATOR: Dilara comes to Sinop to meet Yasar. And to investigate the shipwreck he's spent decades deciphering. RASIM: Here you can see the frames of the ship. They are made from oak. The beam is still stable in its original position. And you can see copper on the hull. Because the hull is surrounded by copper and rot proof oak it remained intact over time. DR DAL: He said that the ship is covered by copper which is really, really important for me. Why? Because this confirms the wreck is from the time of the Ottoman Empire. NARRATOR: Ottoman warships relied on copper sheathing, an innovation to protect wooden hulls, until the middle of the 19th century. DR DAL: And now we have a pivotal evidence. It really gives a lot of richness to Ottoman naval history. NARRATOR: It's now clear that this is a rare Ottoman warship. So now Yasar wants to work out its name. Given its location he thinks it may be a leftover from one of the most famous battles ever to take place in the Black Sea. RASIM: I learned about the Battle of Sinop from the oldest diver in Sinop when I was about 15 or 16. He told me about a shocking attack on Ottoman ships anchored in the harbour here. It killed nearly 3,000 people. NARRATOR: The Ottoman's face a rival power, the Russian Empire. And on November 30th, 1853, in a bid for Black Sea supremacy the Russian navy smashes an Ottoman fleet here in Sinop. The date tallies with the age of Yasar's find. RASIM: To figure out the identity of the wreck I turned to historical sources created at the time of the battle. These sources included pictures and a very important chart made by the Russians. This Russian chart details the location of each ship they destroyed. NARRATOR: Russian sources suggest the attack on Sinop harbour destroys 15 Ottoman vessels. RASIM: On the Russian battle chart, I found one record that explained the location of the wreck I found. This is evidence it was a victim of the battle. What's unexpected is that the wreck is outside the harbour and not in line with most of the other ships that went down that day. NARRATOR: Yasar examines a memoir written by a survivor of the attack. It helps explain the information on the Russian battle chart. Russian guns had crippled a vessel named the Nesim-I-Zafer leaving it afloat but helpless. The story of Yasar's find now comes into focus. Because the Nesim-i-Zafer sank outside the harbour the Ottomans never tried to salvage it, and the wreck remains untouched for more that 130 years. RASIM: We found the Nesim-i-Zafer thanks to fishermen's nets that landed on it. We couldn't have found it otherwise since it was 120 ft underwater. Sea keeps a tight grip on its secrets. But 300 miles west of Sinop a 14-year-long quest casts light on a secret Nazi plan for world domination. SELCUK: People come to me to ask for my help to find shipwrecks or identify them. I love the challenge of finding a wreck that's been lost to time, revealing something new about our history. One of my most challenging missions was back in 2006. I was asked to help find a World War II German submarine, the U-23. Incredibly the person who contacted me was the Commander himself, Rudolph Arendt, who was 83 years old. I found this very interesting. One of the most fascinating stories of the submarine warfare. I was lucky that I had the first-hand account of the whole story of U-23 from the horse's mouth. I was determined to find his U-boat and discover exactly what happened to it. NARRATOR: Rudolph Arendt takes Selcuk to the U-23's last known location. He remembers that the sub sank off the Black Sea coast of Agva, 60 miles east of Istanbul. Rudolph came to the Black Sea as part of Hitler's desperate war with the Soviet Union. By 1944 Germany is losing to the allies. To stop U-boats from falling into enemy hands Hitler's admirals issue a dramatic order, telling Commanders like Rudolph to sink their own vessels. At the time he is only 21. Rudolph's memories provide Selcuk with crucial evidence. SELCUK: When Rudolph Arendt got the order to scuttle his boat, he found a suitable bay and left 25 of his people there. He had told me that after dropping his crew he took out the submarine north, placed explosives then got onto a small inflatable raft and rowed back to his people. NARRATOR: The problem is Rudolph doesn't remember exactly where he scuttled his U-boat. But he does have one invaluable memento. SELCUK: I was lucky that Rudolph Arendt had made a very nice sketch of the bay seen from his submarine when he was dropping his crew. We went from bay to bay and eventually found one matching the sketch. If this was the landing point then we now needed to head north in the same direction Rudolph sailed the U-23 before scuttling it. NARRATOR: Selçuk looks for the submarine with a side-scan sonar capable of mapping large areas of the seabed. SELCUK: We searched all this area north of this bay. But we couldn't find anything. We couldn't find a wreck. NARRATOR: The 2006 survey ends with the final resting place of Rudolph's U-boat still a mystery. SELCUK: But I assured him that I would be carrying on with the search after he went back home. After 2006 I was there several times, but I never found anything. Years later I applied to the navy to look for it with their much more sophisticated sonars and in 2019 they called me to say that they had found something with their multi-beam sonar in that area where they have been looking for the U-23 NARRATOR: The anomaly found by the Turkish navy's survey is a huge break in the now nearly 14-year-long hunt for U-23. And ROV descends into the Black Sea for a closer look. Could this finally be Rudolph's missing U-boat? SELCUK: The wreck has a list of 90, so it's practically lying on her starboard side. The two periscopes. And then three torpedo tubes at the bow. This is a very distinctive shape. Definitely a submarine and no other submarine in history was ever lost in that area. There's no doubt, through the dimensions this is the U-23. NARRATOR: Selçuk concludes the wreck is a class of U-boat called a Type 2B. A smaller model than typical Nazi U-boats, they offered a solution to a major obstacle of the Black Sea attack plan. REPORTER: Throughout World War II Turkey, protecting her neutrality, cut off all passage of warships to and from the Black Sea. NARRATOR: Because they can't sail in Hitler orders that six of the smaller type U-boats be dismantled and transported overland from Germany 2,000 miles via road and river to the Black Sea. None of the six U-boats, however, will ever make it back home. Questions now turn to what state the U-23 is in 75 years after it went down. Selcuk shares the news with Rudolph, who's now 96 years old. Despite setting three charges Rudolph only recalls seeing one explosion. Selcuk plans to dive the length of the wreck, looking for clues to confirm which of the three explosive charges sank the submarine. SELCUK: We will swim all along the submarine and then I would like to find where Rudolph Arendt told me he had put the explosives. NARRATOR: There's no outward sign of damage on the front of the sub, or near the periscope. As Selcuk moves toward the stern. SELCUK: There's an opening of about 2 ft x 2 ft with the skin sheets burned out. This confirms to me that this is the only explosion out of the three that succeeded in sinking the U-23. Having researched this ship for more than 14 years it meant a lot to me when I saw the wreck and that it was the U-23. It was an emotional moment for me. Of course, this all will mean a lot more to Rudolph than it means to all of us. Sea has only just begun to give up its secrets. many more lay hidden on its inky waters waiting to be discovered. NARRATOR: Today our oceans are ruled by a race of giants. Megaships. Up to a third of a mile long. SCOTT: It's just absolutely gigantic. NARRATOR: But when leviathans die. CHRISTOPH: What destroyed this huge giant? NARRATOR: They take their secrets to the deep. Lost inside the most awe-inspiring shipwrecks on the planet. Imagine if we could empty the oceans, letting the water drain away to reveal the secrets of the sea floor. Now we can. Using accurate data and astonishing technology to bring light once again to a lost world. Why did Britannic, sister ship to the Titanic, plunge to the bottom of the seas? How did one simple mistake send a super-tanker to her death? CHRISTOPH: It was the worst oil spill in history. NARRATOR: And can a ghostly voice help solve a deadly megaship mystery? (theme music plays). NARRATOR: Few of us see it. But we all depend upon it. A vast global network of Megaships. LARRIE: Ocean shipping is the lifeblood of the world economy today. Over 90% of world trade is carried on the water. NARRATOR: Over the last 40 years, carrying capacity has tripled, to almost 2 billion tons. Ship builders are locked into a race. Bigger ships mean cheaper transport costs, and lower prices for consumers. JAMES: In ship building there's always been this desire to build bigger, and the ships of today are giants of the sea. NARRATOR: A century ago, ocean giants don't carry cargo. They carry passengers. It's the golden age of the ocean liner. And the biggest of them all is the Titanic. When she tragically sinks in 1912, improvements are made to her sister ship, the Britannic, launched just two years later. She's the same length as Titanic, but 18 inches wider. However, before Britannic can carry a single paying passenger, World War I begins. And she is turned into a vast, floating hospital. 882 feet long. Weighing 53,000 tons, and with enough beds for 3,300 patients. After five successful voyages, she sets out for the battlefields of the eastern Mediterranean. Steaming towards the British naval base at Mudros, traveling in the Kea channel. It's a clear day, with no enemy in sight. But shortly after 8am... she sinks in just under an hour. 30 people die, but over 1,000 are rescued. The contradictory stories of the survivors begin a century of controversy. JAMES: When Britannic was lost the key questions were, had it been torpedoed? Or had it been sunk by mines? NARRATOR: A mine is a tragic accident of war. A torpedo, aimed at a clearly marked hospital ship, is a war crime. SIMON: There was always a mystery about what really happened to the Britannic. NARRATOR: Historian, Simon Mills believes hard evidence may lie in the waters, off Kea Island, in Greece 400 feet down. SIMON: It really was a case of finding out what the weapon was. Trying to find physical evidence on the seabed of what actually sank the Britannic. SCOTT: It's a deep dive, it's a tough dive, but really excited about getting in the water. NARRATOR: Below the surface: a lost world, and a wreck of startling proportions. SCOTT: And as you look up you have this, this beautiful deep blue that silhouettes the whole wreck. It takes your breath away it really does. NARRATOR: Divers only ever see a small fraction of this lost giant. SIMON: It's absolutely massive. She's the largest liner on the seabed and as a result um, when you're diving on her you just cannot see everything. NARRATOR: But now, we can drain away the Mediterranean and see Britannic in full. First, the bridge. Then, the bow, lying on its side. And almost 1,000 feet away: three massive propellers, each as big as a house, and all still in position. The largest ship of her age, bigger than any cathedral. SCOTT: It's just on a different scale. It, it's just NARRATOR: Gigantic and SIMON: You can compare it to the Titanic, which is broken in half, twisted, mangled and, uh, in a terrible condition really. Whereas Britannic you'll actually find that everything is practically as it was on the day she sank. OWEN: Outstanding, absolutely outstanding! NARRATOR: So what really sank her? Looking for leads, Simon turns to newspaper reports. SIMON: She was very, very big headlines for several weeks after. The Germans allegedly had torpedoed an innocent British hospital ship. NARRATOR: Two eyewitness accounts speak of a deliberate attack, with torpedo tracks spotted in the water moments before the explosion. In 1916, attacking a hospital ship runs against all accepted rules of war. So is this really the site of a war crime? The drained wreck site reveals evidence no diver could ever see. Face down on the ocean floor, a deformed section of the ship's hull, probably 40 feet long and eight feet wide, where steel plates are bent inwards. Clear evidence of a devastating explosion on the outside of the ship. What weapon could create this type of blast damage? Simon is determined to hunt down physical evidence. Using a submersible, he scours the seafloor: focusing on a spot half a mile from the wreck site, the area where the explosion was reported. For hours, he sees nothing except sand and rocks. No sign of torpedo parts or fragments. But the drained landscape does reveal something. It's heavily encrusted but identifiable as a small piece of metal three feet across. SIMON: It looks like a cracked eggshell. NARRATOR: The object is exactly the shape and size of the casing of an E-type sea-mine: A standard German device from World War I, and it's lying close to the spot where the explosion was reported over 100 years ago. SIMON: When you see finally see it there in front of your own eyes you think yea, fabulous, we've done it. Now we finally have the physical evidence. NARRATOR: The mine fragments end a century of controversy. It's irrefutable evidence that eye-witnesses were confused and that Britannic was not deliberately targeted by a German submarine. In fact, some reports of a torpedo turn out to be nothing more than wartime propaganda. SIMON: No U-boats were reported to be active in this area on the day that the Britannic was sank. To be absolutely categoric, she was sunk by a mine. NARRATOR: With the key evidence from the drained wreck it is now possible to reconstruct Britannic's final, fatal moments. She steams through the Kea Channel. On her way to pick up thousands of injured soldiers. She strikes the mine probably laid three weeks earlier by a German U-boat. SIMON: There's a huge massive bang, the ship shook literally for about 30 seconds. NARRATOR: The explosion smashes in the starboard side, water floods into a boiler room. JAMES: With so much of the hull opened to the ocean, Britannic was doomed. NARRATOR: The damage is far more extensive than that which sank the Titanic and Britannic is quickly overwhelmed. Another boiler room floods. And another, until the massive ship reaches its buoyancy limit, sealing its fate. It takes just 55 minutes from explosion to sinking. The rapid loss of Britannic, and the Titanic before her, alarms the world's ship designers. For the first time international shipping standards come into force. LARRIE: It did spur the international community into action. NARRATOR: The new laws are intended to make all ships harder to sink. And that's never been more important. In the decades after Britannic, the era of transatlantic air travel dawns, and the number of ocean liners declines. But the number of giant ships doesn't fall. There are new cargoes. One above all: Oil. The world's appetite for Arabia's black gold is insatiable. Moving it from the Gulf to Europe, America and Asia is a lucrative business and requires a new kind of ship: the supertanker. Up to a quarter of a mile in length, these leviathans can carry nearly half a million tons of crude. It's vital they're built to be safer than any previous cargo ship. But are they? NARRATOR: The 1,100 feet long oil supertanker, Amoco Cadiz, is in the English Channel, loaded with 1.6 million barrels of crude oil. The colossal ship is traveling from the Persian Gulf to Rotterdam when off the coast of Brittany, France, she hits heavy seas, and sinks. Spilling her entire load across the coast of north western France. JAMES: Amico Cadiz is the world's first great super tanker shipwreck disaster. What makes it important is it's not loss of human life it's the amount of oil on a coastline. The images of oil-covered birds flashed around the planet. NARRATOR: The clean-up alone costs the oil company $200 million. But how did an almost new supertanker simply break apart? Two miles off the coast of Brittany an expedition is underway. Led by diver Christoph Gerigk. CHRISTOPH: We are here to investigate the wreck. We are trying to work out what happened. NARRATOR: While Christoph searches underwater, a survey team scans the seabed with side-scan sonar, for the very first time. KYLE: The Amoco Cadiz is a really big ship, it's never been scanned before, so we're gonna be the first people to actually see it. We can just keep going straight. NARRATOR: After an hour they get a hit, and it's a big one. KYLE: Right here, that's the wreck right there, that's the stern. CREW MAN: It's huge! That is really huge. It's massive. KYLE: It is a big ship. CREW MAN: It's amazing, that's amazing. NARRATOR: The sonar data offers a tantalizing top-down image of a large section of the hull. Using the scan as a guide Christoph's team focuses on an area 115 feet down. CHRISTOPH: It's an exciting experience to dive the Amoco because it's just so huge. It is a big wreck, it's maybe the biggest wreck in the world. You feel really small compared to it. Inside the tanker is like in a big cave. You never know where it ends. NARRATOR: Underwater footage offers glimpses of this giant. Now we can do better. And slowly a lost behemoth, emerges into daylight. First, the stern. 220 feet long by 160 feet wide. Then, one of the five massive oil tanks. Finally, the bow, disappearing into the sand. CHRISTOPH: It's a landscape of destruction and violence. The wreck is completely ripped apart, like this. NARRATOR: So how was such a huge ship torn to shreds? The drained wreck provides a key piece of evidence. In one of her compartments: what appears to be a hairline crack and there's more. All across the hull, larger sections, cracked open. A closer look reveals why, a metal skin only an inch and a half thick, a skin that once encased over 200,000 tons of oil. CHRISTOPH: To me it's very surprising that such a big ship has such a thin hull. NARRATOR: The Amoco Cadiz may be nearly as big as the Empire State Building, but her hull is paper thin. CHRISTOPH: It's a crack which destroyed this huge giant. NARRATOR: Now, based in part on the evidence from the drained wreck, we can reconstruct exactly how the Amoco Cadiz met her end. The enormous tanker hits a force 10 gale, with winds of 60 miles per hour and waves up to 40 feet high. A powerful wave slams into the rudder, smashing apart the steering gear, making the 1,100 foot long ship impossible to control. Over the next 12 hours, the Amoco Cadiz is pushed ever closer to Brittany: notorious for its jagged rocky coastline. Finally, at 9:04 in the evening the inevitable happens. One tear, and another, is all it takes to rupture the weak single-hulled ship like an eggshell hitting a wall. There are no human casualties. All 44 men aboard are rescued by helicopter. But a region of France famous for its wildlife and natural beauty is drenched in 220,000 tons of oil. worst oil spill ever. It was the worst oil spill in history. changes the way the world sees giant ships. CHRISTOPH: In the aftermath of the disaster and other disasters of the same kind there was a new law which created the obligation for a double-hull construction. NARRATOR: In theory, a double-skinned hull should be able to withstand the worst the sea can throw at it. But as the global economy continues to expand, demand for ever-bigger vessels grows unabated, putting new strains on the work horses of international trade: the bulk carrier. These giants carry almost half of the world's cargo, shunting raw materials from one side of the planet to the other. The MV Derbyshire is one of this new generation of tough super ships, almost 1,000 feet long with a state-of-the-art double-hull and nine massive holds, she can pack in over 160,000 tons of cargo. Derbyshire is a true colossus, with a range of 10,000 miles. In July 1980, she leaves Canada laden with iron ore, heading for Japan. Then on September the 9th, she suddenly disappears without a trace. Without even a mayday call. And no sign of the 42 men and two women on board. Their families demand answers. DAVID: It was the ultimate shipping mystery, one minute it's there and the next minute it's gone. NARRATOR: Shipwreck hunter David Mearns is looking for a lost giant. The MV Derbyshire. DAVID: It was a ship lost without a trace. (radio chatter). DAVID: Something catastrophic happened to this ship, and we had to bring back the evidence. NARRATOR: It won't be easy. With no mayday message Mearns has no reliable fix on Derbyshire's final position. And the China sea is almost two and a half miles deep here. DAVID: Everybody talks about the needle in a haystack. Well first off you need to know where the haystack is. NARRATOR: The only hint, reports of oil slicks in the days after the ship went missing. DAVID: That's a clue to where the ship was lost. Heading, Two Zero, beautiful, right down the line. NARRATOR: Using sonar and gut instinct, Mearns scans the area for days. Without success. Finally, on day three... DAVID: Okay, we've got a large target. NARRATOR: They spot something. DAVID: We see this great big structure in front of us, and we're moving in to it, very very slowly. And we're counting down to this object, 50 meters, 40 meters, 30 and 20 and then finally at about 10 meters out of the gloom comes this great big piece of steel which was the side of the Derbyshire. And that was it, we had found it. This is the grave site for 44 people. NARRATOR: The underwater cameras pick out pieces of twisted metal. Now, as the deep ocean drains away we can reveal the full scale of this lost giant, for the first time in nearly 40 years. A huge bow 160 feet by 140 feet upright on the seafloor, broken off like a discarded toy. Nearby, the cover of one of the ship's holds. Then, behind the bow, something totally unexpected. The rest of the ship, obliterated. Reduced to tiny pieces and spread out over half a square mile. DAVID: It's total utter destruction. We're not talking just hundreds of pieces; we're talking thousands of pieces. We were just shocked. NARRATOR: How could a modern ship, engineered for safety and with a new double skinned hull, end its life like this? DAVID: The real question was, you know not that it was broken, but what caused the ship to sink? NARRATOR: Three years later, another expedition to the wreck site looks for answers. Lead engineer is Andy Bowen. ANDY: For us the first instinct when we saw the debris on the sea floor was just awe, really. The immensity of the destruction was really a mind-blowing thing to, to witness first hand. How a ship could be so completely destroyed. NARRATOR: New data provides a telling clue. All around the bow, there are air vents. Closer inspection shows they're open. Their covers ripped away. Water could have entered here, flooding this section of the ship. And if the bow was flooded, the whole vessel would become increasingly vulnerable, dragging her down lower and lower into the sea. This may explain why she sank, but not why she's in fragments on the sea floor. And when Andy looks closely at pieces of the fragmented vessel, he makes a remarkable discovery. All along the edges, tiny, brittle fracture patterns. Evidence that an explosive force has blasted the hull apart. Could there be some kind of design flaw with the Derbyshire's strengthened hull? The answer lies in the strange effects of the sea on a sinking double-hulled ship. When a ship sinks, at around 200 feet down the pressure is seven times greater than it is at the surface. Most ships implode as they pass this critical point. But a double hulled ship behaves differently. As it crushes down, air trapped inside the empty spaces and voids is violently compressed. Pressure builds until it's strong enough to blow the hull apart with a force equivalent to 16 tons of TNT. (explosion). It's a phenomenon known as implosion-explosion and takes only a matter of seconds. DAVID: It's like taking a balloon and popping it. NARRATOR: Only this effect can explain the Derbyshire's scatter pattern on the seabed. Yet it doesn't explain why she sinks so quickly. However, using all the evidence, it's now possible to recreate the Derbyshire's exact fate, in frightening detail. NARRATOR: The 960 foot long cargo ship, MV Derbyshire, is fully laden, and headed for trouble. There's a typhoon in the area, which suddenly changes direction to put the Derbyshire in its path. Waves repeatedly crash onto the deck. Knocking the ventilator covers off the front of the ship. Sea water slowly fills a storage area inside the bow, gradually tilting the whole vessel nose down into the stormy seas. DAVID: At this point in time the bow is full, and waves are rolling up the deck of the ship. NARRATOR: Through the night, the ship is dragged lower and lower into the water, but in the chaos of the storm the crew doesn't notice. DAVID: Then total disaster struck. NARRATOR: A massive rogue wave, possibly as high as 90 feet smashes in the hatch cover of hold number one, filling the hold with thousands of tons of water. With this extra weight, the Derbyshire is now sinking fast. As she goes down, the hatch covers of her other holds are exposed to the raw power of the sea. LARRIE: It was a lot like an underwater bomb going off. NARRATOR: Hold number one completely floods, the others follow swiftly in a deadly domino effect. DAVID: The vessel is being filled with water and being pulled down by the bow. NARRATOR: In just two minutes she is gone. LARRIE: The crew had no time to react, no time to send out a mayday. NARRATOR: There are no survivors, and no sign that any lifeboat is ever launched. This disaster helps spur even tougher action to regulate cargo ship construction. Stronger air vents on bulk carriers, along with alarms to warn if they're open. DAVID: Ultimately that has really helped in terms of preventing further accidents. LARRIE: Since those rules came into effect, the rate of loss of bulk carriers has been cut effectively in half. NARRATOR: And safety has never been more vital. The decades after the Derbyshire tragedy, witness the most important revolution in shipping for centuries: Containerization. JAMES: Container ships changed the world. NARRATOR: These ships are a crucial cog in globalization: a massive increase in international trade links. Today, the biggest container ships can carry over 20,000 standardized containers. These vast floating warehouses can be controlled by fewer than 30 people and use high technology to plot the safest and most fuel-efficient routes. But they're not infallible. One of the latest container ships, the El Faro is carrying almost 400 containers along with 300 cars and trailers from Jacksonville, Florida, to Puerto Rico. In suddenly menacing seas, she runs into trouble. Her Captain, Michael Davidson, uses a satellite phone to make a desperate call for help. NARRATOR: But before he even gets a chance to explain what's happening, his 800 foot long megaship vanishes off the map. Along with all 33 people on board. JAMES: El Faro is the greatest marine tragedy to hit the United States in decades. NARRATOR: The disaster shows that even the most advanced, modern ships can sometimes fail. NTSB investigator, Eric Stolzenberg is on mission to find out why. ERIC: What happened to the El Faro was a mystery. We didn't have any witnesses; we didn't have the evidence because it was lost on the seafloor. NARRATOR: Eric locates the wreck using its last known GPS position: it's in very deep water: 3 miles down. Sonar images suggest that the debris is spread across an area of 19 million square feet. Andy Bowen, once again the lead engineer, is eager to retrieve the ship's 'VDR' or Voyage Data Recorder. ANDY: A voyage data recorder is essentially a black box, similar to what would be in an aircraft and so it records a variety of data streams, so conversations, telephone calls, radio calls. NARRATOR: Any data recorded there could be key to understanding what went wrong with the El Faro. First the team needs to confirm the wreck's identity. They use a camera-mounted unmanned vehicle. As it descends it begins to pick up ghostly images. Twisted metal and then, unmistakable evidence. Yet only as the waters recede can the full scale of this gigantic cargo ship become clear. A true leviathan of the deep, 800 feet long, standing upright as if still in harbor. Surrounded by dozens of containers. A scene of utter devastation. ANDY: It was a stunning sight. Almost a blast zone of disturbed sea floor. NARRATOR: Working with the US navy, they immediately start searching for the VDR 'black box', ordinarily attached to the ship's communications mast. But the mast has been ripped away. And in a debris field as vast as this, finding it won't be easy. ERIC: The VDR is only about the size of a basketball, 7 inches by 8 inches, it's a small cylinder. NARRATOR: Can the team track it down, and use its data to understand what happened here? NARRATOR: A team of investigators is painstakingly scanning the huge wreck site of the El Faro. They're looking for its VDR, the Voyage Data Recorder, a tiny, basketball-sized object that could explain why it sank. ERIC: Kinda like a needle in a haystack on the bottom. NARRATOR: After five days, with search-time running out they spot something glinting in the ROV's lights. ERIC: It was just enough to catch somebody's eyes and so we drove in that direction. NARRATOR: It's a third of a mile from where it should be. The water's murky, and the ROV moves slowly. But as soon as the object comes into view, it's clear, this is the VDR. The light is from its reflective tape shining back at the cameras. ANDY: There was a tremendous relief for everybody because that was a major, major objective. NARRATOR: After a year on the seabed, does it still contain its vital data? The investigators start by replaying the voice recordings. ERIC: Yeah, it was difficult to listen to the VDR. ERIC: We know how it ends, but they don't. NARRATOR: The VDR offers first hand evidence but that's not all. It also contains information on the ship's final position and movements. Showing that shortly before she sinks, the El Faro is flooding in hold number 3. NARRATOR: Going back to the drained wreck reveals something hidden in plain sight. All along one of the upper decks: large open loading areas. It's common practice to leave them open like this because the crew expect that any water that enters here will quickly drain away. But then the VDR reveals a critical clue. NARRATOR: A scuttle is a hatch often located between decks. Looking at a plan of El Faro shows that if she listed severely in the hurricane, thousands of tons of water can flow in through this point, flooding her lower decks. Cars in the hold break free, and strike water inlet pipes, increasing the flooding. Data from the VDR clinches it: the El Faro is listing as much as 18 degrees amid hurricane force winds and mountainous waves. These openings are the chink in this giant's armor. Immediately the ship is flooded, she becomes unstable, and just 20 minutes later, loses all power. ERIC: The Captain does ring an "abandon ship". NARRATOR: But it's too late. The El Faro, and all her crew, are gone. ANDY: Till the very end it was incredible bravery. NARRATOR: The tragedy shows that even the most modern ships aren't immune to the effects of nature at its wildest. In the meantime, the world's sea-lanes get ever more crowded, and the ships plying them ever bigger. LARRIE: At every stage where we've built larger and larger ships, we ask ourselves the question: How much bigger can we get? And the truth is nobody really knows how big we can go. NARRATOR: Cargo ships are today reaching epic proportions, the biggest in the world is the OOCL Hong Kong at over 1300 feet long. Even giant passenger ships have re-emerged. Cruise liners like the Symphony of the Seas now carry over 6,000 people. The technology keeping these maritime giants safe continues to improve. But however well they are built and commanded, the ocean giants of the future will always have to face, the uncontrollable power of the ocean. MAN: This is Dan Lenihan. MAN 2: Yeah, looks good. DAN: Do I go ahead here? MAN 2: Yeah. MAN 3: Yeah, yeah, go ahead, please. DAN: Well, consider yourself in a water environment which is, um, very dark. You can see perhaps the length of a person. But after about six feet, the rest of it is just kind of mysterious. And then, there it is; the resting place for 1,000 men. This isn't just a sunken ship, believe me. This is the USS Arizona. REPORTER (over TV): Almost invariably, people remember where they were, what they were doing when they first heard the terrible news about the disaster at Pearl Harbor. REPORTER 2 (over TV): The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked. DANIEL: When they looked up, they thought, "Are they having some kind of drill this morning?" REPORTER (over TV): 7:55, that's when the first bomb arrived. DANIEL: They're not at their battle stations; they're helpless. (explosion) And the Arizona was gone. LARRY: The attack in Pearl Harbor is so iconic, you'd think we'd know everything there is to know by now. DANIEL: But yet, still today, there are questions about it. What caused the Arizona to explode the way it did? What we discovered changed our understanding of Pearl Harbor forever. (theme music playing). ♪ ♪ TERRY: I've been intrigued by the oceans from as early as I can remember. One of the things that really sort of steered me in my eventual direction was watching Jacques Cousteau in their submarine, the Soucoupe. Came to Hawaii, and I was driving around the island in 1976, and I was coming to the Makai Pier and then a crane was picking a little submersible out of the water, and that was my dream; I had to go check it out. Just the idea of exploring the ocean, I'd always been intrigued by that. Pearl Harbor really was a defining moment for my parents and their entire generation of Americans. And yet, there's so much mystery about the attack, especially the use of Japanese secret underwater weapons. I always thought this was an attack from the air, but the Japanese said that there was an attack from the sea, but with midget submarines. I was astounded. When I dug into it deeper, I discovered they're roughly the third of the size of a smallest US submarines. Perfect for the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor. The theory is that one of these midget subs made it all the way up to Battleship Row and torpedoed the battleship. Most of these submarines have been accounted for. It was proven that none had sunk any US ships. But two had never been found. So, was it possible that one of these hit a warship? It's fair to say I became a little obsessed with finding them; one in particular, a sub the crew of the American USS Ward claimed they'd sunk. Nobody really believed that they sank that sub. But I always thought that it was still out there. So, I made a unofficial pact to try and find the Ward's midget. After 40 years of piloting submersibles, every time I climbed in and closed that hatch, it was the same rush, like the first time. CHRISTOPHER: Working with Terry Kerby, he's such a fantastic guy. Even though I'm a biologist, like, the shipwrecks are almost a side project or a hobby almost, to help Terry out. Whenever Terry asked me to do a dive, I would jump immediately at the opportunity. TERRY: We started the search about three miles outside Pearl Harbor, not far from where the work crew reported engaging the midget sub. 10K, 10K. Pisces 5, you copy? What is all this stuff? CHRISTOPHER: I don't know what these things are. TERRY: Chasing targets with a sonar, you would get a target that looked very promising. There, you're looking on your sonar and there is a perfect straight line with a conning tower and a periscope. Oh, okay, it's a big rock. CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, I see it now. TERRY: And then you'd go up to it and it'd be the flat slab of a, of a carbonated outcrop with a steel box on top with a pipe sticking out of it. CHRISTOPHER: I guess I'd describe it as an underwater dump... (laughs). Vehicles, landing crafts and ships that the Navy no longer needed; there are lawn chairs, toilets, old cars. So, um, yeah, if you're looking for a specific objects, it can be quite challenging. TERRY: All right, there's the plane wheel we saw this morning. We're at the end of the dive and just getting ready to leave the bottom when I, when I got another good contact out there. I think it's probably one of our landing craft. We'll take a look at it. CHRISTOPHER: Whoa. TERRY: What is this? CHRISTOPHER: What is this? TERRY: And I came up on what I thought was a torpedo. And as I got close... CHRISTOPHER: It's a submarine. TERRY: It's a submarine! A-ha. CHRISTOPHER: I'll be damned. TERRY: Because of its small size, I realized that it was a stern section of a Japanese midget submarine. CHRISTOPHER: Wow, that's a, that is.... TERRY: Now that's remarkable. The rest of the sub was missing, so where was it? Could this be the Ward sub? Took us about a dozen dives over the next ten years to find out for sure. So, there was another dive, and we went to the general area where I'd located the stern section. What have we got here? We need to check this out. It's a submarine. This time, we're looking at the mid-section; conning tower, periscope. That's definitely a conning tower. We went back out there again. Now, look at the bow. And I came across a bow section. That would be the third piece of the same vessel. CHRISTOPHER: Yeah. TERRY: So, here was all three pieces of a Japanese midget submarine. So, was this really the Ward sub? If it was, why was it broken into pieces? All three pieces were roughly within 100 meters of each other, in a rough line. There were cables that were choked up and rigged on the tail. The mid-section, we could see that it had been cleanly disconnected. And the bow section, it too had been disconnected. When I saw this, my feeling was that this was, um, a war prize that was brought back to Pearl Harbor and investigated and then disassembled and rigged and dumped. The sub that the USS Ward fired on was never seen to blow up. So, wherever it was, it should still be intact. So, our hearts sank. We realized that it wasn't the Ward's midget. Eventually, we realized that the method that we are using was gonna take a long time. But we got a real break when our chief biologist, Chris Kelley, got access to a very expensive deep sea mapping system. CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, I took custody of a side-scan sonar. They render almost near photographic imagery of the seafloor. We were doing this mapping in the defensive sea area, identifying potential targets. One in particular was very, very interesting. TERRY: It was a, a, a perfect straight line 80 feet long with a little bump where there would be a conning tower. CHRISTOPHER: Terry took a look at those images, and he got very excited. He basically said, "Well, that's gotta be it." The big question was, was he right? CHRISTOPHER: After so many years of looking for this mini sub, Terry basically said, "I wanna have a shot at that target." "Okay, your call, we'll go for it." And, once again, there was stuff all over the place. TERRY: Yeah, here's an airplane part. And we couldn't believe what came out of the dark. What is that over here? May? MAY: What's up? TERRY: A submarine. CHRISTOPHER: Oh my God, it is! MAY: Is it? CHRISTOPHER: The first thing I saw was the very distinctive figure-8 torpedo guard. Oh my God! That was it! TERRY: They're risin’ now. CHRISTOPHER: That's it, it's a midget sub! One of the major objectives was to try to find the three and a half inch, four inch hole that would be evidence that the Ward destroyer actually hit the conning tower. The guys operating gun number three swore that they hit the conning tower. TERRY: Uh, there is a definite hole through the conning tower, at the base of the conning tower. There was that perfect hole, right there, right where the Ward's crew said they hit it. CHRISTOPHER: Gotta be the Ward midget, right? TERRY: Yeah, I think so. CHRISTOPHER: Oh my God, woo-hoo! TERRY: Yeah, that was a very exciting day. That was like ten years it took to finally find that sub. And it gave such closure to the Ward crew because it had never been confirmed. CHRISTOPHER: Of course, there's absolute elation. Then it suddenly dawns on you that the remains of the, the two Japanese sailors, the engineer and the pilot, were still inside of it. TERRY: I actually had the pictures of the crews, and I'm looking at these faces of these young sailors. That was pretty sobering for all of us. The two crew who were still in there were the first victims of the Pacific War. CHRISTOPHER: Can we move down toward the bow and maybe document the torpedoes? The next question is whether this sub was responsible for sinking any US ships. It looks like, yeah, both torpedoes are in. MAY: Torpedoes? TERRY: It's got the torpedoes. MAY: There in it? Wow. TERRY: The two torpedoes were still in the bow, so it's pretty obvious that it didn't sink any ship. With the Ward mini-sub found, there was just one more sub that was unaccounted for. We just started to wonder if we hadn't already found the fifth and final midget sub. Re-examining the three-piece sub revealed a critical clue. Figure-8 torpedo guard, the Japanese confirm was unique to all the subs in Pearl Harbor. So, this was definitely one of the five midget subs from the Pearl Harbor attack. Now this is pretty cool to see this whole thing to come together. Looking inside, the torpedoes were missing, so had they fired on any US ships as the Japanese claimed? Records show there were several ships in the area, so someone must have seen something. It turns out they did. So, the USS St. Louis was a light cruiser, and during the attack was heading out to sea when they looked over and here comes two torpedoes, hit the reef and detonated about 200 yards off their starboard side. So, the witnesses on the St. Louis account for these remaining two torpedoes. I, I think the facts and the evidence are there that, uh, basically show where all those torpedoes ended up. The midget submarine cannot have fired torpedoes at battleships in Pearl Harbor. Finding the Japanese subs proved that they hadn't sunk any American warships. And just three years later, another team was tracking down a vital missing link about the Japanese attack from the air. (rapid gunfire) SYD: One of the planes that gave the Japanese the upper hand at Pearl Harbor was the legendary Zero fighter. At that time, the Japanese Zero was almost mythological. But why? Right over here, the blue panes of glass you can see are the original 1941 panes. And you can see the bullet damage through them from the attack. Me being the restoration director of the museum at the time, my quest was to try to find a Japanese aviation artifact that we could put in the museum. I started doing lots of research to try to find out what happened to all those wrecked Japanese Zeros? KT: Syd was able to locate what had happened to all but the one. SYD: And that was the one that I remembered had landed on Ni'ihau. KT: And from that, was like a dog with a bone. He wasn't gonna let it go until he'd tracked down where it was and what happened to it. SYD: Probably the luckiest part of my life is to have a life partner that shares most of the same passions that I have. KT: I like research. I love digging and finding things. You know, the thrill is in the search sometimes, not the finding. Back in December of 1941, there were multiple newspaper articles about this Zero that crash-landed. But it was sort of squashed after that. SYD: Ni'ihau was a private, isolated island close to Kaua’i. I kept trying to find ways to communicate with the owners of the island; very difficult to get a hold of. KT: A lot of mystique was around it. It was called the forbidden island and people had an idea that, of course, couldn't go there, strange things happened there. SYD: For months I kept trying to find out more information, either about the people that owned Ni'ihau or the airplane itself. And I'd find little dribs and drabs. By chance, I happened to run into an article about a electrical engineers' conference that had been held. And one of the guest speakers had put on a special presentation and it was about his visit to Ni'ihau Island. And I went, "Wow, I need to find this guy." Called the number, left a message. (phone ringing) We got the call from him. I said, "By any chance, were you the fellow that gave the speech at the electrical engineers' conference?" And he said, "Yep, I'm the one." And I said, "You went to Ni'ihau Island?" And he said, "Yep." And I said, "By any chance, do you know the owners of the island?" And he said, "Keith? Yep, I know him." And I said, "Do you happen to have a way I could contact him?" He said, "I've got his phone number." And I said, "Great, will you give it to me?" And he said, "No." KT: Because the Robinson family had owned that island for almost two centuries, they are very private individuals, and if, uh, they don't like the cut of your jib, shall we say, you're not gonna get anywhere. SYD: Long story short, eventually we did contact Keith. KT: He drilled us pretty hard. And at the end of it, "Okay, it is obvious that you're sincere and you're passionate about it. And I'm okay to help ‘ya." This is taking off from Kaua'i. Way off in the distance there is Ni'ihau, the forbidden island. It was hard to know if we're gonna find anything, and whether we could get those artifacts out. SYD: It's pretty rough country. KT: Quite overgrown and rough. SYD: And, you know, we're so used to being in Hawaii and seeing hotels and housing, and this island is completely void of anything. The airplane had been moved since the crash, and then later on it was moved to kind of the middle of the island, and that's where we first saw it. This is the famous Ni'ihau Zero, or what's left of it, which is actually, uh, fairly some, fairly significant parts. Keith vaguely remembers playing in it when he was a kid. KEITH: I'm just seeing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was kinda like that, except that that's a lot darker. Whoa, the stuff I knew was a lighter color than that. KT: And Keith remembers... BOTH: Everything. KT: The man has a mind like a trap. There's nothing escapes him. SYD: This is a right wing, center section. KT: Collecting data, writing down all the coordinates, taking pictures. It was exciting to do that. I look at the videos and I can feel it all over again, you know, that, that excitement, that thrill of discovery. SYD: There was a lot more to the wreckage than I first imagined. KT: It's a goldmine, absolute goldmine. It really was an inspiration to go, well, let's see what else we can find. SYD: You can't get away from the feeling of history. Something big happened here. KT: I've often said that the T in KT stands for tenacious. Whether it's physically looking for it or digging it up underwater or on land, or in the archives, I'm not gonna let go until I find it, until I get the answer I'm looking for. We found the plane that crashed. Now we wanted to know what had happened. Finding the Holy Grail, the Rosetta Stone, shall we say, of this was finding the Mizuha report. It says the Japanese plane came down near Howard Kaleohano's house on Sunday, 7 December 1941, between 1:00 and 2:00 in the afternoon. The pilot, Nishikaichi, had sustained some damage while he was doing his training run, and was running out of fuel and was headed to Ni'ihau. He was not under power, so he had once chance and one chance only to find a spot. SYD: The question is, what happened to the pilot and the airplane? We’d like to learn a lot more about it, unfortunately, uh, the Ni‘ihauians who were alive at the time of the, uh, of the event in 1941 are no longer with us and so we can’t ask them now, so Keith is our best shot. KT (over radio): Certainly never thought that we’d be able to come back here again. SYD (over radio): It’s still a fascinating place and it has such a presence to it. KEITH: Watch out, there are three wires down here in the bushes, okay? Don’t trip on them. SYD: What do you remember of where the airplane actually came to a rest? KEITH: Okay, Nishikaichi’s final approach was from there. SYD: Right. KEITH: He sees this and he thinks, “A-ha, I’ve got a nice slope up wind and upwind and uphill. I’ll land there.” Hawila was in the house okay. Hawila heard this horrendous racket outside, so he dashed out to the plane, the pilot, Nishikaichi is just coming to, Hawila noticed that Nishikaichi had a pocket full of papers in his uniform. He ripped that off. The Japanese aviator threatened people and went on this reign of terror and things went from there. So... SYD: So it all started here. KT: After threatening to kill everybody on the island if he doesn't get his papers, the pilot runs into Ben Kanahele's wife and Ben, and threatens her. SYD: And Benny tried to take the pistol away from the pilot. KT: Kanahele shot three times. (gunshots) SYD: Hawaiians are pretty tough folks. All it seemed to do was enrage Benny. KT: He got so mad he picked up the Japanese pilot, threw him against a, a brick wall, and then his wife came over and hit the Japanese pilot in the head with a rock and killed him. SYD: But that wasn't the whole story. A lot of the American authorities knew a lot about the Zero, uh, but they didn't know enough to understand why it was as good as they thought it was. KT: The army, uh, they came over and they wanted to look at the plane. Here is an example of the premier fighter from Japan; Zero. The army hoped to find out what made this fighter so good. SYD: Investigating the Zero, a lot of the airplane’s parts were made from an extremely light zinc aluminum alloy called Extra Super Duralumin. The aircraft was made even lighter by cutting holes into the actual internal airframe. The amount of weight was very small, relative to the wings' lift, and that gave it immense maneuverability, particularly at slower or medium speeds. It made this airplane devastating in the battle of Pearl Harbor. America's ability to get their hands on a nearly intact rebuildable aircraft, that was a big deal. Parts of this very plane gave US aircraft designers and engineers insights that could defeat the Japanese Zero and possibly change the course of the war. This Ni'ihau Zero would have been a real find. It would have answered a lot of questions and perhaps save American lives. For us, the Zero was but one factor of the advanced technology the Japanese displayed at Pearl Harbor. But to truly understand what happened, you must also investigate the destroyed ships lying in the harbor, and in particular the Arizona. For decades, getting access was impossible. DANIEL: As a young boy, I think the thing that had the most influence on me was my father, because he loved World War II pictures. When I told my folks that I was going to Hawaii seeking a permanent position at Pearl Harbor, they were wildly excited because my family; my mom and my grandfather and grandmother, they were there. On the morning of December 7th, my grandfather was just coming off work. That Sunday he planned to be taking my mom and the rest of the family for a picnic out on the north shore. Suddenly the roar of aircraft came over their heads. All along Battleship Row, the attack was erupting. The Arizona's life is extinguished at 8:06. My grandfather was on the other side of that film-making, about a quarter of a mile away. I asked him, when it exploded, it must have been deafening. He says, "No, it wasn't, it was a concussion that you could feel against your body." The casualties that occurred that day, nearly half of them are on the Arizona. 1,177 officers, sailors and marines died. Nearly 1,000 were never recovered. The whole area was designated as a war grave. And so for many decades, no one was allowed to search the Arizona. But the question still remained; what exactly caused the disaster? It was thought to be a safe, protected harbor. That professional curiosity led to, uh, connecting with Dan Lenihan and Larry Nordby, and all of those that were part of the Submerged Cultural Resource Unit that operated then out of New Mexico. DAN: So, pretty obvious irony there, to have a diving operation in the desert. We were asked to find out what sunk the Arizona. LARRY: People didn't really understand fully what made it sink. Was it a torpedo or was it bombs? And that was unknown at the time we started doing our work. MAN: Be real careful with placement of feet, fin movements. Try to keep your, your fins up, away from the silt and stand. DAN: We arrived in '83. It had been 40 years since anyone had at least openly dived that vessel. DANIEL: We didn't know what was down there, what was left. Finally, after all this time, we're going to find out. DAN: Well, this does take me back. It really hits your gut and heart when you're working on this ship. The USS Arizona, that's considered the holy site, you know. LARRY: The first time I saw it was a very powerful experience. I just wanted to think about what was on the other side of those bulkheads. It's hard to imagine the force that was such an explosion that it led to such a terrible loss of life. DAN: One has to understand that this ship generally had the shape of some wreckage. But no one knew what was down there. It was all twisted and turned around. The whole ship was kind of a puzzle. That suggested that this ship had to be completely mapped. DANIEL: They were going to map the ship from stem to stern, in other words, bow to stern. I was asked if I wanted to help and I said, absolutely. DAN: No one had ever mapped a 600 foot battleship under water. So, therein came the problem. LARRY: We think of Pearl Harbor as sort of a pristine and watery environment, but it's not. The visibility is low. DAN: The whole idea that we had was to use cave diving reels to make a long, white, straight line. It sounds really, really crude, and it is, because that's the only real way to work where you can't see. And if you don't have a way of getting out, you're gonna die. LARRY: This is a 600 foot plus long vessel, up to 100 feet wide, and you're, you're learning it two or three feet at a time. That's all. DANIEL: And they would bring the drawing, and I would get it and then run it up to the National Park Service artist. It was great, the ship was now progressionally being put together like a mosaic. Not only was I understanding the history that way; I was part of it. DAN: What we created was a detailed map of the entire ship, something never done before. Hoping to reveal exactly what caused such a disaster. DANIEL: For the American fleet, I think that they felt comfortable here because they were in shallow waters. Pearl Harbor's only 45 to 50 feet deep. And the technology was that a torpedo couldn't do that at that time. They had no idea that the Japanese had actually found a solution to the shallow water torpedo problem. What I have here is a scale model. It's about one-tenth scale. This is the thing that made this torpedo capable of being dropped at Pearl Harbor, because when the torpedo is dropped into the water, these wooden fins break away, they have broken the fall of the torpedo, and now it runs at about 25 feet of water towards its target. The USS Utah was struck by two torpedoes, so we wanted to find out if they had also struck the USS Arizona. We were looking for deformation on that port side of the ship. That's the side that the torpedoes would have come into. Deformation would be a rippling; it would ripple that metal. LARRY: When the Arizona was overhauled, they added a torpedo blister to the outside of the hull, which is designed for a torpedo to hit that and go off, instead of hitting the hull directly. The torpedo blister is this double line along the edge of the hull on either side, and no damage was visible there. DAN: We came up with nothing there, no damaged metal. DANIEL: There just was no evidence of any torpedo hit on the Arizona. DAN: We created an incredible map that brought us to the conclusion that it wasn't torpedoes that sunk the ship. We take extraordinary leaps of technology, 30 years later, to fully understand what did happen to the Arizona. SCOTT: As a kid growing up, our family talked a lot about the Arizona and the attack on Pearl Harbor. I'm certainly intrigued by history, and having the chance to work here it's, it's a pretty big honor. To really understand what happened here, we need more than just ink drawings. We needed to see the detail inside and out. Divers can't enter the ship because it's a war grave. But by 2016, the technology was small enough for remotely operated vehicles to enter the interior of the Arizona. We were hoping that all this high-tech equipment would lead to a more precise and better understanding of the ship. We hoped to inspect the condition of the ship, and the full extent of the damage from the attack. So, this is me swimming the ROV over to one of the hatches near turret four. You see these views of the ship that hasn't really been seen by anybody, ever. You can see that this is a table here, and that's actually a full light bulb. That's a desk, and to the right of it you can see a sink. Look at this desk and look at how preserved it is. It's been underwater for 80 some years. But more than just inspecting the interior, we can now monitor the condition of the ship, so we can better protect it for the future. So, we also scanned the exterior of the ship. The accuracy we get now from multi-beam sonar is jaw-dropping. This allows us to see the wreck of the Arizona in more detail than ever before. You can see the stern of the vessel is largely intact. There's not much damage at all. Close to barbette number four, you can see damage to the deck where a bomb exploded. There's damage to the deck near the main mast, indicating a second bomb. And near the port-side guns, there's further evidence of a third. But as you go forward, you're in a blast zone. Everything has been decimated by this massive force. The ship has literally collapsed in on itself; three decks, you know, pancaked down. This certainly wasn't any ordinary bomb explosion. DANIEL: To take out the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese developed a high-level bomb that was a formal naval shell, to be an aerial bomb so they could pierce the armored decks of the battleships. The bomb that will end her life goes down through the deck of the ship, in between gun turrets number one and two, on that starboard side. It plunges down and then ignites a forward magazines. (bombs wailing) (explosions) Some people think there was nearly a kiloton of energy. Those that saw it, like my grandfather, he thought nobody could live through that. And he was pretty much right. American servicemen killed on the Arizona is horrifying. People from all over the world, they come here just to see where it happened, to experience that. When you go to the Circle of Remembrance, you see the enormity of it all. And you see those names arrayed across that marble, you're stunned. No-one talks loudly... But they stare. They stare at that wall and some of them seek to see a name that's similar to theirs. And perhaps wonder.