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U-166 Project Field Updates
Thursday, October 10, 2003 (Part 2)
by Dennis Aig
Dennis Aig is a
filmmaker and an Associate
Professor of Media and Theatre Arts at
Montana State University-Bozeman. He also heads up the
PAST Foundation Documentation
Unit and is PAST’s representative to the U-166 project. Aig’s role at the
U-166 site includes assisting in organizing the videotapes recorded
underwater by the Sonsub
INNOVATOR ROV and its
engineers. Aig is also serving as the project’s liaison to a documentary
crew from KPI Productions in New York
that is producing an episode about the U-166 for
The History Channel series
“Deep Sea Detectives.” The episode is currently scheduled to be cablecast in
early 2004.
From the NOAA research vessel
Ronald H. Brown in
the Gulf of Mexico:
Today is our last full work day on the Brown
before we head to Pensacola, Florida, tonight for demobilization tomorrow
morning. Our work schedule has been intense, and, for the last three days,
the project team has working around the clock. We are on schedule and have
accumulated a massive amount of data, including more than 57 hours of video,
hundreds of still images, and multiple photomosaics (a series of still
pictures taken at set intervals around the underwater wrecks). A highlight
of yesterday's work was recording images and data from The Robert E. Lee,
the passenger freighter torpedoed by the U-166 shortly before the
U-boat itself was sunk by depth charges from the Lee’s patrol boat
escort. The freighter and the U-boat lie about a mile apart form each other
in 5,000 feet of water.
The U-166 Project Team
The project has drawn on the expertise of marine
archaeologists, engineers, computer specialists, historians,
microbiologists, and imagemakers. These individuals have been selected from
private industry, the federal government, and both public and private
universities. The incredible amount of knowledge these people bring to the
project is matched only by the complete dedication of everyone to the ideal
of using science and technology to learn more about our historical past. We
are exploring the underwater wrecks sites to learn in as much detail as
possible what happened here more than 60 years ago. With that knowledge, we
can better understand what the individuals involved, both American and
German, experienced during a catastrophic moment near the beginning of the
United States’ involvement in World War II. Those broken and battered wrecks
covered with rust and vegetation are not “ghost ships” providing a
frightening reminder of the past. They are really messengers from the past
allowing us to make a connection with events and people long gone.
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The 10.5cm deck gun on U-166's forward
deck. This gun was used to sink one of the submarine's four victims, the
trawler Gertrude, near Havana on July 16, 1942. |
As the filmmaker in the group, I have been impressed
by the integral role video plays in the surveying and exploration of the
wreck sites. As the ROV descends to 5,000 feet and then moves over and
around the wrecks, team members huddle around monitors in the main lab
waiting for images to come into view. In the control “shack” of the ROV, the
archaeologists and engineers watch their own set of monitors to make
notations of terrain and artifacts. Much of the time the screen reveals
little more than specks of plankton, some crabs, and an occasional squid.
But then an artifact or a section of a ship will come into view and the
excitement and questions begin.
While there is a great deal of charting and annotating
in log books that must be done whenever an artifact is seen, there is also a
tremendous emotional rush that overtakes the team. When everyone looks at a
decaying deck, a damaged conning tower, a stray piece of copper wiring, a
barnacle-covered canister, or another artifact that chance and circumstance
have left behind for us, there is an instinctual need to acknowledge,
analyze, and understand what we are seeing. As the ROV glides over and
around the wrecks, we feel ourselves become a part of those ships and that
crisis moment when people confronted a death that came quickly and
unexpectedly.
The tapes will be reviewed again and again by the team
members. (No artifacts will be removed from their respective locations at
the site, so the tapes are of vital importance.) The more than 300 artifacts
found on and around the wrecks will be logged, catalogued, and discussed.
Each image will remind all of us who have spent the past week in the Gulf on
this great floating laboratory how important the many hours of dedicated
work have been in capturing and preserving a moment in history before it
retreats ever more quickly into the past.
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