Episodes

As the troopship SS Leopoldville steams towards France from England on Christmas Eve, 1944, with Allied soldiers on board, a torpedo rips into her side. After a fatal delay, the ship sinks within sight of the port of Cherbourg, leaving men to jump into the bitter winter seas. Nearly 800 soldiers do not live to see Christmas Day. Now, an international team of divers brave some of the English Channel’s most treacherous and dangerous waters in an attempt to reach the wreck. They aim to uncover clues to help answer the question: why did so many young men have to die?

The Leopoldville is a Belgian liner taking 2,235 American reinforcements to repel a massive German attack - the Battle of the Bulge. But just off the coast of France, a German torpedo strikes the crowded troop carrier amid ships, killing nearly 400 young soldiers instantly. The others make their way to the upper decks of the Leopoldville. They stand patiently waiting to be rescued.

In a daring rescue attempt, her escort, HMS Brilliant, manoeuvres alongside the larger liner. In rough seas, soldiers on the Leopoldville line up to jump down onto the smaller vessel. But the destroyer can only take a few hundred and has to head for the shore. There is no further rescue attempt. Some 1,200 soldiers are still left onboard. Two and a half hours after the torpedo hit, the Leopoldville slips beneath the waves.

Today divers braving some of the English Channel’s most treacherous and dangerous waters, 56 metres down, see evidence of the chaotic last moments of the ship. Can they find any evidence as to why the men were apparently abandoned and what, if anything, could have been done to save them?

Fairly or unfairly, American survivors are very critical of the Leopoldville’s crew, who they say left them to their fate. Although the official reports apportion blame to a breakdown in communications, none of this information is made available to the stricken relatives, and the incident is covered up. When the facts are eventually made public, survivors and members of the families of those who died have to live with a haunting conclusion. The bitter fact is that the botched rescue killed as many men as the initial torpedo.
 

Off Ireland, the Queen Mary, the most famous liner in the world, carrying 10,000 American troops to Britain, meets her escort, World War II cruiser HMS Curacoa. Without stopping, she rams the smaller vessel, slicing her in two and sending her to the bottom of the ocean, killing 338 of the crew. The story is suppressed. Now an expedition locates the two halves of the cruiser 50 miles from the coast of Ireland at a depth of 125 metres, providing, for the very first time, an opportunity to solve the mystery surrounding both Captains’ orders and courses in this terrible fatal wartime collision.

Royal Navy crewmen of the Curacoa who survived tell their tale. Personnel aboard the Queen Mary also share their memories, as do US Army Air Corps veterans, who witnessed the horror of the sinking. Their moving stories, together with dramatic reconstructions of the events leading up to the tragedy, paint an accurate picture of an important and largely untold wartime story.

The 4,500-ton HMS Curacoa was a light cruiser that had seen service in World War I.  She was past her prime, but had been converted for an air defence role. As the Queen Mary entered British coastal waters, Curacoa’s job was to protect her from German aircrafts. 

The 81,000-tonne Queen Mary had travelled across the Atlantic from New York.  Camouflaged to escape detection, she sailed fast and zigzagged. No German U-boat could keep up with her; her twists and turns made it hard for a submarine to aim torpedoes. Her ability to evade the enemy led her to become known as the ‘grey ghost’.

In order to provide effective anti-aircraft cover, the Curacoa needed to stay close to the Queen Mary. On 2 October, 1942, she was too close. Did Curacoa steer a fatal course towards the Queen Mary or was the Queen Mary to blame? What will the dive to the wreck reveal?
 

Off the north coast of Ireland, deepsea divers discover the wreck of a massive battleship. She is the British superdreadnought, HMS Audacious, which sank in the early days of World War I. For ninety years she has lain unknown and undisturbed. Missed by salvors and too deep for normal scuba diving, only now is she giving up her secrets. The divers find evidence of a catastrophic explosion, strewing wreckage across the seabed, and seek the cause.

At the time, the Audacious was considered unsinkable, the pride of the Royal Navy, one of their most powerful front line units. But even this 23,000-tonne leviathan has a weakness, one which the clandestine activities of a lucky German naval captain cruelly expose. Not even the assistance of one of the largest liners in the world, the Olympic, can help, although it has left an incomparable photographic record of her last moments. In October 1914, design flaws, incompetent damage control and just plain bad luck combine to make her heel over and blow up in spectacular style.

The British Naval High Command of the day is deeply traumatised by the event. It is a bad time to lose such a high-profile and important ship, and they order a complete news blackout. The Audacious’ crew, all of whom survive the sinking, are sworn to secrecy and reassigned. The Olympic is interned and searched from top to bottom for any photographs that might betray the event. The Navy even go to the lengths of building a dummy warship to keep up the pretence the Audacious is still afloat. The Germans must never know the vulnerability of British battleships. After the war the authorities came clean, but such was the blanket of secrecy that it took decades to identify and locate her.

Today the Audacious lies 14 miles out to sea, submerged in 64 metres of water, in perhaps the best visibility for a warship of her size anywhere in the world. The expedition’s divers have access to modern scanning techniques, expert onboard historians and analysts to help reveal how one of the world’s most advanced ships was brought down by just one blow, a chance event that ushered in a perilous new chapter in naval warfare and changed the course of history.
 

In June 1915, the SS Armenian, a large steamship managed by the White Star Line, the owners of the Titanic, heads into the Bristol Channel from the United States. She is carrying over 1400 mules destined for the Western Front. As the unarmed vessel nears the British coast, a German submarine spots the former liner and fires warning shots.  To avoid capture, the Armenian makes a run for it. As the U-boat continually pounds her with shells, the captain orders the crew to abandon ship. Once the remaining crew is safely off in lifeboats, the German U-boat fires a torpedo into the stern of the steamship.  It only takes minutes for the Armenian to sink to the bottom of the Atlantic, with her unfortunate cargo of 1400 mules still on board. 29 American crewmembers also die, causing controversy as the United States have not yet officially entered the war.

More than 90 years later, the infamous White Star Line vessel has still not been found.  Many have searched the waters off the coast of Cornwall, but the Armenian has proved to be elusive. Now, a new expedition of international divers is hunting for the ship known as the Bone Wreck. Using state-of-the-art dive and survey equipment, the team aims to be the first to find this long-lost vessel. 

Underwater surveys have revealed several possibilities, and the divers’ first objective is to go down to two large wrecks near the point the captain of the Armenian noted as the location where he believed the ship went down.  But even though one of those wrecks is full of bones, neither proves to be the Armenian. The expedition is forced to follow other lines of enquiry in order to locate the missing ship. Unexpectedly, German archives reveal the actual log from the German U-boat that sank the mule transport. The German commander’s coordinates are at least 20 miles from where the ship was reported to have sunk and where the team has been searching. How could they have got it so wrong? And could the new mark be the site of the lost Armenian?  At 95 metres this is deep water but there is only one way to find out for sure and that is to dive the wreck.
 

In August 1944, during World War II, four Allied ships are mysteriously destroyed without warning off the coast of Southern England. Sixty years later, in the English Channel, 13 miles south west of the Isle of Wight, 55 metres down, the sea reveals a World War II German submarine unlike any found before. Using revolutionary investigative techniques, a team of underwater detectives discover a story of invention and heroism, and of secret stealth technology. Identified as U-480, it was the first U-boat to go into successful action with a special coating that made it invisible to sonar. But not even this could save the submarine from a fatal trap set by the Allies.

The most effective submarine detection device the wartime Allied Navy develops is ASDIC. It sends out pulses of sound and listens for echoes from the thick steel hull of U-boats. As the war progressed, this and other techniques meant that U-boats went from being the hunters to becoming the hunted and the Germans began to lose the submarine war. To regain the upper hand, in August 1944, the Germans dispatch a very special submarine U-480 to lie in wait under the main shipping lanes that cross the English Channel. Four ships, totalling 14,000 tonnes and including the Canadian warship, HMCS Alberni, and the British minesweeper, HMS Loyalty, were sunk without warning. But how in one of the most heavily patrolled sectors of the English Channel was the submarine able to make its fatal attacks completely undetected?

The secret history of U-480 is followed from the revolutionary invention of the special coating that rendered her invisible, all the way to her brutal demise 55 metres down – and the only survivor finally hears what happened to his ship and shipmates.