Partly the intention was to identify what it was via the high definition images or if we knew what it was it was to get decent images of it. We were going back to visit targets that had been found in the first phase and then we covered them with the high definition sonar to get better images. It carried two manned submarines and often we would meet up with this and the submarines would go down with the film crews. "Crews worked 24 hours a day in order to reveal never-before-seen images of the sea bed with many sunken vessels." They go up one line, they move over 50 or 100 metres and they come back and then they move over another 50 and 100 metres and go back again and that was maintained for 24 hours a day for around four weeks.ĬH: In the second phase, we had a second boat that joined us and that was a ship called the Andre Malraux, which is a French government ship. You would get two lines per day, one up and one back in your 24 hours. The Normandy area is 50 miles long and it was going at about 5 knots, so that’s 10 hours to get from one end to the other. In the first stage there was only one vessel – Etoile Marine’s Magic Star – a catamaran yacht which was quite slow. GT: What happened during the first phase of the expedition?ĬH: They were running 24 hours a day, they would come in every four or five days to get more food and water, provisions and stuff on board but between those they were running long lines up and down the Normandy coast covering the area with a wide-angle sonar called an EdgeTech 4600.
Underwater, although a number of wreckages have been salvaged or a number of them blown up so they are no longer a danger to surface shipping, they are still there as evidence of the struggle that went on and over time – and its coming up to 70 years, they are made of metal and in a high-energy tidal area – these things are disintegrating so in another 70 years there will be a lot less than there is now. On land, all the wreckage has been cleared away, you still have the concrete bunkers that give us some form of evidence but actual evidence of the battle is gone. GT: What is the importance of a project like this?ĬH: I think the importance of the whole project is the archaeological record of the size of the battle, not just D-Day itself but the battle to conquer Europe, Normandy and the area.
With the data we collected in 2011 we sent it to the French Hydrographic Office who may or may not choose to update the charts depending on what they find. We don’t chart French waters from scratch, that would be up to the French. They would put it onto their charts and then we would put it onto our charts. GT: Will this information be used by the UKHO?ĬH: Funnily enough no, it may find its way onto our charts but it would have to go to the French Hydrographic Office. There’s probably about 10 or 15 ships that were actually sunk on D-Day, a lot of landing crafts were damaged but they tended to get damaged on the beach and were therefore salvaged.īut there are probably 100 or so vessels that were sunk in the follow-up phase from mines and bombs that the German’s had managed to get into the area.
GT: Did you find a lot of wreckage from the actual D-Day landings?ĬH: To be honest, there’s not all that much from the day of the assault because not a huge number of ships sank on D-Day. The intention is to show where all the wreckages are, they are trying to tell the story of not just D-Day as the assault, as the battle for the beach, but the massive follow-up operation which kept the troops ashore supplied with everything they needed. Certainly we have records of wrecks and when we went over them there was nothing there. Not all of it has previously been able to be identified. GT: How will the wreckage information be used?ĬH: The information that was gathered is going to be used to make an underwater map to identify and indicate the locations of all the wreckages which are in the Normandy area.
He’d heard of the UKHO and our D-Day survey which we did in 2011 and therefore he contacted us to see if we would be interested in going back there to join in with this larger survey. He was going around gathering support, he’s not a surveyor, he recognises that he’s a coordinator, and he was looking for survey expertise to bring it all together. With the 70th anniversary of D-Day coming up next year he had this vision of draining the water out of the Bay of Seine and therefore exposing the undersea topography including the wrecks and telling the story of D-Day through the archaeology of the sea floor.
Chris Howlett: The project was started two years ago by Sylvain Pascaud, who is a French TV producer.