Читать книгу Deeper into the Darkness онлайн

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Captain R. F. Nichols, (who was in command of Royal Oak at the time she was torpedoed in the Flow in 1939), was a young midshipman on Vanguard that night. He lived to command the Royal Oak in World War II, because on the night Vanguard exploded he had been attending a concert party presented by Royal Oak sailors on the theatre ship Gourko. The show had lasted longer than intended, and he had missed his boat back to the doomed Vanguard.

Commercial salvage work was carried out on the Vanguard in the late 1950s and subsequently in the 1970s. When hard-hat salvage divers initially went to examine the wreck in the 1950s they found that the main battery turret tops had been blown off and all the 12-inch gun barrels were blown out of their trunnion mounts. One main battery 12-inch barrel, weighing 67 tons, was found standing upright some 150 feet away from the wreck, its barrel buried 15 feet down into the seabed in much the same way that the 6-inch guns from Hampshire had impaled themselves into the seabed by their barrels.