The wreck of the British submarine H.M.S Triumph, which mysteriously disappeared during a mission in Greece in 1942 during World War II, has been discovered in the Aegean Sea, Greek news agency Ana reported Wednesday.
It was spotted "at a depth of 203 meters in the Aegean Sea" and "tens of kilometers from the coast" by the team of Greek diver Kostas Thoktaridis who, since 1998, had begun research.
Twenty war missions
84 meters long, this T-class submarine is linked to "the resistance against the Nazi occupation at the time in Greece", as well as to the British secret services", explains Kostas Thoktaridis quoted by Ana. "All 64 members of its crew perished in the sinking," according to the same source.
The Triumph had carried out about twenty war missions between 1939 and 1942. He had begun his missions in the Aegean Sea in March 1941 off the Dodecanese archipelago, then under Italian occupation, where "he had destroyed many enemy ships including the Italian submarine Salpa," reports the Ana. But on January 23, 1942, during its 21st mission in the Aegean Sea, the British Navy had indicated that the Triumph submarine was "considered missing".
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The last testimony about this ship was that of an Italian pilot who had seen it on January 9, 1942 off Cape Sounion, in the Saronic Gulf, near Athens. Among the various versions of the cause of the sinking are a collision with a mine off the Cycladic island of Milos, its capture by German forces in cooperation with Italian agents, or an explosion in the bow of the ship, according to Kostas Thoktaridis.
Specializing in shipwrecks, this diver had to resort to British, German, Italian and Greek archives before successfully locating the wreck. "It was the most difficult and expensive mission of my life," he told Ana. Many teams from Malta and Russia had travelled to Greece in the past to search for the wreck.