New By Reuters
By Mary Milliken
Montevideo, Urguay - The scuttled Nazi Battleship "Admiral Graf Spee" has withstood the silt and currents at the mouth of the River Plate for more than 60 years while waiting for someone to salvage it. Most of the Graf Spee survivors have died and only octogenarians in the Urugayan capital of Montevideo can recall watching one of the first naval clashes of World War II unfold on their sleepy shores.
But the legend of the pride of the Nazi fleet continues to inspire younger geneartions, and this week a team of divers will begin raising pieces of the pocket battleship -- a smaller, lighter version of a conventional warship -- out of the River Plate estuary in a project expected to take years
"It was a masterpiece in its time," said Mensun Bound, a marine archeologist from Oxford University weaned on tales of the Battle of River Plate.
"And it doesn't have a dark histroy, Its captain was a man of great dignity and honor. It was a battle in which both sides came out their honor intact."
Under the command of Capt. Hans Langsdorff, the Graf Spee sank nine commercial vessels in the Atlantic in late 1939 but alwas gave the crews time to evacuate the shios.
The British navy dispatched three ships -- HMS Exeter, HMS Achilles and HMS Ajax -- to the Uruguayan coast and on December 13, 1939, they sighted and attacked the Graf Spee.
Langsdorff took his badly damaged ship to port in Montevideo, where he was allowed to bury 36 dead sailors. His loyalty to Nazi leaders was questioned when he gave the old German naval salute at the funeral instead of the Nazi salute. Neutral Uruguay, under intense diplomatic pressure from British, then ordered the Graf Spee out to sea after 72 hours.
"I went down to the port the morning they left," said Maria Eleonor Ramis, 83, one of the estimated 750,000 people who watched events on the shore that day." It was very sad because the sailors were all so young, 18 and 19 years old.
'THE WHOLE WORLD WAS WATCHING'
Believing he would be met by a beefed-up British fleet, Langsdorff evacuated his men to ships headed to Argentina, then sank the Graf Spee with explosives to stop it from falling into enemy hands.
"It was an event that the whole world was watching," said Cristina Maldonado, a historian at Montevideo's Naval Museum.
Two days after scuttling his ships, Langesdorff took his own life in Buenos Aires.
They said they would raise the ship hull and would restore everything on the ship and sent them to Museum. This is getting little weird about this. I just found this on Dish News and i thought most of you people probably would like to know this or not.
