The paper "Death of a Battleship"presents the results of an exhaustive analysis of the loss of HMS Prince of Wales, combining the fruits of decades of research and analysis by Bill Garzke and Bob Dulin, with the unexpected discoveries resulting from 2007 and 2008 diving expeditions organized by Kevin. Denlay to the battleship wreck site. The remarkably complete private memoir of Vice Admiral D.B.H. Wildish, Royal Navy (Retired), who as a young Lieutenant was in charge of the affected engine room for the port outboard propeller shaft, helped to inform this analysis and study.
A most unexpected (... and still largely unexplained and not well understood ...) anomaly was discovered by a diver who managed to penetrate well into the outboard port shaft alley during a 2008 dive. The Prince of Wales was doomed by a torpedo hit near to the outboard port propeller strut, which wrecked the stern tube, tearing a massive hole which permitted the exploration of several compartments along the shaft alley. The battleship rests upside down in some 68 meters of water. The gaping opening in the stern, caused by the devastation of the stern tube structure, permitted an aggressive diver to make his way inside the ship to the after bulkhead of the diesel dynamo room, a distance almost a third of the length of the ship!
The massive extent of the damage along the length of this shaft alley explains why the battleship was doomed by this one torpedo hit. There are four failures in the structure of this one propeller shaft, which has fascinated and puzzled all who consider how this dramatic event could have occurred. The simple analogy of the failure of a chain under stress, when one link parts, relieving the stress on all the other links, comes to mind. What sort of force or phenomenon could have caused this puzzling, troubling, and entirely unexpected shafting failure?
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