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Germany's U-534 U-Boat's Story, Recovery and Display - 39 photos

USAFSS-ColdWarrior

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Al Harvey

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That was a great read. Just glad that someone decided to recover and save it. That is a piece of history that was literally fading (rusting) away with time.
 

cattlerepairman

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I was lucky enough to actually be able to go see (and, even more rare, get inside) U-534 at Birkenhead, well before the museum went under, the boat was cut up and an incomplete medley of sections was put on public display near a subway station, where they now sit and rot. The pictures above are the remnants of a better time for that U-boat remnant.
What fascinated me were the abundance of artifacts and their incredible state of preservation (e.g. the nautical chart with the pencil marks...the OOW was the last one scribbling on that map before the boat went under) as well as the variation of preservation of the boat interior, depending whether the area was filled with silt, or not. I will remember the galley area with the "warm" and "kalt" porcelain faucet labels, blue on white, that looked brand new...and the stack of steel helmets in their "dispenser" near the conning tower ladder, ready to be grabbed on the way up. The decals and leather interior of the helmets were still there.
I guess, better than scrapping, but cutting her up was foolish.
 

saddamsnightmare

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December 21st, 2015.


Fascinating! Regrettably they chose to cut it, but to move it in one piece would have been prohibitively expensive. Likely it will deteriorate further without special preservation work and stabilization of the steel, it will sooner or later return to the state of iron oxide.
 

319cssb

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With that being said : I'll need an APC , a Lepoard 2a4, a UH-1N and now a Type IX U-boat (not that I'd know where to park it (?))
 
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