Randomizer

Of course he did, as First Lord he bore much of the responsibility for the ships being there in the first place since he had ordered resumption of the armoured cruiser patrols off the Dutch coast against the advice of the Admiralty Operations Division.

No doubt he wanted the lopsided German victory off the Broad Fourteens forgotten and removed from his copybook.

There are more than a few crocodile tears being shed here and Britain's reasonably new-found reverence for the sanctity of marine war graves is rather odd given that the British Museum is chock full of loot pulled from the assorted graves of lesser cultures. Of course British commercial interests were involved in the scrapping of the Jutland wrecks SMS Lutzow and Pommern, both of which, by the standards claimed here, should have been preserved. Can't say who snagged HMS Queen Mary's propellers though.

We clean up land battlefields, why not those at sea. Provided of course that proper respect be accorded to all human remains that might be recovered in the process. By the standards being claimed here every battlefield should remain sacrosanct forever including all of the Western Front since it is still one contiguous graveyard. Common sense has to prevail.

One of the things that make these wrecks valuable is the quantities of non-radioactive ferrous metals of which there is only a small and shrinking global quantity. Every piece of steel produced after the Trinity nuclear test contains minute quantities of radioactive isotopes but the scrap from ships built and sunk before July 1945 is radiation free and can be used for all sorts of specialty applications. These end-uses are frequently medically related and so there is a very real prospect that the scrap from Aboukir, Cressy and Hogue might actually help save lives.

The Brit's sold the wrecks and the Dutch have every claim to profit from them. I will now don my best NOMEX suit and await the rage from the UK members here.