The U-166 and Robert E. Lee Battlefield:

Discovery and Initial Documentation of USS NEVADA (BB-36): An Artifact of Two World Wars and the Advent of the Cold War

“…The physical evidence on the seabed in the form of site distribution patterns provides empirical evidence of the final moments of Nevada as a cohesive entity, i.e., a “ship” as opposed to a scattered area of debris that constitutes a shipwreck site. As Church ( 2014 , 2016 ) has noted, the sinking of a steel-hulled vessel is a violent event that leaves a trail of debris as increased water pressure forces air to vent rapidly, with some compartments imploding as the wreck gains speed, “quickly reaching a velocity of 10–14 m per second (19–27.5 knots)…The upper structures of most vessels are not designed to endure the forces of drag…portions of the vessel break away…a vessel typically impacts the seafloor forcefully, displacing massive amounts of sediment…the hull frequently buckles and decks collapse” (Church 2016 : 249). These processes are not random and they are repeated in a variety of sites.…”

“…These processes are not random and they are repeated in a variety of sites. Based on work on a series of modern steel-hulled wrecks, Church ( 2016 :250–251) postulates a site formation process for these types of sites “distributed with mathematical consistency” with an equation of site distribution that calculates 20 percent of the depth of water (w) plus the length of the hull (vl) to determine the limits of the site boundary: …”

Site Formation Processes and Pollution Risk Mitigation of World War II Oil Tanker Shipwrecks: Coimbra and Munger T. Ball

“…One such region was the Atlantic seaboard of the United States, extending into the Gulf of Mexico, where German U-boats carried out Operation Paukenschlag (Drumbeat) in early 1942 to attack and cripple American shipping of supplies -particularly fuel -to the Allied warfront in England and Europe. The geographic span of this assault, a large part of the broader Battle of the Atlantic that lasted the duration of the war, comprises a maritime cultural landscape of sunken oil tankers and freighters ranging from the coasts of New England to Florida and up to the Mississippi Delta in the Gulf of Mexico (Marx and Delgado 2013a, Church 2016, Hoyt et al 2014. While separated by hundreds of miles, many of these shipwrecks are connected by vessel type, sinking incident, or the shared mission to deliver fuel oil across the Atlantic.…”