Several sections of the wreck can be explored: galleys, storage rooms, bathrooms, generators, different types of shelves-more and more relics appear in the light of the torch. Divers can penetrate deeper into the wreck while moving along white ropes that were brought in years ago. Navigation demands concentration due to the fact that the wreck is lying upside down. These old walls move slowly and statically back and forth driven by the current. A dive into these openings leads through rusty red alleys. Several doorways can be used to enter the inside of the wreck. Torpedoes are sitting in their tubes, still as if ready to be shot. A huge obscure spherical object, the gun director sits right beside the ship. Everywhere, bigger parts of the ship are scattered in the sand. The superstructure has collapsed due to the heavy weight of the ship itself. While moving deeper, a stroll alongside the vessel shows massive 8-inch battery guns. A swim between the stern and the sandy bottom leads to the top side of the ship where the smooth current from the ocean side can be felt. Only the stern with the huge propellers can be seen of the 213 meter long ship before the visibility lets the rest of the shipwreck vanish in blurry shades of blue.Ī single blade of the propeller is as big as a diver. Just a few meters below the surface, the massive body of the wreck is outlined in the shallow water. One of the big copper props has been detached and relocated to Kiel in Germany where the ship was built in 1936. The stern is partly out of the water and exposed to the continuous waves and sharp blowing wind from the sea, which can get very rough from time to time. Today, the wreck rests in 20 to 40 meters of shallow water. The big ship filled with water, rolled to its starboard side and sunk upside down. Due to bad damage, the vessel leaked just before the crew reached the safe harbor of Kwajalein Island. In 1946, the Prinz Eugen was brought to Kwajalein after the atomic bomb test series. Prinz Eugen has become known for the fight alongside one of the famous battleships during World War II, the Bismarck, especially for its role in sinking the British HMS Hood. It is the German cruiser Prinz Eugen, the biggest and most magnificent wreck in Kwajalein. Right beside the main Island rests a victim of “Operations Crossroads”, the nuclear bomb test series in the Bikini atoll 1946. Several US aircraft wrecks are scattered around and many can be found on the northern tip of the atoll, Roi Namur. Overgrown by pale green organisms these big Japanese freighters form in the twilight of the depths the ghost fleet of the Kwajalein Atoll, one of the biggest World War II shipwreck graveyards in the South Pacific. Sixteen of these ships can be dived today. The runways on the Atoll have been destroyed within a few days by the US troops and the following air raid sealed the fate of several big Japanese cargo ships which have been bombed to the seabed of the lagoon. It was January 1943 when the heavy battle of Kwajalein took place during World War II on what was the outer ring of the Japanese force in the South Pacific at that time.
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