War happens fast. When the passengers on the SS Athenia, a British passenger liner, left Glasgow on a fall day in 1939, the world was not officially at war, though tensions between Germany and England were reaching a breaking point.
Two days later Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain went on the radio at 11 a.m. and announced that the country was at war with Germany.Less than 9 hours later, around 7:40 p.m., a German U-boat torpedoed the Athenia, and it sank slowly into the ocean, finally disappearing the next morning, just 24 hours after the war’s official start.
During World War II, thousands of ships sank, and most of them have been rusting anonymously beneath the ocean waters, including the Athenia. Now, though, a shipwreck hunter believes he has relocated it.
At the behest of the BBC, David Mearns went looking for the wreck of the Athenia and found…
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