Plundering War Graves: Illegal Salvage Operations in the Pacific

There’s a quiet crime unfolding beneath the waves of Southeast Asia—slow, methodical, and devastating. While most of the world passes over the Pacific as a serene expanse of blue, the seafloor holds the shattered silhouettes of World War II’s final moments: destroyers that fought to the last shell, cruisers gutted by torpedoes, battleships riven by aviation fuel fires. They are steel tombs for thousands of sailors who never came home.

And they’re being stolen.

Not in part. In whole.

The scale is staggering. No one knows the final tally, but the best estimates suggest dozens—and likely hundreds—of WWII wrecks have been illicitly looted across Southeast Asia. By 2017, at least forty major warships from the British, Dutch, American, and Japanese navies had been confirmed as completely destroyed by illegal salvage operations. Entire vessels ripped from the seabed, hauled up in pieces by industrial cranes, or simply blasted apart with homemade explosives.

The Java Sea, once a graveyard sanctified by sacrifice, has become a hunting ground for scrap. Salvage companies operating in the shadows claim to have taken more than a thousand wrecks. If even a fraction of that is true, the problem is orders of magnitude larger than the headlines admit.

And it all comes down to metal. 

Before the Bombs

To understand why salvagers target these wrecks, you have to step back to the dawn of the nuclear age. Warships built before 1945 contain steel forged in an era untouched by atomic fallout. This “low-background steel” is exceptionally valuable because it lacks the trace radiation that pervades all modern steel.

Why does that matter?

Because in certain fields—medical imaging, particle detectors, deep-space instruments, hyper-sensitive physics experiments—the tiniest background radiation ruins the results.

Color photograph of the Trinity test (Los Alamos National Laboratory: 1945).

Today, manufacturers mitigate this problem through shielding, purification, and controlled production. But for a handful of highly sensitive applications, nothing beats metal made before the bombs.

And so the demand persists.

Pirates with cranes. Floating scrap yards. Offshore cutting platforms are slicing apart vessels that should be protected by international law and basic decency.

A Recent What-If—and a Real-World Crime

Recently, I explored the hypothetical in a new blog: What if Force Z intercepted Japan’s Malayan invasion fleet?

You can read it here. 

In that alternate history, HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse—the pride of the Royal Navy’s Far Eastern Squadron—get a fighting chance to change the course of the Pacific War. But in the real world, the fate of those ships has taken an even darker turn.

3 Multibeam sonar image of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse taken by Salvage and Marine Operations in 2019. You can see the significant damage these wrecks have sustained from illicit salvage operations. That was six years ago. The damage is probably far worse today.

In 2023, Chinese salvage vessels were detained after being caught illegally stripping both wrecks—war graves containing the remains of hundreds of sailors. Authorities found crane barges, cutting equipment, and thousands of tons of historical metal already torn away. The National Museum of the Royal Navy confirmed the desecration in a public statement.

Chuan Hong 68 (CH68), a Chinese purpose-built salvage barge, seen here over the Prince of Wales wreck in April 2023.

The crews who died aboard Prince of Wales and Repulse on 10 December 1941 faced overwhelming odds and paid the ultimate price. That their resting place is now being pillaged for scrap is a bitter insult layered atop an old tragedy.

A Final Word

Unfortunately, this issue goes underreported. It's in fact an ongoing crisis—a systematic erasure of underwater heritage and a violation of the dead. These wrecks are the Pacific’s silent memorials, each a steel headstone marking sacrifice and service.

They deserve better than to be carved up by torch cutters and blasted by explosives. There's a special place in hell reserved for such people.

The nations of Southeast Asia, along with the governments whose warships lie beneath those waters, are taking some action. Still, these efforts largely fall short due to jurisdictional complexities, vast maritime areas, and a lack of universal legal enforcement mechanisms. 

Stronger protections, coordinated enforcement, and international pressure are overdue. Because once a wreck is gone, there is no putting it back. And while the sea would eventually wither these wrecks down, that at least would be more honorable than being erased for profit.

To learn more about these illicit operations, check out this documentary:

Sources

1. Denmark, J. (2017, November 3). The world’s biggest grave robbery: Asia’s disappearing WW2 shipwrecks. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2017/nov/03/worlds-biggest-grave-robbery-asias-disappearing-ww2-shipwrecks 

2. DW. (2017, May 29). Scavengers pillage wartime wrecks in Southeast Asia. https://www.dw.com/en/scavengers-pillage-wartime-wrecks-in-southeast-asia/a-39027260

3. DW. (2023, May 30). Malaysia probes Chinese ship suspected of looting WWII wrecks. https://www.dw.com/en/malaysia-probes-chinese-ship-suspected-of-looting-wwii-wrecks/a-65768188 

4. Grady, J. (2023, May 25). UK Royal Navy ‘distressed and concerned’ by illegal Chinese salvage of WWII wrecks. USNI News. https://www.usni.org/…  [as referenced in broader coverage] 

5. Navy Times. (2023, June 1). Chinese ship accused of looting iconic WWII shipwrecks. https://www.navytimes.com/…  [as part of broader media coverage] 

6. The Washington Post. (2023, May 31). Chinese vessel suspected of pillaging U.K. warships that sank in WWII. https://www.washingtonpost.com/… 

7. Maritime Archaeology Sea Trust. (2023, July). Looting of HMS Prince of Wales & Repulse 2022-23: Briefing Note. MAST.

   
   

Images

1. Maritime Archaeology Sea Trust. (n.d.). Chuan Hong 68: Observing illegal salvage of HMS Prince of Wales & Repulse. MAST. https://www.thisismast.org/maritime-observatory/chuan-hong-68.html

2. Fitzpatrick, S., & Pender, N. (2018). Multibeam sonar image of HMS Prince of Wales (top) and HMS Repulse (bottom), salvage and survey data. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Multibeam-sonar-image-of-HMS-Prince-of-Wales-top-and-HMS-Repulse-bottom-Salvage-and_fig3_380690973

3. Los Alamos National Laboratory. (1945). Trinity test [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trinity_test_(LANL).jpg

4. Stilwell, B. (2024, March 7). Thieves are stripping sunken World War II shipwrecks of their valuable steel. Military.com. https://www.military.com/history/thieves-are-stripping-sunken-world-war-ii-shipwrecks-of-their-valuable-steel.html