The only Brazilian military ship to be sunk by enemy forces during World War Two has been positively identified by the country's navy – 14 years after divers first came across the wreck.
The 82m auxiliary vessel Vital de Oliveira had been torpedoed by the German submarine U-861 in 1944, with the deaths of around 100 men resulting from the action.
Brazil, the only South American country to send troops overseas during WW2, also lost up to 34 merchant vessels to U-boat attacks off its coast during the Battle of the Atlantic.
The Brazilian Navy obtained bathymetric data on the Vital de Oliveira on 16 January, during the sea trials and commissioning of a hydro-oceanographic research vessel coincidentally also named Vital de Oliveira.
Both ships were named in honour of the “father of Brazilian hydrography” Frigate Captain Manoel Antonio Vital de Oliveira, who was killed during the Paraguayan War in 1867 while in command of a battleship.
The wreck of the Vital de Oliveira was discovered in 2011 about 65km off the coast at Macae in the state of Rio de Janeiro by diving brothers José Luiz and Everaldo Pompermayer Meriguete. The two fish-collectors had been responding to a request for help from a fisherman whose net had become entangled on an unknown obstruction.
The wreck lay around 55m deep, so the brothers had called in technical diver Domingos Afonso Jorio. He reported to the navy that he had found the net snagged on a ship’s gun. The Vital de Oliveira had carried two 47mm cannon.
For whatever reasons the navy had not until now been able to confirm the identity of the wreck – as it had informed Brazilian media last year when questions arose on the 80th anniversary of the sinking.
It had stated that it was “currently not conducting research to locate archaeological sites of shipwrecks”, although this stance now appears to have been reversed.
The Vital de Oliveira was built in 1910, originally as the Itauba, and in 1931 was incorporated into the Brazilian Navy. On 19 July, 1944, she had been carrying supplies and military personnel along the coast, and should have been escorted by the submarine hunter Javari, though for unknown reasons the vessels had lost visual contact.
When the Vital de Oliveira was torpedoed in the stern just before midnight the unarmoured vessel sank quickly, with the loss of some 100 of the 270 men onboard.
The navy’s latest Vital de Oliveira was designed to conduct hydro-oceanographic surveys, collect environmental data and support scientific research in maritime areas of interest.
The vessel uses data obtained through multibeam echo-sounding and sidescan sonar to conduct comprehensive surveys, according to Lt-Cdr Caio Cezar Pereira Demilio from the underwater archaeology division of the navy's Historical Heritage & Documentation Directorate.
Further technical and ROV dives might be carried out to capture photographs and videos, collect additional data on the vessel and record or retrieve artefacts, he said. 3D models would be created to “allow a detailed assessment of the remaining structural conditions and the relationship of the vessel with the environment”.
The study would be part of an ongoing digital project called the Atlas Of Shipwrecks Of Historical Interest On The Brazilian Coast, allowing correlations to be made between various wreck-sites to broaden understanding of the country's maritime history.
Also On Divernet: Noronha: An Atlantic diving hotspot, Divers pinpoint wreck of last slave-ship in Brazil, New giant shipwreck – but who needs this one?
