clearing station which is the next step back. there are places on the coast, a big training camp and a big field hospital is where we have one of the biggest cemeteries. these are guys that guy of disease or die of their wounds. and women as well. in fact, it's interesting because it is the only place where they actually do anything to indicate rank. in every other cemetery whether you're an officer or another rank, you get the same burial. but there what they've done is put a semi-circle of officers in and interspersed it with german troops. beyond that, we've got indians an chinese. it is actually a segregated cemetery which is very, very unusual and it is not the way it is done at the time, except

there. it is very u fleak. unique. >> thank you. we are due for a break. we'll come back at 11:00 for our second speaker. thank you. >> you've been watching c-span's american history tv. we want to hear from you. follow us on twitter at c-span history, connect with us on facebook at facebook.com/c-span history where you can leave comments, too. collection out our upcoming programs at our website, c-span.org/history. we'd like to tell you about some of our other american history tv programs. be with us every saturday at:00 p.m. and midnight eastern for lectures in history. join students in the classroom to hear lectures on campuses across the country on topics ranging from the american revolution to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. again, that's lectures in

history every saturday at 8:00 p.m. and midnight eastern here on american history tv on c-span3. here's a look at some of the programs you'll find christmas day on the c-span networks. holiday festivities start at 10 being a following with the lighting of the national christmas tree and the lightle of the capitol christmas tree. celebrity activists then talk about their causes. at 8:00, supreme court justice samu samuel alito and former florida gopher jeb bush on the bill of rights and the founding fathers. at 7:00 p.m., author pamela paul and others talk about their reading habits. on american history tv on

c-span3 at 8:00 a.m. eastern, the fall of the berlin wall with speeches from president john kennedy and ronald reagan. at noon, fashion experts on first ladies' fashion choices and how they represented the styles of the times in which they lived. then at 10:00, former nbc news anchor tom brokaw on his more than 50 years of reporting on world events. for our complete schedule go to c-span.org. american history tv visited the macarthur memorial in norfolk, virginia, which was hosting a symposium marking the world war i centennial. coming up next, maritime archaeologist joseph hoight describes confrontations between american u-boats and vessels off the virginia and north carolina coasts. his talk is about 55 minutes.

>> thank you very much. i'm glad to be here in my backyard. i just want to say one thing before i start with mr. robert shaw's presentation. for those of you that have never tried to identify a set of human remains, this is incredibly difficult work and very important stuff. my primary job is for the "uss monitor" when we recovered the turret in 2002, we found the remains of two u.s. sailors inside the turret and over the course of about ten years, we worked really closely with the joint pacific account and command of hawaii to try and identify those remains. full dna analysis. we did facial reconstruction through louisiana state university. we knew there were 16 sailors lost so we knew generally out of a pool of 16 people who they could have been. we knew who they were associated with and we still couldn't identify these remains. it is just really incredible, important work that you're doing.

so very impressive. i'm going to talk about the much lesser known battlefield, some of the battlefields that are right here in u.s. waters. many people are unaware that there are two world wars that came to the coast of the united states through the battle in the atlantic. just a quick bit of background on who i am and why we do this kind of work. i work for the office of national marine sanctuaries. part of the national oceanic and atmospheric association. it is similar in ethos to the national park service. we have 14 sites around the country in u.s. territorial waters. for the most wart these sites protect special places in the world's oceans focused predominantly on natural or ecosystem-based preservation. the florida keys national marine sanctuary that protects the system of coral reeves. the hawaiian islands, hump back whales, the marine flashl mnati

monument in the northwest hawaiian islands where we recently found some midway aircraft. two sites, the thunder bay is in lake huron. that protects 200 to 300 wrecks that are associated with great lakes shipping. and the "uss monitor" where i work. we have these two sites that focus predominant will i on marine archaeology. however, these sites have shipwrecks that remain within them. we have the maritime heritage program which looks at resources that are either within sites that predominantly focus on ecological resources or sites that may be outside of sanctuary boundaries that are historically significant that may be under consideration for inclusion. so really to give you a background on why we do this kind of work, we look at these things and the archaeology

contingent in my program is starting to look into battlefield archaeology and landscape based archaeology. when we think about world war i, world war ii, these are often considered to be foreign wars. u.s. had very significant involvement in these wars but when we think of sites associated with those we think of places like the western front, we think of places like e iwo jima. we don't have very many sites that are associated with this, but that's not true for the ocean wars of the battle of the atlantic. we started in 2008 looking into the resources associated with german u boat activity during the second world war of which there was a greater amount of resores. just in north carolina alone, almost 90 vessels were sunk in the first six months of 1942. we've focused on this from this landscape based approach.

it was interesting to look at this u-boat war and the time period we're in now gives us a much better opportunity to look at these things because when you look at a landscape on land, it's much easier to get your head around it where you look at things like trenches and operations of cover and fire. and when you look at a sea battle, it is much more difficult because you still see sort of this flat expanse of the ocean. but now with marine survey technology, with advancements in geographic information systems, we're able to model these things in a way that can really start to make sense of them because they took place over a much more vast geographical space. and particularly when you look at u-boat's involvement, this takes the naval engagement from what was always a sort of flat plane to really a 3-d landscape where now you're interacting with the bottom topography because the u-boats operate

within the water column in this 3-d swpace and aerial surface support comes from stations, airfields on shore. the actual atmospheric column becomes important, too. now that we can digitally reconstruct and model these in a way we haven't before. we started looking predominantly at world war ii and have done that now for almost seven years. in the process of that we've started to look now towards the first battle of the atlantic which took place in u.s. waters in 1918. really our interest in this, as i said, is we don't have these sites to remember the significance of these both world war i and world war ii which argue gably have shaped the wor more than any other incident in history. but we protect places like little big horn, york town, and we set those places aside and

say these are where important things happen that changed the course of history. we think that the battles of the atlantic in u.s. waters can be that for the first and second world war and they really haven't had sort of the popular attention that i think they ought to. i'm going to talk predominantly on just the set of resource and activities that are in north carolina waters but just to kind of put it in context if you are not familiar with, i'll give you a quick basic background on the world war i u-boat campaign. first of all, it's important to note that in world war i, this is the first major role that u-boats are submarines in general took in any major conflict. of course, the turtle was one of the first submarines used during the revolutionary war with no success. the first successful use of a submarine was the "css emily"

off the coast of charleston, south carolina during the civil war. it is interesting to note that the reason the confederacy developed submarine technology was because there was clearly apparent that they couldn't hold up anything against the union navy. they started looking into these cheaper ways that they could break blockades. submarines, as well as submarine mines became part of the confederate response to those blockades. however, there were never really major players in the overall war effort. that's not so for world war i but it's a similar impetus for developing submarines on the part of the german navy. again, much like world war ii, the u-boat initiative and campaign look place really from the beginning all the way through the end of the war. predominantly this was fought

around the british isles and mediterranean. same case in world war ii but there was a significant campaign in u.s. waters. i want to talk a little bit about kind of why they're doing this, the british service fleet and the war on commerce. the idea here initially when the german navy was developing u-boats was, again, they were very convinced, and rightly so, that the german high seas fleet really had no comparison to the royal navy. they knew very well that if they were to go into sort of what would be considered a classic naval conflict, the germans wouldn't stand a chance against the british. so they began to develop u-boats with the initial idea that the u-boats would be able to sort of tip the scales a little bit. they could sneak out, sink some of the british capital ships, the big battle ships. they were somewhat successful in

doing this but it was never really enough to tip the scales to balance the power to where they could have a real surface engagement. but this is predom flainant by because of the way u-boats were operating in this time. they weren't quite as efficient as they became later into world war ii. they were quite slow underwater and they weren't really operating in concerted is wolfpack tactics like they did in later years. they really kind of had to sit and wait and set up sort of a u-boat trap and you'd have surface vessels that would sort of try to lure the british navy in an area where there were u-boats operating and they could sink them like torpedotorpedos. it was pretty inefficient. as the war moved on, getting into 1915, it started to shift into a commerce war. this has been a tactic that's part of every major conflict in world history, to cut off the enemy supply chain.

this is tick lparticularly effe against wbritain which is an island nation. most of the resources they have comes from the sea. food, war materials, oil that's fueling the war effort. the british nation really depending heavily on maritime commerce. the idea here was that, well, the royal navy was blockading many german harbors. the u-boats could be used to get out past the blockade and go far afield and sink vessels that were merchant ships that were carrying those supplies. and this was very, very effective. however, it was somewhat ineffective in that -- at least early on -- it was a somewhat gentlemanly way of fighting with a submarine. submarines predominantly are a very good offensive weapon but a very terrible defensive weapon

so their success lies in their stealth, in their ability to have these kinds of surprise attacks. whether they first started this war on commerce, there was a lot of concern over it being sort of poking the beast of a lot of neutral nations. when they declared the areas around the british isle were a war zone and they'd sink vessels that weren't necessarily involved in the conflict but were simply carrying merchant cargo to places like the united states, south america, other places that weren't involved. so they wanted to try and mitigate the losses that they had in that. they observed these things called prize rules which the u-boat firing the proverbial shot across the bow, they would board the vessel, search the papers, look at the manifest, put everybody in a lifeboat, give them a map, some food, tell them where to go to get to shore, then put bombs throughout the ship and then sink it.

there was very little loss of life typically and was considered to be more foma form. however, that kind of negated the effect of a u-boat. they'd then have to paddle over to a rubber vessel, could potentially be overpowered with small arms. so it really wasn't that effective. much as it was in the second world war, as the war progressed, they began to relax those prize rules where they'd just slam a torpedo into the side of the ship and let it go or place submarine mines throughout strategic ports or things. so we see that happening. by the time the u.s. enters the war the prize rules have largely been relaxed. that's sort of what's generally going on. the basic german naval tactic here is to try and cut off the shipping and also the use of the royal navy service fleet. during this time the united states having this isolationist

perspective of getting into the war is kind ever on the fence of everything. the germans sort of a good will mission in the vessel called "the deutscheland." this was the first ever merchant submarine. it was designed as a way for the germans to break the blockade so it would run out under stealth, get away from the royal navy surface vessels, and be able to carry out some commerce. this was more of a token measure. these weren't able to carry quite enough cargo to clearly be effective in large-scale commerce. but it was a way of saying to other neutral nations, hey, we're still able to operate, as well as a way to say to the german public that we're still getting some supplies through, we've got these things going on. "the deutschland" came to the u.s. in the summer of 1916. it was kind of greeted to a lot

of fanfare. these guys were sort of considered celebrities, this brand-new submarine technology, they sailed from the chesapeake pay up to baltimore where they were docked for a number of weeks. this campaign went on trying to sort of win the hearts and minds of america saying, look, you should engage in commerce with germany. actually it went over quite well until about november of 1916 when another merchant submarine, the u53 came on another good will mission. shortly after it left newport, rhode island began sinking ships just outside of territorial waters. kind of ruined its good will with the country. beginning in april 1917, the u.s. is involved in the war and shortly thereafter, the u-boat threat starts to come to the u.s. i'm just going to talk a little bit -- there's more going on along the east coast than i'm going to mention. i'm just going to focus on the

north carolina area and the particular u-boats that operated in this region. a couple of the vessels that we know are lost in that area that we kind of hoped to find and study as we move forward with some of our research projects in the field. there were three german u-boats that ended up operating in north carolina. the u151, the 140 and 117. this -- this graph here kind gives you an idea. this is the destruction of vessels all up and down the coast. north carolina, massachusetts, new jersey. the difference here is that often massachusetts got in major harbors. north carolina doesn't have that. what we found if our research in looking at this landscape, north carolina has some geographical features that lend itself well

to u-boat operations. i'll talk a little bit about that more but this is really a u-boat hotspot for a number of reasons. you see that north carolina merges as one of the largest concentrations of losses in both tonnage and in number of vessels. this is just a quick map. i want to mention, my colleague developed a lot of these gis maps to recreate some of these sites. these are the vessels that are just lost off of north carolina. there's ten vessels just in a little over three months were lost off the coast here. i mentioned that north carolina is a very good area for u-boats to hunt. you've got historically north carolina has terrible ports. there's very few ports in north carolina that are navigable for large vessels. so the closest naval installation that you have is up

here in norfolk. you're down here along this area where it is difficult for military vessels to access. you'll notice here the continental shelf. this is these different shades of blue are depicting the water depth. the continental shelf runs quite close to cape hatteras here. because it sticks out in this area, the ships would run up and down the gulfstream would have to come past this point. this gives you a really good concentration of merchant ships particularly as this is sort of where they would hang a right to head towards british or gulfstreams were kind of like a moving walkway in an airport. give them a few extra knots of speed. u-boats would kind of hang out right here in this area because it was a steady thoroughfare for shipping. they also had being a tess to de access to deep water to hide. it was a very attractive area to

operate and they were usually far away from military installations and because all of the aircraft fields in north carolina are located on the inside of the sound here, there are these barrier islands, the coverage of aircraft was more limited here than really anywhere else. . these are the vessels sunk just off north carolina during world war i. i'll talk specifically just about a few of them. notice back here that these sites that are kind of further offshore in this darker blue area, these are harder for archaeologists to access. you drop off this continental shelf and you're in several thousand feet of water. it is a much more difficult air yar for area for us to work.rea for us to work. the site i'll focus on are in the shallower areas that we

expect to be easier to locate and once located, easier to actually do some work on. tease are the u-boats that operated in north carolina waters. the 151, 140 and 117. just give you a quick background on each of these patrols. this is the u-151. this was one of the more successful u-boats that operated in the u.s. waters. that was built -- converted -- the 151 is the class type that the "deutschland" was. it was originally a merchant vessel, then converted to a military vessel. that's why it only has two torpedo tubes. it could carry 18 torpedos, 213 feet long with a range of 25,000 nautical miles. this is really impressive. there was a bit of a dip in u-boat technology in interwar

period between world war i and world war ii. this was an impressive range for a vessel even in the world war ii era. so they were really quite -- they had quite a lot of range. most of the vessels that were operating in world war ii were more of a craft never intended for oceanic voyages. this is an impressive vessel. only a crush depth of 160 feet so that's not very deep. but this vessel here was on its war patrol to the u.s. they were filing daily position reports in their war diaries and radioing them back that we were able to sort of reconstruct from the positions given throughout the atlantic, war it was at any given point that we have a record for. this is really interesting because it allows us to kind of recreate its path through the area. this is just the area off of north carolina, the delmarva peninsula here.

as you can see, these are the vessels that were sunk. it was quite successful. i think it was the most successful of any of the vessels that were lost -- or that were operating in this area. i'll focus more specifically on one of the vessels that we think has potential to be discovered, the harpathian. this thing was kind of just cleaning up here. there was no convoy system in place yet in this area so it really kind of operated uncontested. again, this column here, you can see that the vast majority of these were using bombs. so this is where they would actually flag down the vessel and go aboard, put people ashore, and then detonate. however, some of them were not as lucky. you can see the ones where there were torpedo attacks or under shell fire. typically had a much higher loss of life. they generally tried to avoid that when possible.

the u-140. this was a u-cruiser that was 300 feet long. it was almost 100 feet longer than most of the u-boats that were operating in world war ii. although these vessels were all slightly different in type and they weren't quite as standardized. shorter range but still plenty of range to get across the ocean and do some damage along the coast here. it had four torpedo tubes in the bow and two in the stern. this one was built as a military vessel initially and so it had more armament. this is a reconstruction of its war patrol here. you can see across the atlantic, had more attacks on its way over. so we won't focus on those as much as we will on the ones here off the coast. but again, not quite as successful as the u-151 but still quite successful in sinking and damaging vessels.

the u-117. this was a mine laying u-boat. they were very -- this was very success f successful in part of the chesapeake bay. these mining missions they would undertake were really more of a nuisance operation than an operation where they really believed that they would have any significant success. but as soon as a port was mined or there was perception the ports could be mined, it would change and complicate the tactics all up and down the coast. so it was successful in that, that just generating that notion of a threat of mines would cost considerable more on the part of the u.s. to try and negotiate that threat. again, this is a big one. 290, almost 300 feet long. you can see the difference here. the 14 knots on the surface, 7

knots submerged. this gap would close a little bit as you get into world war ii so these weren't quite as able to operate kwund water as much as they were later on. they'd generally hide under water, stationary, and wait for ships to come across their path and sort of launch this sneak attack, rather than operating and maneuvering under water. this is the reconstruction of its operation here on the coast. it sunk "the merlot." that's one of the more interesting stories that we'll talk about. it's still yet to be found but we're hoping to identify that. this gives you just a quick idea of the comparative successes of the three u-boats that operated here. the amount of tonnage that was lost, the different types of technology that was used to actually sink the vessels. shellfire, bombs and torpedos.

this gives you a good cross section of the u-boat tactics that were happening in the area. so the first merchant ship that we'll talk about that was sunk, "the harpathian" it was a british ship, 380 feet, operating just south of the virginia line. when it started receiving some shellfire, then was torpedoed. just to give you an idea of the difference in some of these tactics, when "the harpathian" was torpedoed, the crew abandoned ship. there was no loss of life but one of the surgeons on-board was injured pretty severely. he was actually taken on board the u-boat that attacked it, they patched him up, they gave him a bunch of tobacco and some beef jerky and things like this and pointed him to shore and said, head that way and you'll be all right. and they finished off "the

harpathian" to put it on bottom. again, there was no loss of life here and it was a fairly cordial way to sink someone's ship. again, this one here is a little farther north on hatteras. the continental shelf sticks out a little bit further in this area so we believe this wreck should be in something like 130 to 200 feet of water. it's still a manageable area. this ship was sunk by the u-140. this was a pretty spectacular event. it was the only -- it was the only loss the u.s. coast guard had during world one 1. it was sailing south from new york folk, coming around cape hatteras around diamond shoals when it started getting shelled by the 140 which is an alarming thing to have happen to a