Saving Southeast Asia’s Sunken Warships

Some 2,000 war and merchant ships were sunk in the waters of Southeast Asia during the Second World War, constituting around ten per cent of the estimated 20,000 vessels lost globally during the conflict. Many of these wrecks – American, Dutch, British, Australian and Japanese – are still there, lying in the territorial waters of what is now Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Timor-Leste.

Eighty years on from the end of the war, many of its battlegrounds and graves have become solemn sites of national remembrance. This is not the case for the sunken warships of Southeast Asia. Today they constitute some of the most challenging heritage sites in the world: politically sensitive, environmentally unstable and long neglected due to the complexities of managing sovereign craft, unexploded ordnance, leaking oil and human remains in foreign waters. It has been all too easy for both flag and coastal states to simply ignore these wrecks. Quietly corroding on the seabed, the vessels are out of sight and out of mind; a problem that was simply too complicated to address in the immediate postwar period.