One day our group ran into a couple of French Navy divers based in Cherbourg who told us about the ocean liner Leopoldville sunk about 7 miles off the main harbour entrance to Cherbourg that was sunk on D-Day. None of our records or charts showed such a ship. We contacted a local dive club and made arrangements to dive the ship.

The dive was difficult to say the least. The water was cold and the currents fast. We arrived at the massive 575 foot long ship at 145 feet deep which was on its side resting on the bottom which at that location was 200 feet- deeper than anyone of us wanted to go. The ship is almost totally intact and in very good state of preservation. We only had about 15 minutes of time on the wreck before having to go up and decompress. I saw dozens of American Army helmets and rifles without their wooden stocks and parts of boots.

What surprised me was that nobody in Cherbourg knew anything about the wreck or what had happened to it. When I got back to London I checked around at Lloyds and found out nothing about it nor when it was sunk. No records from the D-Day landings showed any shipwreck off the harbour of Cherbourg on that day or the following days. Over the years I had occasionally checked books to see if there was any mention of the wreck but I never came upon one reference.

Then while on a business trip to the United States I turned on the History Channel in my hotel room and saw this documentary about the sinking of the SS Leopoldville. I could hardly believe my eyes. 800 had died on this ship and their deaths had been listed for more than 50 years as 'missing in action.' Even the families of the men who died on this ship knew anything about this- to make it worse- many of these families had spent years after the war writing their congressmen and the army for any details of their missing sons only to receive form letters in return promising to send on any new information about them from German records or the Red Cross POW records. Many of the families thought their sons had been captured and hoped for years that they would eventually turn up in a displaced persons camp behind the Iron Curtain or in European hospitals.

After the sinking of the Leopoldville the soldiers who survived the shipwreck- there were almost 1500- were put on the frontline and ordered not to mention or write anything about the sinking to their families back home, even their letters were censored by their own officers. After the war, these same survivors were threatened with retroactive dishonorable discharges or cutting off of GI benefits if they ever told anyone of the sinking of the ship.

The film shows that several survivors were contacted by the families of the dead men for information about their dead sons but they kept their secret for 50 years.

The ship was sunk by a German submarine on Christmas Eve 1944 and the high death rate was due to American harbour authorities at the time basically not at their posts on Christmas Eve. These soldiers were being rushed to the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium so the whole story was hidden behind the massive battle story coming out at the time. The coverup was approved all the way up to Eisenhower, the Pentagon, and Admiralty the latter holding all the documents on the sinking in their secret file up to 1996.

It is a sad but very powerful story well told and researched and a lesson to us about what governments can hide from their own people when they decide to cover up their errors with the secret stamp.