CH5 - Sunken Warships: Secrets from the Deep - Series 1 (2023)

This First Season of eight-part series follows the stories of four remarkable warships. Once titans of the sea, they now litter the seabed, their histories lost to the waves - until now. The twentieth century bore witness to some of the most devastating naval battles in history. Hundreds of thousands of men and women served in some of the largest armadas ever assembled, as, from the Arctic Sea to the South Pacific, colossal battleships met in desperate conflict alongside aircraft carriers, submarines and destroyers. These warships symbolised a nation's power on the world stage. With each generation, they grew more powerful and advanced. These were machines of war that inspired both awe and terror.
But many of these ocean titans did not survive. Naval warfare was always evolving, and what was once groundbreaking was soon obsolete. Ships were destroyed by gunfire, torpedoes, and bombs, often with catastrophic loss of life.

Part 1: Scharnhorst: Hitler's Lucky Ship
In a short but dramatic career the Nazi battleship Scharnhorst became one of the most feared warships of the Second World War. She sank the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and became the scourge of Allied Convoys in the North Atlantic. Then, when under threat of destruction, Scharnhorst escaped back to Germany through the English Channel in one of the most audacious naval operations in the entire war. But her luck would finally run out in the freezing waters of the Arctic, in a deadly battle with the British battleship Duke of York.

Part 2: The Hunt for USS Scorpion
The loss of the Skipjack-class nuclear powered submarine USS Scorpion is one of the greatest maritime mysteries of the 20th Century. When she disappeared in 1968, the Scorpion was one of the most modern and deadliest attack submarines the world had ever seen. Following a huge search and rescue operation the wreck was finally located at a depth of just under 10,000 feet. But speculation over the cause of her loss continues to this day. Was it a faulty torpedo, a fire within the submarine's batteries, or even a deadly confrontation with America's cold war rival, the Soviet Union?

Part 3: HMS Edinburgh: The Ship of Gold
For centuries, explorers have searched inside shipwrecks for gold, but there has never been a treasure trove as valuable - or as difficult to recover - as that lost in the waters of the Barents Sea in 1941. British light cruiser HMS Edinburgh was assigned the dangerous mission of escorting an Arctic convoy to the Soviet Union. But on her trip home, laden with Russian gold, the warship was attacked by a German U-boat. Edinburgh's fight for survival and the audacious operation launched to recover the gold decades later tell a remarkable forgotten story of bravery above and below the sea.

Part 4: The Unsinkable USS Nevada
USS Nevada was a legend in the United States Navy. She was the only American battleship to raise steam during the deadly Japanese attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbour and managed to survive the assault despite suffering appalling torpedo and bomb damage. Nevada's guns would go on to support the D-Day landings in Europe and those in the Pacific at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. But despite her exemplary service, at the end of the war, she was selected as a target ship for the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. But even a nuclear bomb couldn't sink Nevada…