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The speakers, members of the TVE program "Al filo de lo imposible", presented the results of their investigations into the sinking of ships in front of the Gulf of San Jorge during the First World War.
The College of Industrial Technical Engineers of Tarragona (CETIT) hosted Wednesday, December 21, the video conference "The Forgotten War of Tarragona", which was followed by about a hundred people, simultaneously, from the headquarters of Tarragona and Tortosa. The act, presented by the Dean of the College, Santiago Crivillé, had the valuable testimony of two members of the television space team "Al filo de lo imposible", Josep Maria Castellví and Josep Guarro, who go To make an approach to the exhaustive research work they have carried out on the shipwreck of boats on the Tarragona coast during the First World War.
His research work has been included in a book entitled "The Secret War of the Mediterranean". The authors' explanations were accompanied by different video material, and later, attendees could see the documentary produced by the speakers for the "Al filo de lo imposible" program of TVE.
His work is based on the underwater explorations that Castellví and Guarro have done in recent years in front of the Golf de Sant Jordi, between Ametlla de Mar and Hospitalet de l'Infant, where the remains of dozens of merchant ships rest, sunk by German submarines. This enclave was chosen preferentially to make the attacks because it is an area that left the limit of the territorial waters of Spain, which was a neutral country during the First World War.
Human catastrophes hidden under the sea
Merchant ships of the allied side: English, French and Norwegian, were the main target of the submarines. The boats are at a great depth: between 75 and 105 meters. This has hampered the work of divers and investigators, who have been able to locate, among other important findings, the remains of a French flag vessel that was sunk by a German submarine in a bloody episode of the First War World Cup that ended with the death of 352 people. Among these were many Catalans between the crew and many passengers who were Spanish emigrants. This is the largest catastrophe documented in this area during the war conflict.
The speakers explained how their research work was also moved out of the sea, to diverse centers of documentation located in places like the United States, where are the logbooks of the German submarines. In this way, they could contrast and verify their information and bring light to the popular beliefs of the area, not always fully correct, about what the waters of the Gulf of Saint George hide at many meters deep.
The event also revealed the importance that the different states began to grant to engineers and their authors: engineers, in the field of naval technology and the unstoppable race to be leaders in this field, at a time of state reaffirmation and recomposition of borders.
