[After more than 80 years hidden beneath the waves off Rio de Janeiro, the location of a Brazilian troop transport ship torpedoed and sunk by Nazi Germany has been definitively confirmed by Brazil’s navy.
The wreck of the Vital de Oliveira was initially discovered in 2011 by a pair of brothers, Jose LuÃz and Everaldo Popermeyer Meriguete. However, the Brazilian navy had not been able to confirm whether the hulk lying 45 kilometers from the coast was indeed the ship in question, until a scientific expedition used sonar imaging to confirm the location on January 16.
As part of the expedition, the navy used multi-beam and side-scanning sonar to create a detailed visualization of the seafloor, revealing the outline of the Vital de Oliveira in a side-scanning sonar image. The research vessel that confirmed the wreck’s location is also called the “Vital de Oliveira.”
The Vital de Oliveira was a civilian ship, built in 1910 and outfitted as an auxiliary naval craft when Brazil entered World War II on the side of the Allies. It was transporting supplies, sailors, and soldiers along the Brazilian coast when a German U-boat struck its stern with a torpedo just before midnight on June 19, 1944. Of the 270 souls aboard, 99 perished.
The sinking of the Vital de Oliveira was the navy’s “most major loss” during the war, according to naval historian Roberto Sander, who wrote that the ship was the only Brazilian vessel lost with all hands. More than 60 years after the events, Sander inferred that the locations of many Brazilian ships remain unknown, including those that remain at the bottom of the ocean.
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