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Post by Karl Welteke on Oct 10, 2010 6:20:00 GMT 8
Navy Tunnels still exist in Mariveles 2010 On the 5th and the 7th Oct. I finally got around looking seriously for the WWII Navy tunnels in Mariveles. An Engineer in the Mariveles Municipality Planning and Development office took me to an elderly gentleman who happened to live very near the entrance of what I call #1 Tunnel. His name is Nerlito Verzosa and he also showed me two more tunnels which I call #3 and #4 tunnel. Friends in the Coastal Defense Study Group (CDSG) had given me a description of these tunnels in 2005 and they jived but Nerlito didn’t mention nor showed me tunnel #2 which is reported filled with garbage and is cemented over according this CDSG description. Here are 34 images: s74.photobucket.com/albums/i265/PI-Sailor/Manila%20Bay%20Forts-Other/Mariveles%20WWII/Navy%20Tunnels%20still%20exist%20in%202010/[img src=" "] [/img] Here is a maybe 2 decade old image of the Mariveles #4 Navy Tunnel, already flooded. It is from my CDSG friend. This tunnel is the closest to the USS Canopus AS-9 position in WWII at Mariveles.
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Post by okla on Oct 10, 2010 8:24:06 GMT 8
Hey Karl...This is good stuff. I had read about a "tunnel being blown just prior to the surrender by Genl King in April 1942", but have never learned anything more about the incident. I have asked Fots if he had ever prowled any tunnels on Bataan, but he pleaded innocent. Thanks for posting. Cheers.
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Post by chadhill on Oct 16, 2010 12:14:51 GMT 8
Karl, what a great job locating those tunnels. I viewed all the pictures on your album.
I'm looking at Captain Sackett's detailed, personal hand drawn map of the Mariveles Bay Harbor area, which is reproduced in Everett Perry's wonderful new book "Ghosts of Canopus" (BTW, I highly recommend this book). The tunnels are depicted on the map, and in the text Skipper Sackett mentions one of them being 148 feet high, 18 feet wide and 200 feet deep where more than 30 torpedoes were stored. He wrote that this tunnel was "inland from the ship and about a mile north". I realize that there were cave-ins and flooding in these tunnels, but can you say if you may have found this particular one, and what condition the entrance was in?
Keep up the great work.
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Post by armyjunk on Oct 17, 2010 0:24:58 GMT 8
Does he really say "148 feet high"? or is that a typo?
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Post by chadhill on Oct 17, 2010 3:32:21 GMT 8
Yes, I wondered about that too, thinking maybe it was 48 feet instead. But it says 148
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Post by buster on Oct 17, 2010 7:47:44 GMT 8
Years ago, in our area, there were always stories about WWII surplus being buried in crates - Jeeps, Harley-Davidsons, spare GMC motors, etc. The stories normally used to start with deep pits being dug...things being driven into the pits etc.
This was a sort of culturally advanced "cargo-cult."
I learned somewhere that the SOP for digging pits in any event was that when a pit was dug by a dozer, it was never dug deeper than the top of the exhaust pipe on top of the dozer, otherwise the pit might fill with carbon monoxide. One can only imagine that some GI paid for that discovery with his life.
I did have a confirmed story about a GI in a rear echelon area being killed when he took a shortcut changing a tyre by splitting a jeep's combat rim without fully letting off the air pressure in the tube. The rim split (as it was intended to do) and hit him in the head. I can't imagine his folks back home being told anything beyond that he was killed in the course of performing his duties.
Irrelevant to the Mariveles tunnels, of course, but it does remind me always not to lose sight of the basic practical considerations.
148 ft as a height of the tunnel is ridiculous, but it might well be its height above sea level. I really don't know. 48 feet probably surely can't be the interior height of a tunnel either, because we are dealing with an emergency storage and air-raid shelter tunnel, not a V-2 factory or U-Boat dock. I can't see any purpose in a tunnel so tall, or practicality in building such. I would expect 14 ft to be more close to the mark, and even that would make it one heck of a big tunnel.
I'd expect a tunnel more in the style of Middleside than Malinta - and Middleside was originally intended to be a far larger tunnel system.
Were do I pay my two cents?
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Post by chadhill on Oct 17, 2010 8:58:59 GMT 8
I can't second guess the 148' height, perhaps they found a convenient natural cave that was quickly available (don't forget that Bataan was volcanic in early times). Also remember that there was not much time left in early 1942 and using what was readily available may have been the practical result. Let's see what turns up. Karl has found some significant historical locales and if a big cave (high cave) isn't one of them, there must be a reason...perhaps it's a censor thing during wartime, or indeed an editor's typo.
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Post by armyjunk on Oct 19, 2010 0:34:43 GMT 8
15 foot is the tallest tunnel in the document I have. one at least 410 feet long in 1942, thats big....
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Post by tomasctt on Oct 19, 2010 9:33:39 GMT 8
Great discovery, karl! Awesome photos. Am I the only one getting goosebumps seeing all this "hidden history"? Looking at the pix, I can't help "seeing" the soldiers and sailors of WW2 walking around doing their job.
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Post by EXO on Oct 19, 2010 13:41:43 GMT 8
As neither of us were there at the building of the tunnels, or have any photos or plans to go on, Karl and I have a pleasant variance of opinion on the profile of the tunnel we were in yesterday.
Our difference is how to tell whether the roof of a tunnel that we see today is original, or is in fact what is left after the original rock has fallen in after an explosion.
There's a portion, getting toward mid-tunnel, where you exit the upper thigh deep water, and have to climb up a rise of rock. The ceiling above also goes up at the same point.
Karl feels that this might be the original profile. I disagree, because I see no reason for having to build the tunnel at anything more than a flat or slightly inclined profile. I also have the theory that an explosion sends its shockwaves equally, and thus can fracture the rock such that it increases the height of the arch. Thus, we may be walking a few feet above the original level, as the top of the arch has fallen down into the void that was once the tunnel.
It's like the Intercept Tunnel in a way. Its concrete liner roof was so thoroughly shattered, when it caved in, and the rock above the concrete liner also caved in, what we are walking on top of is several feet of cave-in, plus the fallen roof, and the roof above is part of a new cave-in produced roof. The roof takes the natural shape of an archway, as the shockwaves are equal in every direction - though once shattered, of course, gravity takes over and the roof falls in to make the effect dome like.
I did see a drill hole at eye-height, but again, I have no idea how much higher I was standing than the original floor.
Any mining engineers out there?
At any rate, I see no reason to disagree with your statement which tend to establish fourteen feet as being more or less the standard size. Width, well that's another practical issue, my two pesos is on a width profile which allows the passage of a single vehicle. A jeep could do it, but from what I saw, this individual tunnel wouldn't have taken anything much larger than that.
My thanks to Karl for a great day, I will let the detailed reports come from him.
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