S.S. Thistlegorm

Holds packed with WWII military cargo sit inside a 131-metre ship on white sand at 30 metres. Most trips split the wreck across two dives. The exterior route begins at the stern gun platform at 18m, where the big gun from every classic photograph still points skyward. Easy to miss beside it is the second mount: its protective shield came away sometime after 2011 and now lies on the sand below, which is why most divers remember only one gun.1 From there, divers move along the hull past the gap where the explosion tore the ship apart and the two steam locomotives rest on the seabed at 30m. The scale of the engines only registers when another diver swims alongside for reference. The bow completes the circuit.

The second dive enters the forward cargo holds. Hold 1 and 2 contain the motorcycles and trucks, recognisable after 80+ years despite coral colonisation. Norton 16H and BSA machines sit on their frames. Deeper in, Lee-Enfield rifles stand in rows and ammunition cases remain stacked. Torch beams pick out serial numbers and tyre treads. Silt is the enemy inside: one careless fin stroke can blank the hold for everyone behind you.

The Thistlegorm's reputation rests on a combination no other recreational wreck matches. The cargo is not crates or scrap. It is an identifiable WWII military supply chain frozen mid-transit: motorcycles, trucks, armoured vehicles, rifles, aircraft wings, Wellington boots, and two steam locomotives. The depth range (16-32m) keeps the entire wreck within AOW territory. And Cousteau's 1955 discovery adds a layer of diving heritage few wrecks carry.

The tension between the wreck's significance and its popularity runs through every diver account. Some find it transcendent regardless of crowds. Others note decades of damage from mooring lines and looting. Both are honest. The wreck is diminished and still magnificent.

She was built for the Albyn Line at J.L. Thompson & Sons in Sunderland, yard number 599, and went into the River Wear on 9 April 1940 — 131 metres of new steel, 4,898 gross tons, managed by Allan, Black & Co.2 She made three voyages before her last: to America, to Argentina for grain, and to the West Indies for rum and sugar.3

On 2 June 1941 she left Glasgow with a war cargo for Alexandria — Bedford trucks, Norton and BSA motorcycles, Lee-Enfield rifles, Bren guns, aircraft spares, ammunition, and two LMS Stanier 8F locomotives carried as deck cargo. With the Mediterranean closed she went the long way, round the Cape and up the east coast of Africa to Aden, and then waited. A German mine had been dropped in the Suez Canal and no one was transiting until it was found. She anchored at Safe Anchorage F off Sha'ab Ali and sat there for weeks.3

German aircraft found her first. Heinkel He 111s of II./KG 26, hunting a troopship reported in the area, attacked in the early hours of 6 October 1941. At least one bomb went into Hold No. 4, where the ammunition was, and the explosion tore the ship in two. It threw the locomotives clear of the hull — their boilers, twenty-odd tonnes apiece, ended up sixty to eighty metres out on the sand, where they still lie. She sank in about half an hour.3

Nine men died: five Royal Navy gunners and four merchant crew, from a complement of forty-one. The youngest, Able Seaman Archibald Giffin, was eighteen; so nearly was Rolfe, at seventeen, of the merchant crew. They are named on the Plymouth, Chatham and Tower Hill memorials.43 Seaman Angus McLeay had already jumped when he saw a gunner lying unconscious on the deck; he went back for him, and was awarded the George Medal.5 HMS Carlisle picked up the survivors.3

Jacques Cousteau brought her to public attention in 1955, diving her from Calypso and publishing the account in National Geographic the following February.6 She had never really been lost — the Admiralty chart of 1948 gives her position accurately — but she slipped out of the diving world's view for decades afterwards, until Red Sea operators began running trips again in the 1990s. Egypt designated her an official dive site in 1992.3

What has happened since is the part the survey record documents most sharply. The bell, the safe, the portholes, the telegraph, the ship's clock and a gun traverse handwheel have all gone; the mast was cut away by military divers in the late 1970s; the debris field has doubled to more than twenty-one hectares as mooring lines from vessels of forty tonnes and up work at a hull that was never built to take them. In 2019 the port anchor chain failed and dropped a three and a half tonne anchor onto the wreck. Egypt acceded to the UNESCO underwater heritage convention in 2017, but it protects only remains over a hundred years old, so the Thistlegorm has no legal protection at all.3

The difference between a good Thistlegorm dive and a great one is timing. Day boats from Sharm leave at 5am and arrive mid-morning together. By then, 20+ boats are moored and the holds fill with divers and silt. Liveaboard guests dive at dawn or after dark, when the wreck belongs to them. Night dives are liveaboard-exclusive and widely rated as the most atmospheric way to experience the wreck.

Nitrox is close to essential: at 30-32m, air cuts bottom time sharply and multiple dives per day load nitrogen fast. A torch is mandatory for hold penetration. Deploy an SMB before ascending into the surface traffic above. Currents can strengthen with the lunar cycle, so descend and ascend on the mooring line when conditions are uncertain.