Dokument: Unterwasser Festung R’lyeh - 2047 - 8/10
AKA - Document: Underwater Fortress R’lyeh
Tantalizing what-if footnote in World War II history.
Between October and December 1944, the HMS Helford, frigate in the South Pacific, discovered wreckage of a German submarine, U-603.
To this day, anything related to the incident remains classified by the Admiralty.
Such as, what was a British frigate doing in the South Pacific? Aside from its commander (Charles George Cuthbertson), nothing is known of HMS Helford.
Fortunately, recently unearthed materials near Wewelsburg Castle provide a glimpse into the German side of the mystery.
U-603, reported missing in February 1944, had been sent midway between New Zealand and the southern tip of South America.
Aside from crew and Kapitän Hans-Joachim Bertelsmann, there were two scientists, an anthropologist, an archaeologist, a linguist, and Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, reported to have been assassinated in 1942.
By 1944, the war was going badly for Germany, but this unit was following clues written by a reclusive Rhode Island scholar. Supposedly, there were undersea ruins and a force of unspeakable power at the coordinates 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W.
In the vast nowhere of the South Pacific, the area was known as R’lyeh.
Apparently, U-603 found the ruins, titanic in scale. A yawning entrance, equally immense, appeared to descend.
According to the dive team, within the structures were compartments, inexplicably dry.
That, and there was “something.”
The final transmission from the u-boat indicated that Heydrich and specialists were going into the ruins, with the intent of subduing and controlling the “something” that had been found.
At that point, the documentary sidesteps into a trove of speculation, theories and nonsensical, Cassandra like warnings that become ludicrously far-fetched. And tiresome.
This is packed with newsreel footage, maps, vintage radio messages, superb drawings, a few reenactments, and a gallery of talking heads.
The first 3/4 of this is outstanding. The final twenty minutes were, frankly, preposterous.
I docked my score a point for that. That said, I added a point for the sheer incongruity in the producers choice of narrator: Robin Leach.
A sample of the prose, delivered in his over the top voice, “… deeper into the ghastly, gargantuan chapel of grotesqueries and grim menace …” or “… as a coruscating crescendo splashed flames into minds shattered by the crepuscular crypt poised over the chasm of …”
Pure lunacy, and a must-see documentary!