Search for Gibraltar wreck diving and sooner or later you will read that you can dive the wrecks of Italy's human torpedo campaign. You cannot. Not one of the ships the Italian frogmen sank between 1941 and 1943 appears on any Gibraltar dive list we could find, and the tanker they rode out of was cut up for scrap in an Italian yard in 1961. The diving here is still worth the trip. It is just that almost everything good about it was put on the seabed on purpose, by a local doctor who started sinking barges off Camp Bay in 1974, and getting in the water legally requires a permit that most travel pages never mention. The campaign itself was real and it was extraordinary. Between September 1941 and August 1943 Italian frogmen and manned torpedo crews hit merchant shipping in Gibraltar harbour, most of it launched from a salvaged tanker moored in neutral Spain. We have written the [full account of the Olterra and the man sent to stop her](/blog/buster-crabb-gibraltar-silent-enemy-frogmen) elsewhere, so this piece is only about what survived it underwater. The short answer is almost nothing. Take RFA Denbydale, the 8,145 ton fleet oiler whose back was broken by a limpet mine on 19 September 1941 and who is often described as sunk. She was patched, spent the rest of the war as a hulk at Gibraltar, and then [arrived at Blyth in Northumberland on 22 July 1957 to be scrapped](https://historicalrfa.uk/rfa-denbydale/). She is not on the bottom. She is razor blades. The [Olterra herself](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_auxiliary_ship_Olterra) went the same way, broken up at Vado Ligure in 1961, with the surviving fittings ending up in Italy rather than here. There is no hatch below the waterline to swim through, because there is no hull. The pattern is not an accident. Gibraltar harbour is a working commercial port and always has been, and a working port does not leave wrecks lying in its own approaches. Ships that go down inside the moles get raised, patched, towed away or cut up, because the alternative is losing a berth. The frogmen attacked the one part of Gibraltar's coast where nothing is allowed to stay sunk. There is a single genuine Second World War wreck that local dive lists agree on, and it is not a ship. An aircraft sits in roughly 35 metres of water and is generally described as a Bristol bomber that came down during the war. It is the only wartime entry on Gibraltar's standard dive inventory. We are going to be careful here, because this is where sites start guessing. The exact type, the squadron and the date of the loss are not something we could pin down from any source we would be willing to cite. If the aircraft is your reason for booking, ask the dive operator to tell you precisely what they think it is before you pay. Here is the real inventory, with the wartime column filled in honestly rather than hopefully. |Site|What it actually is|Depth|Wartime link| |SS Rosslyn|Cardiff steamer of about 3,679 tons, driven onto the South Mole by a southwest gale in February 1916|About 23 m|None. Weather, not enemy action| |SS Excellent|1,082 ton steamer that dragged her anchor into two other ships in February 1888 and sank|About 28 m|None| |482 cable layer|Royal Navy cable laying barge, about 30 m long, sunk on purpose in August 1990|16 m|None. Built long after the war| |Batty's Barge|The second barge of the same reef programme, a short swim from the 482|14 m|None| |Sun Swale|195 ton tug, about 28 m long, sunk as a reef on 16 March 2015|22 m|None| |SS Mount Olive|Steamer lost in 1890, now lying in two separate pieces|20 m and 40 m plus|None| |Bristol aircraft|Wartime aircraft wreck, usually listed as a bomber|About 35 m|Yes, and it is the only one| |Olterra|The frogman base tanker, scrapped at Vado Ligure in 1961|Not in the water|The whole story, and nothing to dive| The [SS Rosslyn](https://www.ministryforheritage.gi/heritage-and-antiquities/ss-rosslyn-1033) is the one most divers rate highest. She was returning from Malta in ballast, dragged her anchor in a gale and foundered on the South Mole, and her bow now stands about 10 metres proud of the seabed with a list to starboard. The [SS Excellent](https://www.ministryforheritage.gi/heritage-and-antiquities/ss-excellent-1030) lies upside down off the detached mole and is the easier of the two to read, which is why it gets used for wreck specialty courses. This is the part of the story that deserves the attention the frogmen get. In the early 1970s the marine life in Gibraltar's southern waters was visibly collapsing. Eric Shaw, a local doctor and diver, proposed building an artificial reef in 1973 to give what was left somewhere to breed. The early attempts were failures worth knowing about. Chained tyres were swept off or buried by sand. Stones did no better. What finally worked was hulls: two barges donated locally and sunk in Camp Bay in 1974, which became [the first artificial reef built in Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibraltar_Artificial_Ree