It was the night of Oct. 6, 1941, in the Straits of Gubal in the southern Red Sea. Like most of the crew of the hybrid steam-sail ship SS Thistlegorm, moored in the safe haven in Egyptian waters off the shallow reef, merchant seaman John McKai was sleeping on the deck. There was no air conditioning, of course, and the Red Sea is the world's northernmost tropical sea.
The ship was bound for Alexandria, loaded with supplies for the British 8th Army -- Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's "Desert Rats" fighting in North Africa -- but had been forced to wait for two weeks because of a collision in the Suez Canal that blocked the entrance. Its escort, the light cruiser HMS Carlisle, was flanking it in deeper waters.
The supplies -- trucks, motorbikes, rifles, ammunition -- would never reach the 8th Army. In fact they are still in pretty much the same place, only now they are 30 meters below the surface, and the marine ecosystem has, over the intervening 65 years, colonized the wreckage.