Scott here with another episode of the History on Blog Podcast.

The Titanic is history's most famous shipwreck, but it wasn't the only ship of its kind.

The White Star Line built two other nearly identical ships, the RMS Olympic and the RMS Britannic.

The Olympic carried passengers until 1935 and could be visited today. The Britannic sank only four years after the Titanic, off the Greenannic. The Olympic carried passengers until 1935 and could be visited today. The

Britannic sank only four years after the Titanic off the Greek island of Kia in the

Aegean Sea and was likely sunk due to striking a German mine while serving as a hospital ship

during World War I. It sank in only 55 minutes compared to 160 for the Titanic, but despite

the faster sinking, only 30 of the 1,066 passengers died because the

Olympic had better lifeboat procedures, sank in more of the waters, and was closer to the

land, and everyone on that ship was prepared for a sinking because the thought of that

happening definitely wasn't inconceivable.

While the wreckage of the Titanic is two miles below the surface and

rapidly deteriorating, the Britannic is much more accessible, it's only 400 feet down, and it remains

largely intact. It's in shallow enough waters that divers can reach it, although subversibles

do most of the investigation work. What can this ship tell us about the sinking of the Titanic,

the lives of its passengers in the early 20th century, and whether something nefarious happened that caused it to sink, as some people claim,

like possible German sabotage. These are the questions that today's guest Simon Mills

tried to answer when he bought the wreck of the Britannic in 1996. He's a maritime historian who's

coordinated multiple expeditions into the underwater wreckage and most recently finished

internal surveys in 2021 and 2023. He's also the author of the new book Inside the Britannic,

which is the sum of decades of work covering every inch of the ship. We discuss exactly how

it sank, what happened during the frantic 50 minutes if it's sinking, what happened to the

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