Recent WW2 discoveries

War History Online has an article on some recent discoveries of things left over:

Seven decades after World War Two ended, artifacts from this period are still being discovered around the globe. These range from fighter airplanes in the desert to almost complete aircraft carriers and battleships lost on the ocean floor for decades.
We are going to look at nine of the most astonishing discoveries that have turned up in the last four years:

The Japanese battleship HIJMS Musashi 

In March of 2015, almost seventy years after the end of World War Two, the sunken Japanese battleship Musashi was located in the Sibuyan Sea, off the coast of the Philippines. Researchers believe they have located the ship after identifying a type 89 gun turret, which was a feature of the Musashi, one of the biggest battleships ever built.
The Japanese ship was the second of the country's Yamato-class ships, which were built by the Imperial Navy and were the heaviest and most powerfully armed ships of World War Two. The Musashi was sunk in a battle with American forces towards the end of 1944.

An RAF Kittyhawk 

After more than seven decades, the body of a missing RAF pilot was discovered in the Egyptian desert. In 1942, the pilot was reported missing when he failed to return back to his base. He was flying a Curtiss Kittyhawk fighter (known as the P-40 in the USAAF), and it was said that the aircraft crashed in the desert. It was initially believed that Flight Sergeant Copping’s aircraft was shot down by the Luftwaffe near the Libya-Egypt border. However, it was later revealed that Copping got lost in a massive sand storm, and after flying disoriented over featureless desert, his plane crashed.
A group of Polish oil workers discovered Copping’s Curtiss in 2012. They quickly reported it to the authorities, who found a partially destroyed aircraft, along with a parachute. This meant that Sergeant Copping somehow survived the crash and attempted to make it on foot. They also concluded that Copping was killed by the smoldering heat of the desert and not by the Luftwaffe.

The USS Independence

In April of 2015, a World War Two-era aircraft carrier was found on the ocean floor near the Farallon Islands off San Francisco, California, and it’s looking great. Despite being underwater since 1951, the USS Independence CVL-22 is “amazingly intact”, said officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).Sonar images even show what could be an airplane sitting in the carrier’s hangar bay. “After 64 years on the seafloor, Independence sits on the bottom as if ready to launch its planes,” James Delgado, maritime heritage director for NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, said in a statement. “This ship fought a long, hard war in the Pacific and, after the war, was subjected to two atomic blasts that ripped through the ship.”
A team from NOAA and Boeing investigated the site, thirty miles off the Northern California coast, where an earlier survey indicated the ship could be located. The Independence was there, nearly three thousand feet below the surface of ocean in the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary.

An I-400 class Japanese mega submarine

In 2013, in the waters off the Hawai'ian island of Oahu, a Japanese mega-submarine was discovered. The I-400 class Japanese mega-submarines were the largest subs of World War Two. It had a hangar in which it could carry three Aichi M6A1 Seiran floatplanes.
The I-400 was completed on 30 December 1944. In April of 1945, it was prepared for the Panama Canal Strike, a Japanese attack plan to destroy the locks of the Panama Canal. But, after Okinawa fell, the plan was cancelled and the fleet planned to attack fifteen American aircraft carriers assembled at Ulithi atoll. However before the Ulithi attack could be launched, Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945, following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.
The crew of the American destroyer to which I-400 surrendered was astounded at the sheer size of the sub. The I-400 was taken to Hawai'i by the Navy for further inspection. After examining it, the American sub USS Trumpetfish scuttled the Japanese sub in the waters near Oahu in Hawai'i using torpedoes, on 4 June 1946. It lay undiscovered for almost seventy years.

In 2012, the remains of a carrier pigeon still carrying a coded message was discovered in a chimney in Surrey, England, having been there for decades. It is thought the contents of the note, once decoded, could provide fresh information from World War Two.
During World War Two, the United Kingdom used about a quarter-million homing pigeons. The Dickin Medal, the highest possible decoration for valor given to animals, was awarded to thirty-two pigeons, including the United States Army Pigeon Service’s G.I. Joe and the Irish pigeon Paddy.

Nazi ‘Nuclear Weapons’ complex in Austria
Suspiciously high radiation levels around the Austrian town of St. Georgen an der Gusen had long fueled theories that there was a buried bunker nearby where the Nazis had tested nuclear weapons during World War Two.
Those suspicions came one step closer to being confirmed in December of 2014, after the opening of a 75-acre underground complex was dug out and granite used to seal off the entrance had been removed.
The weapons facility was believed to have been manned by SS General Hans Kammler and situated near the B8 Bergkristall factory, where the first working jet-powered fighter was created. Sulzer first got wind of the site after seeing references to it in an Austrian physicist’s diary. “Up to 320,000 inmates are said to have died because of the brutal conditions in the subterranean labyrinth,” Sulzer tells the Sunday Times. Those inmates were chosen for skills in physics, chemistry, or other sciences that would advance the Nazis’ quest for nuclear weapons, Sulzer says. Excavation and exploration of this site is still ongoing.

Millions of silver coins from torpedoed ship 

A hoard of silver coins worth £34 million that was sunk by the Germans on board a steamship has been salvaged by a British-led team at a record depth of seventeen thousand feet.
The SS City of Cairo (run by Captain William Rogerson), a mixed cargo and passenger ship belonging to Ellerman Lines, was on an unescorted voyage from Bombay, India to England via Cape Town, South Africa and Recife, Brazil in late 1942. She carried three hundred people, of which 136 were passengers, and a mixed cargo, including some hundred tons of silver coins belonging to the British Treasury.
Spotted by U-68 on 6 November 1942, she was and torpedoed at 2030 hrs. The engines were stopped and preparations made to abandon ship. A second torpedo was fired ten minutes after the first, and the ship sank a few minutes later.
DOS decided to look for the wreck of the SS City of Cairo and, in November of 2011, started operations. This was to be a difficult search as the water depth would exceed five thousand meters, the weather, swell, and currents were known to be challenging, and the presumed site was some thousand miles from the nearest land, in the foothills of the mid-Atlantic ridge.
The salvage was completed in September of 2013, but DOS had only been given permission by the Ministry of Transport to announce it in December of 2014.

Panther tank in basement garage 

In June of 2015, when a prosecutor in Kiel, Germany suspected the existence of war relics in a villa in the town of Heikendrof, Germany, the only way to find out was a police raid. Possession of war relics or weaponry is banned in Germany, and is a prosecutable offense. The raiding party and prosecutors were in awe to find an intact Panther tank in an underground garage, as well as a number of other weapons from the Nazi era.
The villa is owned by a seventy-year-old man with an interest in war relics. Local people regard him as a quiet and conservative citizen. Authorities had long suspected the presence of suspicious items under his possession, especially after the reports that the owner of the villa was seen driving his World War Two tank in 1978.
The tank is now in the procession of the German Federal Police.

ME-262 jet fighter in bomb crater
In October of 2014, members of the Museum Deelen Airbase, near Arnhem in the Netherlands, found a Messerschmitt 262 in a farm field near the airbase. This 262 was shot down on 12 September 1944 near the village of Elden. The pilot, Uffz. Schauder, was killed. The Germans took the wreckage to Deelen and dumped the plane in an bomb crater to hide it. This was the first 262 ever to crash in the Netherlands.