Vasa comes to surface

The location, salvage and placement of the Regal Warship Vasa (or Wasa) has been a front page item since its first mention. 

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  Nordstjernan of April 27, 1961.

• The location, salvage and placement of the Regal Warship Vasa (or Wasa) has been a front page item since its first mention, and less than a week after this edition (April 27, 1961), the King set foot upon the long-forgotten vessel.

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  Anders Franzén, the man who discovered the Vasa ship on August 25 in 1956. Here photographed after the ship was salvaged, five years later, in 1961.

• Nordstjernan editor Gerhard T Rooth reported from Stockholm. His description of the quick flight - only seven hours to Stockholm! - was just as enthusiastic as his documenting the salvage and final surfacing of the ship.

• The years at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s were truly a “Golden Era” for Sweden, Swedish-America and Nordstjernan. Sweden’s economy was blooming, and relationships between Washington and Stockholm were close, both diplomatically and culturally. Although asserting neutrality, and manufacturing their own arms, warships and aircraft, Sweden’s relationship with US military powers can be related by at least one example: Swedish airplanes were armed with American missiles. There was great cooperation, although this may have only been thoroughly reported in Nordstjernan and kept from leftist-leaning readers in Swedish national newspapers.

• At the forefront of the good international relationships was the fact the Sweden’s own Dag Hammarskjöld was Secretary General of the United Nations. His untimely death in an airplane crash in the Congo was mourned in Washington, D.C., where flags were flown at half mast…an unusual honor for a foreign citizen at that time in history. His passing was cleverly noticed in Moscow, and only a few weeks later, the Soviet Union exploded a 50-megaton nuclear bomb in the atmosphere over the Arctic, only about 1,500 kilometers from Swedish territory, and also send lists of demands to Finland regarding political and territorial matters. These chills of the escalating cold war was seen setting swiftly into the stories reported in Nordstjernan. The gaiety of local events, a decade of proudly spotlighting small sections of Sweden and relating leisurely news about the traditions and customs of the ancestral homeland, was soon replaced with unsettling news of diplomatic strongarming from the Kremlin, led by Kruschev, whose intentions were surely to undermine and shatter the centuries-old alliances of heritage between Sweden and the United States.

• The warship Vasa, built 1626-1628. which sank during her maiden voyage on August 10 in 1628 was discovered by amateur naval archaeologist Anders Franzén August 25 (1956) in Swedish History