More help needed to identify a British annual

[Studio263]

Hello everyone, this is my first post.

I'm trying to identify a comic book annual that I used to enjoy reading at school. It was an army school in Germany so British comics and annuals were difficult to get hold of, most of what the school had must have been brought by soldier's families who had been posted there and donated once they were sent back home. Because of this most of them were old and very well used!

I was at that school in 1982 but the annuals they had were much older that that, I'd guess that most of them dated from the 70s. It wasn't one of the big comic titles (Beano, Dandy etc) and contained both comic strip characters and adventure stories. Some of the pages were in colour, some were black and white. A story I remember was about a sunken ship which was loaded with gold. The heroes of the piece wanted to recover this but when they got there they found that another group, possibly aliens, had got there first. They had a big machine which was sucking up everything on the sea bed and then sifting out the gold. The machine was red and ran on six big grey tyres, the plot was eventually defeated when one of these was punctured and the whole thing flipped upside down.

Does anyone know which annual this was? It's a long shot I know, but I've been wondering about this on and off for years.

[TessaB]

This is the 'Whizzers from Ozz' strip in The Topper Book 1979.

[Al]

Here's one of the pages from this story.