US Identifies Nine Missing WWII Airmen
DGH
DGH
This was a response to an earlier post, but apparently the earlier post
has been lost by usenet.
- - - -
DGH wrote:
>
DGH
I think the post this was supposed to reflect was one posted on June 29
of this year mentioning the missing airmen. How it showed up now is
unknown to me.
betsyb
"DGH" <peri...@eudoramail.com> wrote in message
news:ds0ni2pgrsjeo0efn...@4ax.com...
>
Is this the article you are referring to?
Sonar may have found sunken WWII sub
FAMILY: Three brothers have searched Aleutian waters for ship their father
commanded.
adn.com story photo
A sonar image shows what may be the USS Grunion. (Photo by AP Williamson &
Associates via Bruce Abele)
adn.com story photo
The USS Grunion is shown shortly after its launching in 1942. Recent sonar
images may have located it off Kiska Island. (Photo by Electric Boat Co. via
Bruce Abele and The Associated Press)
By JEANNETTE J. LEE
The Associated Press
(Published: October 2, 2006)
Underwater sonar images of a black shape against a background of grainy
monochrome are safely stored on two computer hard drives at Bruce Abele's
home in Newton, Mass.
Blurred by odd shadows and striations, the silhouettes are the biggest clues
in more than 60 years to the fate of his father's World War II submarine,
the USS Grunion, which sank near the remote islands at the tip of Alaska's
Aleutian chain.
For decades, relatives of the Grunion's 70 lost crewmen had no information
beyond fragmented U.S. Navy records, and a few rumors, about where and why
the sub went down.
They knew the Grunion had sunk two Japanese submarine chasers and heavily
damaged a third in July 1942 near Kiska, one of two Aleutian islands
occupied by the Japanese. They knew her last official radio message to the
sub base at Dutch Harbor, on July 30, 1942, described heavy enemy activity
at Kiska Harbor. They knew she still had 10 of her 24 torpedoes during that
communication. They knew Dutch Harbor responded with an order to return to
the base, but they don't know if Grunion ever received it.
Until a few years ago, the clues were too sparse to justify a search, said
Abele, whose father, Mannert Abele, was the Grunion's commander.
"We really didn't do anything about it because there was nothing, no
information," Abele said. "What were we going to do?"
Abele and his two brothers all married and had children. Bruce, the oldest,
started working in computers in the late 1950s and later invested in
Boston-area real estate. Brad, the middle son, owned a management recruiting
business and John helped found the multibillion dollar medical equipment
company Boston Scientific Corp.
Four years ago, a man who had heard about the Grunion's disappearance
e-mailed Bruce the links to several Grunion Web sites.
One site held an entirely new clue, a note from a Japanese model ship
builder who said he thought he knew what had happened to the Grunion.
John Abele contacted the man, Yutaka Iwasaki, who translated and sent him a
report written in the 1960s by a Japanese military officer who served in the
Aleutians. A maritime magazine had recently reprinted the report.
It described a confrontation between a U.S. submarine and the officer's
freighter, the Kano Maru, on July 31, 1942, about 10 miles northeast of
Kiska -- the Grunion's patrol area.
The sub dispatched six or seven torpedoes. All but one bounced off the boat
without exploding, or missed, the officer wrote, although the hit knocked
out his engines and communications. He said he returned fire with an
8-centimeter deck gun, and believed he had sunk the sub.
Japanese troops took over Kiska and Attu in early June 1942, just as the
Allies were winning the battle of Midway. The U.S. Navy was shoring up its
defenses in the central Pacific, but managed to assign more than a dozen
submarines to the waters around Kiska at the end of the month, according to
declassified Navy orders.
The Abeles began investigating the identity of the sub in the Kano Maru
officer's report.
They contacted Robert Ballard, discoverer of the Titanic. He declined to
participate in a search, but briefed the Abeles on the complications of
searching for deep-sea wrecks. Geological formations sometimes conceal a
vessel; it could be perched precariously on an undersea cliff; the water
pressure and landing impact could have broken the Grunion into small pieces,
making it harder to find.
They also hired a marine survey firm, Williamson and Associates, for an
expedition to Kiska in August. The Seattle-based company focuses on mapping
ocean and river bottoms for oil and cable companies, government agencies and
academic institutions and occasionally explores for wrecks.
Williamson at first told the Abeles that surveying the tip of the Aleutian
archipelago would be too expensive, Bruce Abele said, but after six months
of negotiating, the firm agreed to send sonar technicians and equipment
aboard a Bering Sea crab boat to the frigid waters at the base of Kiska
volcano.
The U.S. Navy, citing lack of resources, is not involved in the search and
the Abeles prefer to keep the cost to themselves.
The Aquila, carrying more than a dozen crew members and sonar surveyors, set
out from Dutch Harbor on Aug. 6, said Pete Lowney, a family friend from
Newton who joined the crab fishing fleet in Dutch Harbor more than a decade
ago. Lowney has fished king and snow crab for years under the Aquila's
captain, Kale Garcia.
The conical volcanoes of the far western Aleutians seem to drop straight
into the sea. Even in summer, rain, fog and vicious winds envelop the tiny
islands.
Near the end of July 1943, for instance, the fog clung so thick around Kiska
that 5,183 Japanese troops and civilians evacuated from the harbor without
drawing fire from any of the surrounding U.S. battleships. The military
realized a distant three weeks later that Kiska was deserted, but only after
35,000 Allied troops had spent eight days searching the fog-cloaked island,
with 24 killed by friendly fire, according to the National Park Service.
For more than two weeks, the Aquila carefully towed a sonar cable from east
to west and back again inside a 240-square-mile grid that the survey team
had plotted using information from naval archives and the Kano Maru
officer's account. The crew worked in shifts to keep the search going 24
hours a day, Lowney said.
Sonar images can deceive even those who interpret them for a living.
Elongated boulders look like submarines; outcrops resemble ship's prows.
"It's a rocky seascape," said Art Wright, survey manager for Williamson. "We
went over the areas several times to differentiate between rock and ship and
look at things from three to four different aspects."
They looked first for the Japanese destroyer Arare, sunk by the U.S.
submarine Growler, to test the sonar and see what a known wreck would look
like against the seafloor. The sonar captured shapes that appeared to be two
halves of the Arare, Wright said.
There were several false "eureka" moments, Lowney said.
"We put down the sonar and I thought I saw two destroyers and got excited,"
he said ruefully. "After that point, I stopped jumping to conclusions."
In mid-August, the sonar picked up a 290-foot-long object with the sharp
angles and jutting shadows of something man-made wedged into a terrace on
the steep underwater slope of the volcano.
The Grunion, however, was 312 feet long. The Williamson team believes the
bow may have plowed beneath a mat of thick sediment, hence the apparent
shortage of about 20 feet. Skid marks show the vessel slid to rest about
1,000 meters from the surface, Wright said. Over the years, earthquakes
along the tectonic subduction zone could have piled on more debris, he said.
Wright, a retired Navy captain who has worked with Williamson since 1986, is
95 percent sure the shadowy images are those of the vanished sub. The
Grunion is the only known sunken vessel in the area and the sonar captured
the distinct outline of a submarine conning tower, he said.
"If our target is not the Grunion, where is she?" Wright said.
The Abeles remain circumspect about the find, saying they need more proof of
the vessel's identity.
"Although it's very encouraging at the moment, it's dangerous to say,
'Absolutely, we have it,'" Bruce Abele said in August. But they have enough
faith in the wreck to send out a second expedition next summer, this time
with a remote-controlled underwater camera to identify the vessel and try to
reconstruct her sinking.
The Kentucky Wizard
> "DGH" <peri...@eudoramail.com> wrote in message
> news:ds0ni2pgrsjeo0efn...@4ax.com...
> >
>
> Is this the article you are referring to?
> Sonar may have found sunken WWII sub
> FAMILY: Three brothers have searched Aleutian waters for ship their
> father commanded.
> adn.com story photo
> A sonar image shows what may be the USS Grunion. (Photo by AP
> Williamson & Associates via Bruce Abele)
>
I'm glad someone came up with the story. For a moment there, I thought we
all were supposed to point up toward the sky at the same time and yell;
"There they are!!".
© The Wiz ®
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