'In search of a submarine"
Mike
By Jeannette J. Lee
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published October 3, 2006
ANCHORAGE, Alaska
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 underwater 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 nearly 5,000 miles west of Massachusetts, near the obscure
islands at the tip of Alaska's Aleutian chain.
For decades, relatives of the Grunion's 70 lost crewmen had no
information beyond fragmented 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 Mr. Abele, whose father, Mannert Abele, was the Grunion's
commander.
"We really didn't do anything about it because there was nothing,
no information," Mr. Abele said. "What were we going to do?"
Mr. 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 Abele 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 thought he had sunk the sub.
Japanese troops took over Kiska and Attu in early June 1942, just
as U.S. forces 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
Inc., for an expedition in August to Kiska. 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.
The Williamson firm 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 licking 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. Mr. 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, Mr. 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, Mr. Wright said.
There were several false "eureka" moments, Mr. 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, Mr. Wright said. Over the
years, earthquakes along the tectonic subduction zone could have piled
on more debris, he said.
Mr. 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?" Mr. 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 during a
brief stop in Anchorage after the three met the crew of the Aquila on
Adak, 275 miles east of Kiska.
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.