Scuba Diver Australasia + Ocean Planet
THE LOST FLEET OF TRUK LAGOON
The biggest graveyard of lost ships in the world, Truk Lagoon is a Mecca for wreck diving enthusiasts
One of the decisive battles of WWII left this world of lost ships to gather life beneath the waves
As we finished one of the best wreck dives
I have ever done, our boat released its mooring and sailed for about 10 minutes while we chatted enthusiastically about what we had just seen. Before we could even get it all out, we arrived at the next wreck. Which was just as good. This was the norm, apparently, but took a little of getting used to.
Welcome to Truk Lagoon, undoubtedly the WWII wreck diving capital of the world.
Staring out at the tranquil lagoon during our surface interval, it is hard to imagine the carnage that took place here over 70 years ago. Besides the rusted heavy defence guns that Nature promptly reclaimed, it appears as if little remains of the island’s military past. But of course, nothing could be further from the truth. For, at the bottom of the lagoon lay a snapshot of history, a place frozen in time, where there rested a Japanese fleet of over 40 ships.
On the morning of February 17, 1944, Japanese soldiers and sailors got a rude awakening after a night of partying. American planes from the carriers Enterprise, Yorktown, Essex, Intrepid, and Bunker Hill of Task Force 58, swooped down at the first light of day and began to strafe, bomb and torpedo anything of military importance. Operation Hailstone had begun, Japan’s “Pearl Harbor”.
The surprise attack destroyed almost every plane on the island and by the second day, every ship of significance was sunk as well. The strategic worth of Truk had dropped to zero literally over night.
From then on, the road to the Marianas and Saipan was open for the American forces. And it is from Tinian, an island Southwest of Saipan, where the Enola Gay took off to drop the atomic bombs which ended the war. As the world moved on and recovered from the horrors of WWII, the wrecks of Truk rested silently at the bottom of the lagoon, frozen in the moment they sank.
For many years, they lay there, largely forgotten by the world above.
It wasn’t until the 1960s, during an outbreak of crown-of-thorns starfish in the Pacific, that the Truk Department of Fisheries embarked on a programme to check on the explosive growth of this animal and how it was threatening the reefs around Truk. Men from the islands were trained to dive in the hopes of manually eradicating the starfish, and just like that, scuba diving arrived in Truk.
One of these young divers was Kimiuo Aisek, a man who would later be recognised as the most eminent figure in diving in Truk, and the local custodian of the sunken Japanese Marus. As a Micronesian, Kimiuo had an innate instinct for navigation and for noticing little secrets that the sea tries to tell.
One day, on the way back from fighting the crown-of-thorns starfish, he noticed a discolouration of the lagoon bed. He asked the boat to stop and dived in. The rest, as they say, is history, for he had stumbled upon the Yamagiri Maru.
The ship had not been seen since the day she sank, let alone been explored on scuba. Everything, including the remains of hundreds of sailors, are still right where they were on that fateful February day in 1944.
I can only imagine what it must have felt like to know that you are the first to set eyes on these remains, and that every turn you make becomes a discovery. Word of the find soon spread and Truk was suddenly “rediscovered”, prompting improvements in scheduled flights, which brought increasing numbers of divers, and putting Truk on the diving map.
Kimiuo went on to open the first dive shop in Truk and was involved in the discovery of many more missing wrecks though the 70s and 80s.
I had gone to Truk on assignment to photograph some of these wrecks using the “light stacking” technique that I have developed over the years in my studio work. Heading out to the dive site, I was immediately puzzled by the lack of mooring buoys that I thought would have been used to mark these wrecks. In fact, there is not a single buoy on any of the sites. Instead, my guide used the positions of distant islands to triangulate and pinpoint the drop point for each site!
And here I was, getting lost with a GPS…
Once there, he would jump in with a rope and secure our boat to a submerged mooring. When asked why they go to all this effort, he simply says that it is to protect the wrecks from looters, a sad fact that I would come to understand during my stay in Truk.
We had decided to dive the Nippo Maru, one of the more photogenic wrecks within the lagoon, and at 35 metres, she is relatively shallow by Truk standards. She comes complete with a battle tank on her top deck, field artillery guns on wheels, two trucks and a beautiful bridge with the telegraph still intact. There could not be a more perfect wreck for“light stacking”. While she is a medium size freighter, as you get close, her size is still awesome. She rests listing to portside and the first thing you naturally do is to go right into the bridge. Beyond that, at about 40 metres, you will see the unmistakable shape of a Japanese tank.
That was what I had come for, and so, with one eye on my deco limit and the other looking through my camera, we started the extremely complex process of taking several images with the camera on a tripod for the “light stacking” effect. (Easier said than done at 40 metres on air!) We shot it as fast as we could, and proceeded to explore the shallower parts of the wreck with the little bottom time we had left. Over the course of the week, I went on to penetrate and explore deeper through engine rooms, workshops, and passageways that I could barely fit my camera through. The sight of human remains in those rusted corridors is something I will never forget.
In the evenings, I would chat with my guide and so naturally asked questions about the looting issue. That’s when it really hit me, the future that awaits this graveyard of sunken ships: Truk is fighting a war with time that it can never win. The ocean will inevitably reclaim these pieces of history as the steel corrodes. And what we see now, as amazing as it still is, is certainly a far cry from what is was when Kimiuo Aisek first gazed upon these wrecks.
To compound this gradual disintegration, the fame of Truk has also brought with it dreaded trophy and artefact hunters. In fact, it was revealed to me that many of the small items that my guide would once bring his guests to see are lost every other day. It has become so bad that guides sometimes resort to hiding new finds so that random divers will not remove them, and they won’t end up in someone’s private collection. Moving anything on a wreck is certainly not “best practice”, but with no one actively policing every dive on every wreck, it is perhaps a necessary evil.
It is indeed sad that this battle with time is one we can never win. Someday, all this history will be lost to the ocean, but until then let’s all visit them responsibly and show the respect that these wrecks deserve.
Everything, including the remains of hundreds of sailors, are still right where they were on that fateful February day in 1944