Lucky ending to Second World War underwater mystery
Tim Taylor was about to end the mission. His team had scoured the seabed off Japan with autonomous underwater vehicles, which are essentially high-tech drones, without a hit. His ship now needed repairs, and a $7-million (U.S.) drone had just reported an error on its latest dive.
All that remained was to download the data from that drone before heading hundreds of kilometres back to shore.
That’s when they spotted it: an unusual reading on the ocean floor, more than 400 metres deep. The next day, another submersible with high-definition cameras went to investigate.
The images it beamed back left no doubt about what Taylor’s team had found: a hulking ship lay rusting in the pitch-black water. As the camera rounded the bow and panned to the bridge, an eerily preserved plaque came into view: USS Grayback.
“It was amazing. Everyone was excited,” Taylor said in an interview. “Then you realize there are 80 men buried there and it’s a sobering experience.”
Taylor’s discovery on June 5 solved an enduring 75-year-old mystery about the fate of the USS Grayback, one of the Second World War’s most effective submarines. The U.S. Navy confirmed on
Nov. 10 that Taylor’s team, part of a group dedicated to finding the 52 American submarines lost in action during the war, found Grayback’s final resting place in the ocean off Okinawa, Japan.
The news brought closure to relatives of the sailors lost that day.
“There’s a book I read, and it said these ships are known only to God,” Gloria Hurney, whose uncle Raymond Parks died on the Grayback, told ABC News. “But now we know where the Grayback is.”
The Grayback’s final mission started
Jan. 28, 1944, according to the navy’s official history, when it left Pearl Harbor on its 10th combat tour. Commissioned in 1941, the Tambor-class sub had spent the war patrolling the South Pacific and South China Sea. The Grayback sank more than a dozen Japanese ships in all, the New York Times reported.
On Feb. 24,1944, the sub reported sinking two Japanese cargo ships days earlier and was ordered back to replenish its torpedo supply. But it never arrived in Midway.
After the war, the Navy used Japanese military records to try to piece together a history of its lost subs, and pinpointed the final resting place as about 160 kilometres east-southeast of Okinawa, the Times reported.
In 2010, Taylor, an undersea explorer and CEO of a New York-based firm that provides autonomous underwater vehicles, discovered the USS R-12, which sank in an accident off Key West, Fla., in 1943.
He set up a privately funded group called the Lost 52 Project, dedicated to using new technology to find long-lost Second World War subs. Along with his wife, fellow explorer Christine Dennison, his team found three more vessels before tackling the Grayback.
In this case, he relied on a key discovery by Yutaka Iwasaki, a systems engineer in Kobe, Japan, who works with Taylor’s team as an amateur researcher. Last year, while poring over original Japanese military documents, he found reports showing that on Feb. 27, 1944, a Japanese aircraft had dropped a 226kilogram bomb on the Grayback. The co-ordinates given in that report suggested the navy had made a crucial error when translating the co-ordinates where the sub was attacked.
“It was off by one digit,” Taylor said. “That changed the location by more than 100 miles.”