How did a World War II `ghost boat' end up in a shallow lake?

If the rumors were true, the remains of a World War II-era boat were partially submerged somewhere in the shallow waters of Lake Shasta in Northern California.

James Dunsdon, a volunteer firefighter who collects military vehicles, was determined to find it. One day last fall, he hiked for miles along the lake’s receding shoreline. Then he spotted it, plainly visible and partly exposed: a remarkably preserved 36-foot military landing craft.

“It just came over the horizon like a ghost,” he said. “There it was with original World War II paint and timbers and steel and in the position with the ramp down.” It was as if the boat had sunk while making a beach landing, he said.

The Higgins boat had once carried American troops into battle during the Allied invasion of Sicily in the summer of 1943, a seminal moment in the war in Europe. It was then deployed in the Battle of Tarawa in the Pacific that fall, when U.S. forces invaded the Japanese-held Gilbert Islands (now part of the nation of Kiribati), according to the ShastaTrinity National Forest, which is part of the U.S. Forest Service.

The boat sank during that battle, in which more than 1,000 U.S. service members were killed, according to Dunsdon, whose research into the boat’s history was cited by the Forest Service. It later was salvaged.

Now Dunsdon and others want to know how the sturdy ship-to-shore craft, which the Forest Service refers to as “the ghost boat,” ended up at the bottom of Lake Shasta, where it might have remained forever if a severe drought had not brought it closer to the surface.

“Someone has to know,” said Gerald Meyer, executive director of the Nebraska National Guard Museum in Seward, Nebraska, which plans to display the boat once it is stabilized enough to transport. “Someone is going to say: ‘I know. I remember Bob bought that boat back in ’54.’ But that person has yet to be found.”

The ramp of the boat was marked with the numbers 31-17, which meant that it had been assigned to the Monrovia, a Navy attack transport ship that had served as Gen. George Patton’s headquarters during the invasion of Sicily, according to the Forest Service. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was also on this ship at that time, the Forest Service said.

About 23,000 Higgins boats were made during World War II, Meyer said, and they were credited with helping to change the way the war was fought by giving American troops easier access to open beaches, where they invaded. Equipped with guns and a stern ramp, the boats were designed to travel in shallow waters and allow fighting forces to disembark quickly. Only about 20 remain today, Meyer said.

“These landing craft were used in every amphibious invasion of World War II,” Meyer said. “To find one 75 years later in the bottom of a lake in California — it really is a miracle.”

The Nebraska National Guard Museum is about 50 miles south of Columbus, Nebraska, the birthplace of Andrew Jackson Higgins, the designer of the Higgins boat who served in the Nebraska National Guard.

Jerry E. Strahan, author of “Andrew Jackson Higgins and the Boats that Won World War II,” said a few of the boats have turned up in recent years, including one that was found in a barn in the Midwest. But he said it was remarkable to find one preserved in a lake, given that they were made of mahogany plywood.

“Wooden boats weren’t meant to last that long,” he said. “But I’d imagine that being underwater in a cold-water lake, away from oxygen, allowed it to survive.”

The discovery is a reminder of the way severe drought, worsened by climate change, is revealing long-hidden elements of the past, including submerged World War II relics in Europe, sets of human remains at Lake Mead outside Las Vegas and dinosaur tracks in Texas. A sunken Higgins boat also emerged in Lake Mead in July, according to The Las Vegas Review-Journal.

As of August, Shasta County was experiencing its driest year to date over the past 128 years, according to federal data, as much of the West has been seared by long-term drought.

Meyer said his best guess is that the Higgins boat in Lake Shasta belonged to a private owner who bought it at a government surplus sale after the war. Perhaps the owner was a rancher who used it to cross the lake and tend to cattle grazing on the shoreline, he said. Other theories suggest it might have been operated by a logging company or government agency.

“As to why they sank it, we just don’t know,” Dunsdon said. “Nobody knows. And anybody who probably remembers that is probably very, very old, or they’re dead and gone.”