kiwi_2005
12-30-07, 11:55 PM
Found this while browsing for sub pictures, its about the 'USS Grunion' that went missing while on a Top Secret mission during WW2. The Grunion was lost at sea and never found, until the captains sons went looking for her years later and found it!
A long read but a good read anyways :)
Ten years ago, Air Force Lt. Col. Richard Lane walked into an antiques shop and plunked down a dollar for an old Japanese electrical diagram of a ship's winch. On the back of the illustration was a note, handwritten in English: "Wiring diagram of deck winch on Kano Maru."
A military history junkie, Lane could find no mention of a Japanese freighter called Kano Maru in the usual sources. In 2001, still curious, he posted a query about the ship on a military history website, j-aircraft.com. Within days, a Japanese amateur historian responded. His account of an embattled Kano Maru, which supplied Imperial forces in the Aleutian Islands, would satisfy more than one man's curiosity.
It would set in motion an emotional search for the USS Grunion, an American submarine that disappeared during World War II.
No Goodbyes
The skipper of the newly commissioned Grunion was 38-year-old Lt. Comdr. Mannert L. Abele. As a boy, Mannert didn't much care for his given name and decided that Jim was a better fit. And so it was that on May 24, 1942, a Sunday, Jim Abele invited his wife and three young sons for dinner at his submarine base in New London, Connecticut.
There was nothing out of the ordinary about the meal. No grand gestures or pronouncements, just the mundane chitchat of families. And in hindsight, that's what was so strange.
After the meal, Commander Abele sent his wife, Catherine, and their three sons -- Bruce, 12, Brad, 9, and John, 5 -- home, saying he had "important work" to finish up.
Word of the Grunion's departure came that evening, when another officer's wife telephoned the Abele house to say she'd just spotted the sub heading out to sea. The Grunion's mission was so top secret, its departure orders couldn't even be disclosed to the commander's wife.
"We all knew that Jim would be in the thick of things as soon as he could get his boat ready to go to sea," writes Brad Abele in his memoir of his father, Jim. "However, as things turned out, it was the last time we were ever to see him."
Pain and Denial
The summer passed without the Abeles hearing from their husband and father. When news finally did come, on September 30, the boys were outside playing football. Their mother called them in to listen as she read a telegram from the Navy: Commander Abele was "missing following action in the performance of his duty and in the service of his country." Across America, 69 other families received the same notice.
After the disappearance of the Grunion, times were hard. Catherine Abele struggled to support her sons by teaching music in her home. She never borrowed money -- "It wouldn't be done," says son Bruce -- and all the while clung to the belief that as long as the Grunion was missing, there was reason for hope.
When a death benefit check arrived from the government, "my mother sent it back," says Brad. "If you cashed it, you bought into the contract, the deal that your husband had died. And she never bought into that deal."
Nor did other Grunion families. "My mother never remarried either," says Nancy Kornahrens Stark, daughter of William Kornahrens, a lieutenant on the sub. "That was true for many of the wives of the Grunion. They stayed married to their husbands. They believed their husbands were just missing."
The mystery wouldn't stop gnawing at Nancy Stark. "I never knew my father," she says. "If you don't know your dad, then who are you?"
Stark reached out to her missing father by learning to sail. "I love anything near the water," she says. "When I'm on the water, even today, I feel close to my dad.
"My mom never talked much about him," she continues, "so I grew up with this mystery. There was always a part of me that felt he was marooned on a desert island or taken as a prisoner of war. I felt like he'd come back."
Finally, a Clue
The Japanese historian who responded to Lt. Col. Richard Lane's request for information on the Kano Maru sent these notes about a battle that took place off Kiska, an island in the Aleutians, in 1942.
31 July
05:47 Torpedoed by submarine Grunion (SS-216). One hit at machinery room starboard; main engine and generator stopped.
05:57 Second torpedo came but passed below the ship.
06:07 Third and fourth torpedoes came, hit forebridge and amidships on the port, but both duds. Grunion surfaced. Kano Maru's forecastle gun fired; fourth shot hit the conning tower of the sub. It is thought the last of Grunion.
Lane's find was posted on the Grunion's page on the website of COMSUBPAC, the U.S. Navy's submarine command for the Pacific Fleet. The fate of the long-lost sub would now reach families who'd spent six decades wondering.
But the discovery raised a new question: If the Grunion was sunk near Kiska, could anyone locate it?
Commander Abele's youngest son, John, got lucky. First he found himself in the company of Robert Ballard when he attended a speech given by the famed oceanographer. Ballard is credited with, among other things, finding the wreck of the Titanic in 1985. When John told him all about the Grunion and the recent developments, Ballard was hooked. He offered advice and put John in touch with a Seattle-based underwater search and salvage company, Williamson & Associates. Then it turned out that an Abele neighbor in Massachusetts was a part-time fisherman in Alaska. He helped engage the 165-foot commercial fishing vessel Aquila as a platform for the search expedition.
All this costs money, something the Abele brothers had -- John cofounded the biotech giant Boston Scientific, and Bruce coinvented Polaroid's Big Shot camera. They underwrote the entire cost of the search.
At the far tip of the Aleutian chain, Kiska island is a remote and forgotten corner of the earth, almost a thousand miles from the Alaskan mainland. But you'll find history everywhere. A rust-coated mini submarine lies on the grassy shore, while atop the island's ridges sit rusting antiaircraft guns amid hillsides pocked by airplane bombs and naval artillery.
Between June 1942 and August 1943, Kiska was one of two Aleutian islands occupied by Imperial Japan. That the enemy was on U.S. territory was a fact blacked out across much of America at the time, as the country still reeled from Japan's assault on Pearl Harbor.
Six decades later, in August 2006, Kiska was the jumping-off point for the search for the Grunion. The investigation began by covering about 250 square miles of ocean off the island. The crew lowered sound-emitting sensors into the Bering Sea, then towed them behind the Aquila. After a week of searching, an unusual "target image" came into the sonar field. It was a long and narrow silhouette, lying 3,200 feet beneath the surface.
The thing on the ocean floor was about 20 feet shorter than the 312-foot Grunion, and while it could have been man-made, it might also have been a dead whale or a round chunk of cold magma from one of the Kiska volcano's undersea vents. Most likely it was a sunken surface vessel, because the target didn't seem to show any tell-tale propeller guards, which should have been visible in the sonar composites. Only the Grunion and other Gato-class subs had prop guards.
Still, there was hope. "I was excited, but there was something else," says Nancy Stark, daughter of Lieutenant Kornahrens, "something I'd never felt before: a kind of emptiness, mixed with happiness and some tears. It was an emotion without a blueprint."
One Last Shot
A year later, John Abele and the search team once again found themselves aboard the Aquila, off Kiska. This time, they brought along a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), a cagelike mass of bright yellow ballast tanks and directional propellers, smaller than a minivan, festooned with sonar and video cameras. The goal: to 100-percent identify the previous year's target image.
At 10:20 p.m. on August 22, 2007, the ROV, the Max Rover, was set into the sea, just a few miles off Kiska's shore. It was an odd hour to start a search. But since leaving port the day before, the violent Bering Sea -- of Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch fame -- had gone almost supernaturally flat calm. No one was about to let this opportunity pass.
In the water, the Max Rover, lights on and propellers fired up, swam smoothly and silently away like an enormous yellow puppy.
Next came the waiting. In the wheelhouse of the Aquila, John Abele, bouncing on the balls of his feet, watched the blizzard of flotsam dots drift through the closed-circuit video that streamed from the Max Rover's array of high-definition cameras. As the ROV descended, Kiska's lonely and mysterious sea life, including orange jellyfish the size of basketballs and startled black cod, glowed in the lights.
An hour later, the Max Rover finally reached the seafloor, more than 3,000 feet below. On-screen, the grayish volcanic soil bed could be seen, naked and punctuated by the gray flatness of a haddock or a grumpy-looking crab, its claws extended toward the Rover's floodlights.
"We've got a target out at 045 degrees and about 60 meters," said Joe Caba, the Max Rover's pilot.
Slowly the object emerged. Through the darkness of the Bering Sea depths, the lights of the Max Rover fell on a mass of twisted and rusty metal standing proud on the empty seafloor, bejeweled by orange starfish. It was a submarine conning tower, or what was left of one. Around it, pipes and hoses snaked across the ship's double hull, laid bare as some of the sub's outer skin had been stripped away.
Guarded Secret
The Max Rover approached the vessel's port side, the cameras recording more smashed and imploded metal. In some places, the hull had been crushed and cracked along weld seams.
"There they are!" shouted Richard Graham, the expedition's navigator.
As the ROV came to stern, the submarine's prop guards appeared on-screen. They were draped in flotsam and dust, but they were also configured just as they'd been in the old photos of the Grunion.
"I've been seeing those prop guards every night in my dreams for a year," Graham said. After a lifetime of waiting and two years of searching, the USS Grunion had been found.
"It's so … mangled," John Abele whispered. The five-year-old boy who'd lost his father in 1942 was now learning what had happened.
Further investigation would show that the conning tower had sustained some kind of blow (perhaps from the Japanese artillery shell) and that, just behind the tower, one hatch had been opened, maybe so the crew could fire the deck gun in their doomed, final assault on the Kano Maru.
The submarine's bow section was either missing or so badly smashed that it appeared nonexistent -- that's why it had looked 20 feet shorter on the sonar. It may have sheared away as the sub struck the tilting seafloor. Or maybe the torpedo that had missed the Kano Maru circled back and exploded against the submarine's bow.
Back home in Maryland, Nancy Stark sat glued to her computer, watching the drama unfold on the Grunion website. "It was disorienting," she says. "I'd been so excited and hopeful. Then, when the sub was found, well, I cried a lot, just sitting there at the computer.
"But over time, the sadness was replaced by a kind of gratitude, an acceptance and a sense of peace. My life of not knowing was over."
John Abele agrees, adding that finding his father's sub was "a humbling experience. And humbling experiences are often the most rewarding."
Then he smiled. Kiska had finally given up its most guarded secret.
http://www.rd.com/content/search-for-a-submarine-missing-since-wwii/
(http://www.rd.com/content/search-for-a-submarine-missing-since-wwii/)
A long read but a good read anyways :)
Ten years ago, Air Force Lt. Col. Richard Lane walked into an antiques shop and plunked down a dollar for an old Japanese electrical diagram of a ship's winch. On the back of the illustration was a note, handwritten in English: "Wiring diagram of deck winch on Kano Maru."
A military history junkie, Lane could find no mention of a Japanese freighter called Kano Maru in the usual sources. In 2001, still curious, he posted a query about the ship on a military history website, j-aircraft.com. Within days, a Japanese amateur historian responded. His account of an embattled Kano Maru, which supplied Imperial forces in the Aleutian Islands, would satisfy more than one man's curiosity.
It would set in motion an emotional search for the USS Grunion, an American submarine that disappeared during World War II.
No Goodbyes
The skipper of the newly commissioned Grunion was 38-year-old Lt. Comdr. Mannert L. Abele. As a boy, Mannert didn't much care for his given name and decided that Jim was a better fit. And so it was that on May 24, 1942, a Sunday, Jim Abele invited his wife and three young sons for dinner at his submarine base in New London, Connecticut.
There was nothing out of the ordinary about the meal. No grand gestures or pronouncements, just the mundane chitchat of families. And in hindsight, that's what was so strange.
After the meal, Commander Abele sent his wife, Catherine, and their three sons -- Bruce, 12, Brad, 9, and John, 5 -- home, saying he had "important work" to finish up.
Word of the Grunion's departure came that evening, when another officer's wife telephoned the Abele house to say she'd just spotted the sub heading out to sea. The Grunion's mission was so top secret, its departure orders couldn't even be disclosed to the commander's wife.
"We all knew that Jim would be in the thick of things as soon as he could get his boat ready to go to sea," writes Brad Abele in his memoir of his father, Jim. "However, as things turned out, it was the last time we were ever to see him."
Pain and Denial
The summer passed without the Abeles hearing from their husband and father. When news finally did come, on September 30, the boys were outside playing football. Their mother called them in to listen as she read a telegram from the Navy: Commander Abele was "missing following action in the performance of his duty and in the service of his country." Across America, 69 other families received the same notice.
After the disappearance of the Grunion, times were hard. Catherine Abele struggled to support her sons by teaching music in her home. She never borrowed money -- "It wouldn't be done," says son Bruce -- and all the while clung to the belief that as long as the Grunion was missing, there was reason for hope.
When a death benefit check arrived from the government, "my mother sent it back," says Brad. "If you cashed it, you bought into the contract, the deal that your husband had died. And she never bought into that deal."
Nor did other Grunion families. "My mother never remarried either," says Nancy Kornahrens Stark, daughter of William Kornahrens, a lieutenant on the sub. "That was true for many of the wives of the Grunion. They stayed married to their husbands. They believed their husbands were just missing."
The mystery wouldn't stop gnawing at Nancy Stark. "I never knew my father," she says. "If you don't know your dad, then who are you?"
Stark reached out to her missing father by learning to sail. "I love anything near the water," she says. "When I'm on the water, even today, I feel close to my dad.
"My mom never talked much about him," she continues, "so I grew up with this mystery. There was always a part of me that felt he was marooned on a desert island or taken as a prisoner of war. I felt like he'd come back."
Finally, a Clue
The Japanese historian who responded to Lt. Col. Richard Lane's request for information on the Kano Maru sent these notes about a battle that took place off Kiska, an island in the Aleutians, in 1942.
31 July
05:47 Torpedoed by submarine Grunion (SS-216). One hit at machinery room starboard; main engine and generator stopped.
05:57 Second torpedo came but passed below the ship.
06:07 Third and fourth torpedoes came, hit forebridge and amidships on the port, but both duds. Grunion surfaced. Kano Maru's forecastle gun fired; fourth shot hit the conning tower of the sub. It is thought the last of Grunion.
Lane's find was posted on the Grunion's page on the website of COMSUBPAC, the U.S. Navy's submarine command for the Pacific Fleet. The fate of the long-lost sub would now reach families who'd spent six decades wondering.
But the discovery raised a new question: If the Grunion was sunk near Kiska, could anyone locate it?
Commander Abele's youngest son, John, got lucky. First he found himself in the company of Robert Ballard when he attended a speech given by the famed oceanographer. Ballard is credited with, among other things, finding the wreck of the Titanic in 1985. When John told him all about the Grunion and the recent developments, Ballard was hooked. He offered advice and put John in touch with a Seattle-based underwater search and salvage company, Williamson & Associates. Then it turned out that an Abele neighbor in Massachusetts was a part-time fisherman in Alaska. He helped engage the 165-foot commercial fishing vessel Aquila as a platform for the search expedition.
All this costs money, something the Abele brothers had -- John cofounded the biotech giant Boston Scientific, and Bruce coinvented Polaroid's Big Shot camera. They underwrote the entire cost of the search.
At the far tip of the Aleutian chain, Kiska island is a remote and forgotten corner of the earth, almost a thousand miles from the Alaskan mainland. But you'll find history everywhere. A rust-coated mini submarine lies on the grassy shore, while atop the island's ridges sit rusting antiaircraft guns amid hillsides pocked by airplane bombs and naval artillery.
Between June 1942 and August 1943, Kiska was one of two Aleutian islands occupied by Imperial Japan. That the enemy was on U.S. territory was a fact blacked out across much of America at the time, as the country still reeled from Japan's assault on Pearl Harbor.
Six decades later, in August 2006, Kiska was the jumping-off point for the search for the Grunion. The investigation began by covering about 250 square miles of ocean off the island. The crew lowered sound-emitting sensors into the Bering Sea, then towed them behind the Aquila. After a week of searching, an unusual "target image" came into the sonar field. It was a long and narrow silhouette, lying 3,200 feet beneath the surface.
The thing on the ocean floor was about 20 feet shorter than the 312-foot Grunion, and while it could have been man-made, it might also have been a dead whale or a round chunk of cold magma from one of the Kiska volcano's undersea vents. Most likely it was a sunken surface vessel, because the target didn't seem to show any tell-tale propeller guards, which should have been visible in the sonar composites. Only the Grunion and other Gato-class subs had prop guards.
Still, there was hope. "I was excited, but there was something else," says Nancy Stark, daughter of Lieutenant Kornahrens, "something I'd never felt before: a kind of emptiness, mixed with happiness and some tears. It was an emotion without a blueprint."
One Last Shot
A year later, John Abele and the search team once again found themselves aboard the Aquila, off Kiska. This time, they brought along a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), a cagelike mass of bright yellow ballast tanks and directional propellers, smaller than a minivan, festooned with sonar and video cameras. The goal: to 100-percent identify the previous year's target image.
At 10:20 p.m. on August 22, 2007, the ROV, the Max Rover, was set into the sea, just a few miles off Kiska's shore. It was an odd hour to start a search. But since leaving port the day before, the violent Bering Sea -- of Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch fame -- had gone almost supernaturally flat calm. No one was about to let this opportunity pass.
In the water, the Max Rover, lights on and propellers fired up, swam smoothly and silently away like an enormous yellow puppy.
Next came the waiting. In the wheelhouse of the Aquila, John Abele, bouncing on the balls of his feet, watched the blizzard of flotsam dots drift through the closed-circuit video that streamed from the Max Rover's array of high-definition cameras. As the ROV descended, Kiska's lonely and mysterious sea life, including orange jellyfish the size of basketballs and startled black cod, glowed in the lights.
An hour later, the Max Rover finally reached the seafloor, more than 3,000 feet below. On-screen, the grayish volcanic soil bed could be seen, naked and punctuated by the gray flatness of a haddock or a grumpy-looking crab, its claws extended toward the Rover's floodlights.
"We've got a target out at 045 degrees and about 60 meters," said Joe Caba, the Max Rover's pilot.
Slowly the object emerged. Through the darkness of the Bering Sea depths, the lights of the Max Rover fell on a mass of twisted and rusty metal standing proud on the empty seafloor, bejeweled by orange starfish. It was a submarine conning tower, or what was left of one. Around it, pipes and hoses snaked across the ship's double hull, laid bare as some of the sub's outer skin had been stripped away.
Guarded Secret
The Max Rover approached the vessel's port side, the cameras recording more smashed and imploded metal. In some places, the hull had been crushed and cracked along weld seams.
"There they are!" shouted Richard Graham, the expedition's navigator.
As the ROV came to stern, the submarine's prop guards appeared on-screen. They were draped in flotsam and dust, but they were also configured just as they'd been in the old photos of the Grunion.
"I've been seeing those prop guards every night in my dreams for a year," Graham said. After a lifetime of waiting and two years of searching, the USS Grunion had been found.
"It's so … mangled," John Abele whispered. The five-year-old boy who'd lost his father in 1942 was now learning what had happened.
Further investigation would show that the conning tower had sustained some kind of blow (perhaps from the Japanese artillery shell) and that, just behind the tower, one hatch had been opened, maybe so the crew could fire the deck gun in their doomed, final assault on the Kano Maru.
The submarine's bow section was either missing or so badly smashed that it appeared nonexistent -- that's why it had looked 20 feet shorter on the sonar. It may have sheared away as the sub struck the tilting seafloor. Or maybe the torpedo that had missed the Kano Maru circled back and exploded against the submarine's bow.
Back home in Maryland, Nancy Stark sat glued to her computer, watching the drama unfold on the Grunion website. "It was disorienting," she says. "I'd been so excited and hopeful. Then, when the sub was found, well, I cried a lot, just sitting there at the computer.
"But over time, the sadness was replaced by a kind of gratitude, an acceptance and a sense of peace. My life of not knowing was over."
John Abele agrees, adding that finding his father's sub was "a humbling experience. And humbling experiences are often the most rewarding."
Then he smiled. Kiska had finally given up its most guarded secret.
http://www.rd.com/content/search-for-a-submarine-missing-since-wwii/
(http://www.rd.com/content/search-for-a-submarine-missing-since-wwii/)