In his book, Hidden Warships, naval historian Nicholas A. Veronico details the history, recovery, and preservation of various sunken combat ships from the WWII era. The stories he tells, along with the intriguing images that accompany them, make this book an adventure in itself. The following is a truly unbelievable story within the book, the search and discover of the Grato-class submarine, the USS Grunion (SS-216).
What We Know: The Backstory of the Grunion
On May 24, Grunion sailed for the Pacific theater of war. As it zigzagged along the eastern seaboard, Abele (the captain aboard the Grunion) worked to identify each vessel he came across. On May 29, Grunion passed from the Atlantic Ocean into the Caribbean Sea, cruising submerged past Mayaguana Island and through the Windward Passage. En route to the Panama Canal on May 31, Grunion came across sixteen survivors from the Army Transport USAT Jack. The ship had been torpedoed by the German U-558, and the survivors floated in their damaged lifeboat for 108 hours until they were rescued by Grunion. One other raft was known to have cast off from the sinking transport, but after a dedicated search, Abele was forced to continue his journey. Those men were never heard from again. Steaming across the Caribbean Sea, Jack’s survivors were landed at the submarine base at Colo Solo, Panama Canal Zone, on June 3. Among those rescued were the Jack’s chief mate; Peter Korb; first engineer, George F. Drew; and Lt. j.g. A. O. Lund, chief of the ship’s Naval Armed Guard.
The submarine transited the Panama Canal on June 6, 1942, and crossed the eastern Pacific Ocean without incident. A couple of ships were spotted as were a few US patrol planes. The voyage took seventeen days with the boat arriving at Pearl Harbor on the morning of June 20. Grunion sailed into Pearl Harbor, past the overturned battleship Oklahoma and the wreck of the once-mighty Arizona, sitting on the bottom of the harbor. The crew could see salvage workers attending to each ship.
Grunion was tied up at the undamaged submarine base, the reason for her mission visible across the channel. At Pearl Harbor, Grunion underwent a rigorous training schedule to get the boat and her crew into top fighting condition. The submarine would conduct torpedo attack training using Mk 14 exercise torpedoes modified so they could later be retrieved and used again. Once torpedo training was done for the day, the tables were turned and the submarine served as a target for US destroyers attempting to track the sub using sonar and as a target for depth-charge runs. Grunion used this part of the cat-and-mouse game to perfect its ability to hide from its pursuers.
The weekend of June 26–28 was probably spent on one last liberty call as Grunion got underway at 9:05 a.m. local time on June 30. Grunion’s ultimate destination would be the Aleutian Islands, specifically in the area around Kiska Island. The Japanese had occupied both Attu and Kiska on June 3 and 4, simultaneous to their attack on Midway Atoll.
With Oahu passing by the stern that afternoon, Grunion attacked a training target in Kauai Channel, firing ten rounds of 3”/50 from the deck gun, and some .50-caliber machine gun fire raked the target as well. Official Navy understanding of Grunion’s activities for the period July 15–30 is very sketchy. Radio transmission was poor, and there were only four brief and somewhat confusing communications from the sub, some of them being repeats.
It is known that on July 15, Grunion attacked and sunk what was believed then to be three destroyers. (After the war it was determined that they were sub chasers and that only two were sunk.) Grunion made several other attacks, but the results were unconfirmed.On August 1, Grunion was radioed to continue her voyage to Dutch Harbor, and in a twist of fate the submarine was to expect to reload and re-provision the boat and be back at sea on August 3. There was no confirmation of that message. All further efforts to communicate with Grunion were unsuccessful. With the realization that Grunion would never reach port again, the submarine was decommissioned, on paper, on October 5, 1942, and listed as “Missing. Cause Unknown.”After the war, Japanese records were combed for any clues of Grunion’s fate, but nothing was forthcoming. The submarine remained on the record as missing, cause unknown, for sixty-five years.
On the Hunt!
Williamson and Associates had to manage the logistics of getting everything required for the search up to Dutch Harbor and on to Aquila. In Seattle, a barge was loaded with two side-scan sonars, two very large winches, several miles of cable, and two forty-foot containers that would serve as the sonar shack and the search head-quarters. The barge was towed up to Dutch Harbor and its contents transferred and secured on Aquila. It was only while the barge was en route that the team learned of Iwasaki’s discovery, which greatly narrowed the search area. The 2006 search effort was underway.
The Kiska area is volcanic. The indications were that the sub was on the side of an “extinct volcano that sloped away to the north with deep ridges almost the height of a reasonable-size office building,” said Bruce. “Now the problem was they were dragging the side-scan behind the boat and it had to be lowered down into the valleys. If you saw a target, you had to let the side-scan sled move horizontally; up-and-down movement would give unusable images, so it had to be held steady and then reeled in very rapidly so that it wouldn’t hit the ridge on the other side. If it did, a three-million-dollar sonar would be lost.
Considering the plans for the 2006 search, the Abeles felt that it was appropriate to attempt to notify the relatives of the crew. Bruce’s wife, Susan, while surfing the web, came across a woman named Rhonda Ray. Bruce wrote Ray a note saying: “This is a stab in the dark. I am under the impression that you are a relative of somebody who was on Grunion. This August the three sons of Mannert Abele are sponsoring a search for Grunion based on new evidence that has been provided because of a Japanese history buff. It is quite a story.” Ray wrote back: “Well your ‘stab’ hit home.”
From there Ray located Mary Bentz and Vickie Rodgers,who also had relatives on board Grunion, and the amateur genealogist trio began searching for other relatives of Grunion crew.Using Kay Abele’s post-war correspondence with the next of kin as a starting point, the women found relatives for every crew-member—not an easy task considering that names and locations had changed over the years.
“At two a.m., early in the morning of August 15, 2006, John and I received an email from Art Wright, the project leader from Williamson and Associates saying that they were ninety-five percent certain that they had found Grunion,” said Bruce. “It was just unbelievable! The target was about twelve miles north of Kiska almost exactly where predicted by Iwasaki and Kamada’s search. It appeared to have lost a significant amount of the bow and to have slid two-thirds of a mile down the side of a dormant volcano.”
The next year, 2007, John led a second trip to the area, this time with an ROV equipped with HD video cameras, the goal being to determine whether what had been spotted the previous year was Grunion. To operate the ROV, the team needed relatively calm waters, else they could break the cable attached and the multimillion-dollar ROV would be lost. “Their first night in the search area they were expecting a storm to blow in,” said John. “They lowered the ROV into the water for an all-night search, and within twenty minutes after the ROV got down to the bottom, they spotted the sub.” Then the ROV took a wrong turn and they lost contact with Grunion. It took another hour and a half to get back onto the target, which finally happened when they came across the slide path (exactly as Ballard had advised: “follow the debris path”). One of the first anomalies the team noticed was that the aft battery hatch was wide open. This led to early speculation that the crew was making a surface attack on Kano Maru.
“The crew of Kano Maru reported that the submarine fired six torpedoes,” said Bruce. “The first one missed. The second one hit the engine room and disabled Kano Maru. The third one was bad, went under the freighter, and didn’t explode. The next two hit Kano Maru but bounced off, neither one exploding. The last torpedo appeared to have been a circular run, not uncommon in those days, that came around and struck the submarine in the periscope shears, but it didn’t explode.
The evidence suggests that the sonar man heard the high-pitched whirring of the torpedo as it changed course and the skipper ordered a hard dive to get out of the torpedo’s way. Traveling at fifty-three miles per hour and weighing 3,500 pounds, a torpedo has the same impact velocity as a small car, so it can do a lot of damage—even if it doesn’t explode. With the hard dive order, the dive planes were put into a downward position, but the submarine was still not able to get out of the torpedo’s way. It was struck in the periscope shears, the structure holding the periscopes, where a significant dent is plainly visible. The torpedo broke both periscopes, in essence blinding the sub, but did not explode.
In analyzing the video of the wreck, it was noticed that the rear dive planes were still in the dive position. The analysts surmised that during the descent, the dive planes became jammed, forcing the sub-marine down at a steep angle from which it was unable to recover. The sub plunged down until it reached about one thousand feet, where it imploded, instantly killing the crew and blowing one hatch open.
When the sub impacted the bottom, fifty-two feet of the bow broke off; the remainder then slid two-thirds of a mile down on the side of an extinct volcano, coming to rest in a notch in the terrain.
Seventy men perished at this spot; the families now knew where it happened and why.
Hidden Warships: Finding World War II’s Abandoned, Sunk, and Preserved Warships
Author: Nicholas A. Veronico
As close as you can get to the world’s warship wrecks without getting your feet wet
Sunk by enemy fire, scuttled, or run aground, the number of World War II-era battleships, cruisers, submarines, and other warships that ended their service on the bottom of the world’s oceans and seas is enormous. In the decades since the conflict, wreck hunters have pored over historical records and combed the world’s oceans to find their remains.
In Hidden Warships, naval historian Nicholas A. Veronico details the history, recovery, and preservation of these sunken combat ships–including accounts from the divers and restorers who have worked with them. Beginning with the Japanese midget submarines that attacked Pearl Harbor and continuing through into the modern era, including the 2006 sinking of the postwar aircraft carrier USS Oriskany, Veronico provides rich detail on each noteworthy vessel, including over 150 photographs, ship specifications, geographic coordinates, and more. For the enthusiast who wants an even more complete experience, the book concludes with a list of preserved ships, an Internet resource guide, and a suggested reading list to continue the exploration.
Whether you plan on visiting these historic sites yourself or simply enjoy their compelling stories, Hidden Warships will guide you, above the surface and underwater, through some of the most famous relics of World War II naval warfare.
Buy from an Online Retailer
In North America:
In The UK:
The post Hidden Warships: The USS Grunion Submarine appeared first on Quarto Knows Blog.