A 75-year-old mystery has been solved, and the families of 80 American sailors lost at sea will now have closure: the https://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/danfs/g/grayback-i.html" rel="nofollow - U.S.S. Grayback has finally been found. It was hidden from discovery all this time by a single errant digit. The
mystery began on Jan. 28, 1944, when the Grayback, one of the most
successful American submarines of World War II, sailed out of Pearl
Harbor for its 10th combat patrol. By late March it was more than three
weeks overdue to return, and the Navy listed the submarine as missing
and presumed lost. After the war, the
Navy tried to piece together a comprehensive history of the 52
submarines it had lost. The history, issued in 1949, gave approximate
locations of where each submarine had disappeared. The
Grayback was thought to have gone down in the open ocean 100 miles
east-southeast of Okinawa. But the Navy had unknowingly relied on a
flawed translation of Japanese war records that got one digit wrong in
the latitude and longitude of the spot where the Grayback had probably
met its end. The
error went undetected until last year, when an amateur researcher,
Yutaka Iwasaki, was going through the wartime records of the Imperial
Japanese Navy base at Sasebo. The files included daily reports received
by radio from the naval air base at Naha, Okinawa — and the entry for
Feb. 27, 1944, contained a promising lead. The
report for that day said that a Nakajima B5N carrier-based bomber had
dropped a 500-pound bomb on a surfaced submarine, striking just aft of
the conning tower. The sub exploded and sank immediately, and there were
no survivors. “In that radio record,
there is a longitude and a latitude of the attack, very clearly,” Mr.
Iwasaki said. And it did not match what was in the 1949 Navy history,
not by a hundred miles. Honor Flights From across the U.S., private planes and commercial airliners https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/us/politics/honor-flights-veterans.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article" rel="nofollow - take veterans to Washington to see monuments dedicated to them. Mr.
Iwasaki is a systems engineer who lives in Kobe, Japan, and who became
fascinated as a teenager with the Japanese merchant ships of World War
II — four-fifths of which were sunk during the war, he said. Uncovering
the history of those ships necessarily brought him into contact with
records on submarines. “For me, finding U.S. submarines is part of my
activity to introduce the tragic story of war,” he said. “It is my
hobby, and also my passion.” His
work brought him to the attention of Tim Taylor, an undersea explorer
who has set out to find the wrecks of every American submarine lost in
the war. In 2010 he found his first submarine, https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/u/united-states-submarine-losses/r-12-ss-89.html" rel="nofollow - the U.S.S. R-12 ,
off Key West, Fla., where it sank during a training exercise in 1943.
He set up the privately funded Lost 52 Project to track down the rest,
relying on technology that had become available only in the last 10 to
15 years.
------------- DBF Joe SS485,CVA42 Holland Club Mid-Atlantic Base
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