It seemed like looking for the proverbial haystack needle, but a Navy Deep Submergence Unit proved instrumental in finding a U.S. carrier sunk during the turning-point Pacific battle of World War II.
In the annals of war, historians can point to many well-defined turning points. For a demoralized and outgunned U.S. Pacific Fleet in World War II, the battle that began on the morning of 4 June 1942 proved to be one of those shifts in the tide. That day, a massive Japanese force steamed toward the tiny, isolated atoll of Midway. If Midway were lost, the battle for the
Pacific might be lost as well. Admiral Chester Nimitz could not let that happen. To block the Japanese offensive, Nimitz took a gamble and dispatched the tattered remnants of his fleet to Midway. The move paid off. The combined force of three remaining U.S. carriers in the Pacific—the Enterprise (CV-6), the Hornet (CV-8), and the Yorktown (CV-5)—and a cruiser-destroyer battle group was enough to defeat the Japanese ships arrayed against them. The Yorktown and the Hammann (DD-412), the U.S. destroyer group flagship, paid the ultimate price.
The history of war is full of noble sacrifices, and the world’s oceans are massive graveyards, each hiding countless stories of such sacrifices. Sadly, most of these tales are lost to posterity. Not often can one be brought back to life, especially when many heroes of that tale are interred more than three miles below the deep blue surface of the Pacific Ocean.
For more than 24 years now, one name has been nearly synonymous with the quest to retell these old stories. He rediscovered the German battleship Bismarck, sunk during World War II in the north Atlantic. He was first to bring back images of the Titanic, long before the blockbuster movie captivated the world’s imagination. In the Pacific, he worked to tell the tale of the U.S. Naval combatants that had fought and sunk off Guadalcanal.
For this next step in his relentless quest, Robert Ballard asked a group of deep-ocean search-and-survey experts from the U.S. Navy’s Deep Submergence Unit in San Diego, California, to accompany him to the scene of one of the most pivotal naval battles of World War II, and to help bring the Yorktown back to life for a whole new generation.
“Without the Navy, this wouldn’t have happened,” said Ballard, who also worked with the Navy on his 1992 Guadalcanal special for television’s National Geographic Explorer. “Their (remotely operated vehicle) is the only one of its type capable of reaching the depths where we thought Yorktown might be.”
The Midway expedition began in the early morning of 13 April 1998 at Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego. With their unmanned, remotely operated Advanced Tethered Vehicle (ATV) already loaded on board the unit’s deep submergence support vessel, the Laney Chouest, the eager Sailors departed under the glaring cameras of local television.
“All the attention was pretty uncomfortable,” said Navy Commander Kurt Sadorf, the unit’s executive officer and officer in charge of the expedition’s Navy contingent. “I thought the trip should really be about, and focus on, the veterans who came out with us.”
The focus did shift, eventually.
The first part of the trip was routine enough. After a quick stop at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, to pick up the University of Hawaii’s MR-1 side-scan sonar system and its team of academic technicians, the ship continued on her way toward the tiny Pacific atoll on the extreme northwestern tip of the Hawaiian chain. They were to use the MR-1 system to map the ocean floor in the area that scant World War II position data indicated might be the final resting place of the Yorktown and the Hammann, a spot roughly halfway between Hawaii and Japan. Before pulling the large, towed sonar system back and forth across the empty Pacific waves at a slow four-knots-per-hour crawl, though, the Laney Chouest stopped at Midway to pick up the rest of the expedition’s team members and special guests.
“Even if we just spent the entire month in Midway, the trip would have been worth it,” Sadorf said with a grin. “The people there were very hospitable.”
Ever since the Navy established a Naval Air Facility on Midway, the island has been closed to unofficial visitors. This virtual isolation has made this a favored home for many unique animal species, including millions of albatross. In recent years, the island was opened for extremely limited sport fishing and tourism, adding to the tiny population of scientists and caretakers. But the atoll has changed very little since the enormous battle raged to protect it. The Midway expedition brought a welcome change of pace to a community where intramural basketball games and watching the habits of monk seals are the usual main sources of entertainment.
The first group of people to leave Midway and go to sea with the Navy on board the civilian support ship was a unique mix. In addition to Ballard and his crew, a film team contracted to document the historic venture, and photographers and writers from National Geographic Magazine, two U.S. and two Japanese veterans of the Battle of Midway brought a real human element to the story. These four old men, one-time enemies, joined the expedition in friendship, wanting to catch a glimpse of the ships that were their homes 56 years ago, hoping to see the site of memories both painful and profound.
“It worked out very well, having the veterans aboard” Sadorf said. “The Japanese vets were very grateful at being aboard. I was disappointed that we couldn’t find one of their carriers when we were out there. But it worked out very well. . . . They interacted, and I think they put to rest some of their lasting hatred from the war.”
That interaction took place during the first two long and tedious weeks at sea after leaving Midway. Once the team reached the site where the ships from the battle were most likely to be found, the University of Hawaii Mapping Research Group launched their MR-1 system. Used in swathes some five miles wide, the MR-1, Sadorf said, was invaluable in mapping the ocean floor of the search area, some 700 square miles.
“That part was fantastic,” he said, “We got along very well. One of the MR-1 guys was even on the team that built the ATV. It was a real opportunity to watch how a state-of-the-art piece of gear worked. It gave us a chance to see how they conduct a search and let us feed that into how we do business.”
The MR-1’s search eventually turned up several abnormal shapes—shapes that may or may not have been war-torn ships. In order to find out, the ATV had to be deployed. The first contact, suspected to be the Japanese carrier Hiryu, turned out to be nothing more than a large grouping of deep-ocean boulders.
Undaunted, the Navy specialists dived on. Just before the Laney Chouest was to turn around and head back to port to pick up the next group of journalists and photographers, the ATV was diving on one final site. Then, the expedition suffered a potentially disastrous setback.
In order to light the inky blackness of the ocean at more than three miles’ depth and bring back images clear enough for the world to see, huge spotlights were needed to augment the ATV’s normal lighting system. Part of this lighting package were two glass spheres to protect delicate electronics. Normally, the spheres are designed to withstand the enormous pressure found at those depths. This time the pressure was too great.
“There was no way we could plan for that kind of accident,” offered Ballard. “It could have been something as small as a tiny piece of grit in the spheres’ seals.”
The implosion was like two sticks of dynamite going off in the ATV’s face. When the Sailors recovered the vehicle, no one knew if the expedition could be salvaged. “Chief [Mike] Swarm and the guys put ATV back together in three days,” Sadorf explained. “They really did save the mission. I don’t think anyone thought we were going to be able to recover and be successful.”
That emergency repair took place as the Laney Chouest steamed back to Midway. In alternating 12-hour shifts, which most Sailors know actually can last up to 18 or 20 hours, the ATV’s team of electronics technicians and mechanics pulled the vehicle apart, piece by piece. The team was creative with many of the repairs, using what few spare parts they had on hand. The time window for the operation was small, and without the ATV, the explorers might as well have gone home.
Once the expedition returned to Midway, hastily flown in repair parts and a new set of spheres—made of titanium this time—were waiting at the pier. The Sailors added the parts and performed a pier dive. They announced the vehicle fit for service late on the afternoon of 14 May. The ATV may not have been 100%, but it was well enough to take one last shot at finding the Yorktown.
Back at sea the next morning, the group of explorers struggled to make the best of a tense situation. After two-and-a-half weeks of searching and long, hard hours of putting the ATV back together, nerves were starting to fray. The afternoon of 19 May showed just how quickly success can change despair into elation.
After the long, three-mile, five-hour trip from the surface to the bottom, the ATV’s sonar picked up a contact. The excitement level rose to fever pitch as long hours of looking at blank ocean floor was about to pay off with the first glimpse of the Yorktown in 56 years. The vehicle did a slow crawl, hovering above the ocean floor, as the team came close enough to use the sophisticated obstacle-avoidance sonar. The first indication that this might be the site everyone was waiting for came when a lonely piece of anchor chain, like some improbable deep-ocean snake, crept into view.
Bill Surgi, a Navy veteran who served on board the carrier during the Battle of Midway, summed up the thoughts on everyone’s mind as the ATV climbed the water column and dropped over the lip of what seemed to be an impact crater.
“Is that it? Is that the Yorktown?”
Lying with a small list to port and with her stern in the air was the mighty warship, looking surprisingly good after a half-century at this depth. Surgi was a fount of information, as the ATV’s camera’s brought back images unseen by human eyes since the Yorktown slipped beneath the waves on 7 June 1942.
“Bill was a big asset to have out there,” explained Sadorf. “His memory of the Yorktown was so clear. I don’t have that clear a memory of my first submarine, and here was a man who, 50-plus years later, instantly recognized different parts of the ship. Bill would point and say, ‘I was standing right there when the torpedoes struck.’ Or, ‘My seabag was stored in that corner.’ He was very detailed in his memory of the ship. It was like he just walked off her.”
The rest of the mission was somewhat anticlimactic. Once the Yorktown was filmed and photographed completely, the ATV and the Laney Chouest moved on to other possible locations of the ships they sought, using the MR-1’s colorful maps as guides. The Hammann never was found, and the Japanese carriers, too, remain unrediscovered. Nonetheless, the entire team counted the mission an unqualified success. “We did what we came here to do,” Ballard said. “We discovered Yorktown, filmed her, and left her in dignity.”
One of the ATV’s veteran Sailors had perhaps the most succinct answer, summing up the feeling of everyone involved with the Midway expedition: “We were a part of history-in-the-making,” said Sonar Technician 1st Class Jason Katzer, the ATV’s leading petty officer. “Only a select few can say they were here and saw what we did first-hand.”