Finding Grayback

A heart-warming story. From Navy Submarine, Missing for 75 Years, Is Found Off Okinawa by John Ismay.

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.

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On the next to last day of the expedition, the drone reported a malfunction one-third of the way through a planned 24-hour mission. As they recovered the drone, Mr. Taylor said, half of his crew started getting the ship ready to return to port, thinking that the vehicle was likely to be beyond quick repair. But Mr. Taylor began reviewing the images captured by the drone.

He quickly spotted two anomalies on the sea floor, and readied another of the ship’s remotely operated vehicles to visit the bottom. Unlike the drone, this one was steered manually from the mother ship, and had high-definition cameras.

In a matter of hours, Mr. Taylor was looking at the hull of the Grayback and, lying about 400 feet away, was the submarine’s deck gun, which had been blown off when the bomb exploded.