From the Newton Tab
Sons may have found dad’s sub
By Christopher Loh/ Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - Updated: 10:40 AM EST
After 60 years, a Newton trio of sons has taken one more step to unraveling the shroud of mystery cloaking their father’s submarine lost in World War II.
The USS Grunion disappeared seemingly without a trace in 1942 while on patrol off the far tip of the Aleutian Islands, 1,400 miles from the tip of Alaska.
The location of the submarine, and what exactly happened to it, has remained a mystery. But last week, a tiny black dot appeared on a sonar scan of the ocean floor near the Aleutians that has given the family hope.
“That’s it, right there,” said Bruce Abele, sitting in his Newtonville home’s living room and pointing to the black dot on his laptop’s screen.
Highlighting the image and zooming in, the image takes a ship’s form.
“The problem is, the top has a super structure that looks like a surface ship,” explained Abele, the oldest son of the Grunion’s commander, Manner L. Abele. “There were three major [volcanic] eruptions since 1942, so rubble would pick up on top of the sub.”
Abele pointed out two Japanese subchasers and one Japanese destroyer are also missing.
The 76-year-old said he and his two brothers, who are in charge of the expedition to find the missing sub, are also looking for the Japanese ships.
The brothers are funding their own search. The youngest, John, is the founder of Boston Scientific and is worth billions.
The sons first began to search extensively for their father’s lost ship several years ago when a Japanese man, Yutaka Iwasaki, examined a previously ignored document written by the commander of the vessel that is believed to have sunk the Grunion.
Iwasaki translated the document into English for the Abeles to use as a reference point in finding the location of the lost sub.
After procuring a 165-foot boat equipped with one mile of cable to sonar-scan the ocean floor, the sons procured Williams and Associates to run the expedition.
This past weekend, the trio flew to Alaska to meet with the expedition’s crew to pick up the hard drives of the sonar recordings and to discuss future steps in the process.
That future, according to Bruce, will include the obtainment of an automated underwater vehicle.
On board the vehicle are cameras set to take photos of the object projected to be nearly 2,500 feet below the surface.
“It will be a very emotional thing,” said Abele when asked how he will feel if the object, is in fact, the lost sub. “Our objective is to ultimately find out what happened. Why in the world did it sink?”
Christopher Loh can be reached at cloh@cnc.com.