Whitefish engineer returns from stormy Bering Sea with tale of discovery
Posted: Wednesday, Sep 06, 2006 - 12:20:12 pm PDT
By RICHARD HANNERS Whitefish Pilot
http://www.whitefishpilot.com/articles/2006/09/06/news/news02.txt
When it left the Electric Boat Company shipyards in New London, Conn., on May 24, 1942, the USS Grunion belonged to a new era of submarines with all-welded hulls. The Gato-class subs were the mainstay of the U.S. Navy through World War II.
“Well, here’s the scoop — we found the submarine.”
That was the e-mail message Whitefish resident Jay Larsen sent his wife Katrina on Aug. 17 from aboard the fishing boat Aquila off the coast of the Aleutian Islands.
Larsen, an electrical engineer who operates side-scanning sonar for the Seattle-based Williamson and Associates marine engineering firm, was with a team of seven technicians and two deck hands searching for a U.S. submarine lost in the stormy Bering Sea in 1942.
The discovery will provide closure for Bruce, Brad and John Abele, the sons of Capt. Mannert Abele, who perished along with 69 other crewman when the USS Grunion disappeared. John Abele, a billionaire who co-founded Boston Scientific Corp in 1979 and has been a pioneer in noninvasive surgical techniques, funded the search for his father’s long-lost submarine.
Scanning the ocean bottom for sunken ships is not the career Larsen expected growing up as the son of a Flathead logger. His father, Larry Larsen, helicopter-logged in Alaska until an accident laid him up. Larry and his wife Liz now own the liquor store in Whitefish.
Jay and his high school sweetheart from Kalispell, Katrina Sweet, went to Montana State University-Bozeman and later Seattle. Jay was working on a master’s degree in applied physics when he was approached by Williamson and Associates, which needed someone to build and maintain the unique side-scanning sonar equipment.
Since then, Jay has worked in exotic locations like Papua, New Guinea, and off the west coast of Africa, surveying the ocean floor for mining companies and oil pipelines. In 1999, he was in the Aleutians surveying a route for a Japanese fiber-optic line.
According to a 29-page history by Brad Abele, the USS Grunion left New London, Conn., with Capt. Abele at the helm on May 24, 1942. The Gato-class submarine had a new all-welded hull and cost $6 million to build. She was 312-feet long and could cruise at 20.25 knots on the surface and 8.75 knots submerged.
The Grunion passed through the Panama Canal, stopped briefly at Pearl Harbor and headed north to the Aleutians. It was early in the war, but Japanese forces were already occupying Attu and Kiska islands at the far western end of the 1,000-mile long chain.
The Aleutians separate the Bering Sea from the North Pacific, an area dubbed the “Devil Sea” by Japanese sailors. Savage storms often appear out of nowhere, and a dense blanket of fog covers the islands the rest of the time, making navigation — and war — nearly impossible.
The Grunion was assigned to an area north of Kiska, where it immediately ran into a Japanese destroyer, according to radio reports to Dutch Harbor. Information on her first day of action was clarified after the war ended — the Grunion had sunk two brand-new subchasers and damaged a third.
But it was its battle with the Kano Maru, a 8,572-ton merchant ship, that proved the Grunion’s undoing. According to an account by the superintendent of the Kano Maru, first published in March 1963, the cargo ship was in heavy fog in the Bering Sea on July 31, 1942, when two torpedoes were spotted headed their way.
The first torpedo missed, but the second hit aft of the engine room, flooding machinery and knocking out the generator and radio. Japanese crewmen manned their 8 cm forward gun and began firing at a periscope seen off the starboard side.
A single torpedo was seen passing harmlessly beneath the ship. Then three more torpedoes were fired by the Grunion. Two hit but didn’t explode.
At that point, Capt. Abele apparently decided to surface and finish off the cargo ship with the submarine’s deck gun. But before it fully surfaced, a Japanese shell hit the conning tower. This was probably the 84th round from Japanese deck gun — an accurate shot from about 450 yards away.
That was the last time the USS Grunion was seen. The Abele brothers learned about the Japanese account online in March 2002. The original 1963 article had been republished in the trade magazine Maru in July 2001 and then posted online on the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s Web site.
Experts — both Japanese and America — questioned whether the freighter’s deck gun could have sunk the submarine. Instead, experts lean toward the theory that one of the torpedoes that missed the ship circled back and hit the sub.
That theory is partially corroborated by eyewitness accounts of a water spout seen exploding out of the ocean where the Grunion was last seen.
Jay found himself back in Dutch Harbor in August, but this time the work was different — a search for a sunken ship, his first.
“It’s foggy most of the time,” he said, “but we saw whales, orcas, porpoises — we even caught an octopus. In rough seas, we had to wrap mattresses around our towfish to protect the equipment.”
The towfish carries the side-scanning sonar equipment and is dragged thousands of feet down behind a boat. Inside each towfish are dozens of electronic circuit boards, each hand-made and unique, sealed within a pressurized tube. It’s Jay’s job to solder replacement components in place when needed. The equipment is analog, not digital, he said, but very reliable.
On their fifth day off Kiska searching for the Grunion, a 320-foot long “hard target” was picked up on the side-scanning sonar about 3,000 feet below the surface off Kiska north of McArthur Reef.
The towfish got within 120 feet or so of the Grunion, Jay said, but only the silhouette is visible in the grainy images.
“We’re about 90-95 percent sure we’ve found the Grunion,” Jay said, “but we can’t be absolutely positive until we put an ROV (remote-operated vehicle) with cameras down there next summer.”
The SeaMARC towfish dragged behind the Aquila is the same side-scanning sonar device Mike Williamson, an ex-Navy diver, used to locate the USS Central America, a 19th century steamship carrying California gold-rush bullion that sank off North Carolina.
Jay said the Abele brothers and John’s son Chris flew by private jet to the Navy base at Adak right away to meet with the search crew. The discovery, which made front-page news in Boston, marked the second time their father’s name attracted public attention.
In April 1944, a destroyer built in Bath, Maine, was named for Capt. Mannert Abele. The Abele family attended the christening, and his widow swung the bottle of champagne. The destroyer, however, was attacked and sunk by Kamikaze planes and a Baka bomber in April 1945.
An email from Jay says..
“By the way… I didn’t tell that reporter that we wrapped mattresses around the towfish!! He had asked me if we had any weather and I told him that on the transit back home we had a couple of days where you had to wrap your toes around the mattress, so…”
Secret of the sea
Fate of WWII submarine may have been discovered
http://www.spokesmanreview.com/local/story.asp?ID=151888
From left, Mike Kelly, Kevin Beck, Jay Larsen and project leader Art Wright look at a target that could possibly be the USS Grunion from their base on the crabbing boat Aquila in early August 2006. (Photo COURTESY OF BRUCE ABELE)
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Bill Morlin
Staff writer
September 28, 2006
A marine geophysicist from Spokane played a key role last month in apparently unraveling a 64-year-old mystery from World War II: What happened to the USS Grunion, a submarine that vanished with 70 sailors aboard?
The work of 35-year-old Mike Kelly and seven other employees of a Seattle-based underwater exploration company helped locate what’s believed to be the wreckage of the U.S. submarine.
Using digital, computer-captured images from side-scan sonar, Kelly and his fellow scientists located the wreckage in more than 3,300 feet of water in the Bering Sea, northeast of Kiska Island in Alaska’s Aleutian chain.
“It was a thrill,” the 1990 Mead High School graduate said in explaining the discovery to his parents, Ed and Kati Kelly, of Spokane.
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The privately funded scientific search expedition was sponsored by the three surviving sons of the submarine’s captain – men now in their 70s who grew old never knowing for sure what happened to their Navy father, Mannert L. Abele.
With the new sonar images captured by Kelly, the sons hope to return to Alaskan waters next summer with underwater cameras to further document the discovery.
“We’re 95 percent sure this is our dad’s submarine,” Bruce Abele said Wednesday when reached at his home in Newton, Mass.
The sonar images clearly show propeller guards which were unique to the USS Grunion and its class of submarines, Abele said.
The submarine’s probable final resting spot was located not only with high-tech gear, but also with newly discovered vital historical information posted on the Internet by two Japanese naval historians.
With that, the Abele family in May hired Williamson & Associate, where Kelly works as a marine geophysicist, usually mapping the ocean floor for cable and oil companies. The Seattle company previously found an Israeli submarine in the Mediterranean Sea and has looked for Amelia Earhart’s missing plane in the South Pacific. In the 1980s, the company found the wreck of the SS Central America off Charleston, S.C., and its reported billion-dollar booty.
“The whole crew was remarkable, but Mike is a phenomenal individual,” Abele said. “He was the key analyst who looked at the images and determined if it was a valid or useful target or a topographical image, like rocks.”
The work of Kelly and the other Williamson scientists was recorded on about 20 hours of video, which Abele and his brothers have reviewed.
“I can tell how closely they’re getting to the spot by watching Mike chewing gun,” Abele said. “The closer they get, the faster he chews.”
Besides finding the final resting spot of the USS Grunion, Kelly also spotted what’s believed to be the remains of two World War II Japanese “sub-chasers” in another location, tucked between undersea rock formations, Abele said.
The Williamson crew sent 11 sonar images via e-mail to Abele’s home, where he’d get up at 2 a.m. EST to monitor that day’s progress. “It was better than any movie you’d go to,” he said.
USS Grunion (SS-216)
Construction: Began March 1941.
Launched: Dec. 22, 1941
Commissioned: April 11, 1942
Displacement: 1,526 tons
Length: 312 feet
Depth limit: 300 feet
Speed: 20.25 knots (37km/hour) surface
8.75 knots (16km/hour) submerged
Propulsion: Four 5,400-horsepower diesel engines
Submerged Endurance: 48 hours at 2 knots
Patrol endurance: 75 days
Range: 11,000 nautical miles
Crew: 70 officers and crew
Source: U.S. military archives
Now producers of documentaries and TV news shows, including “Today,” are lining up to tell the story.
But what’s important, Abele said, is this summer’s discovery answered a lifelong mystery for him and his two brothers.
“We grew up not knowing for sure what happened to our dad and now – 64 years later – we have some answers, which makes it all so unbelievable,” the 77-year-old said.
The 312-foot-long, 1,526-ton “Gato-class” submarine was built in Groton, Conn., launched in December 1941 and sent to the North Pacific the following May to hunt for enemy ships as the Japanese were establishing a forward base on Kiska Island in the Aleutian chain.
After its crew reported firing torpedoes somewhere northeast of Kiska Island on July 30, 1942, the USS Grunion vanished without providing precise location information to U.S. military.
Its whereabouts and the fate of its 70-man crew remained a mystery until Abele’s sons used the Internet in 2004 to make contact with two Japanese historians, Yutaka Iwasaki and Minoru Kanara.
“They gave us a close location where to look,” Abele said.
The historians had researched Japanese military archives and spotted logbook details from the Kano Maru, a Japanese freighter. Its crew, the historians said in an Internet posting, reported their ship was disabled after being hit in the machinery room by a torpedo from the USS Grunion (SS-216).
Following that hit, the Kano Maru crew fired two three-inch deck guns and a .50-caliber machine gun at the Grunion, which had surfaced about 400 meters away, possibly with mechanical trouble.
One of the shots, the Japanese historians wrote, hit the conning tower of the submarine, moments before it slipped beneath the surface.
The Abele brothers – Bruce, Brad and John – were told their father and his crew may have been taken as prisoners of war or vanished when the submarine experienced underwater mechanical problems. A U.S. destroyer was named after Mannert L. Abele, but it was sunk by the Japanese in Okinawa during a later phase of World War II.
After getting the new leads from the Japanese historians, Bruce Abele and his brothers began looking for an underwater exploration company. They found the Seattle-based company which does deep-ocean surveying for pipelines and oil exploration.
The funding largely came from his John Abele, of Vermont, who is the founder of Boston Scientific, the world’s largest maker of cardiovascular catheter equipment, Bruce Abele said. He wouldn’t disclose the cost of the privately funded sea hunt or give the precise location where his father’s submarine is believed resting.
Kelly has traveled the globe with the company after getting his geophysics degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He currently is in Paris, awaiting another sea-search beginning this weekend off the coast of Angola. He couldn’t be reached by phone on Wednesday.
Kelly and the other seven Willliamson crew members, including Jay Larsen, of Whitefish, Mont., met in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, in early August, said survey manager Art Wright.
The crew put their scientific gear, including computers and two deep-ocean sonars and winches, aboard the Aquila, a 165-foot crabber boat based in Seattle. The fishing boat’s owner, Kale Garcia, of Seattle, agreed to join the hunt between his Alaska fishing jobs.
The side-scan sonar devices were lowered to about 1,000 feet off the ocean floor, initially capturing images in a 3,000-meter swath.
When Kelly and the crew spotted something interesting on their computer screen on Aug. 14, their ship returned over the area for a narrower 375-meter swath, giving a much-more defined image of the submarine’s hull on Aug.17.
“The job was a real thrill, and we’re very satisfied our plans worked,” Wright said Thursday from his Seattle office.
Kelly analyzed the recorded computer images being sent from the underwater sonars, being tended by survey technicians. “He was a key guy, our processor,” Wright said. “He is the one who does the images and sorts through the data.”
At the Seattle office, the analysis of the data continues, Wright said.
“Nobody accepts it for 100 percent until you go down with cameras, but here in the shop we feel it’s a 95 percent probability it’s the Grunion,” he said. “Excited? Nah. This is what we do for a living. We’re a bunch of low-key guys.”
I’d agree that the photographs favor the idea that one of the missed torpedoes circled & hit her. Although, a 8 cm shot could have damaged the tower it would not have been responsible for sinking a submarine. Preliminary damage to the sub, seems to be toward the back, near the engine room. There’s no doubt in my mind, she went down quick, thereafter.
However, the testimonies state she was surfacing just before the sub sank. I understand this was during a time of war, but nothing was mentioned about aiding or helping survivors floating in the water, afterward.
Submarines surfacing after firing torpedoes that have missed their targets, places the submarines on the same chess board & depth, as their intended targets.
God Bless the families of her crewmates,
Sivada
I ave viewed the soar image and from my impresiiona nd analysis of the image I am unsure that the image is that of a GATO class submarine. The image rather appears more like that of a surface vessel such as a destroyer class of ship. The shadow of the sonar indicates a substatnial superstructure amidships and a sturcture like that of a gun turret on the foredeck.
The aft deck also exhibits supertructure with lower structure directly of the aft end of the image.
I would suspect that this vessel either is a WWII surface combat vessel or even a more modern fishing vessel.
The key to my analysis is the sonar shadows.
In favor of it being a submarine is te fact that the sturcture is rather narrow.
The dispatch of an underwater ROV with lighting and camera’s will provide the only assurity.
If there are other sonar images available for analysis might someone provide me a link to them?
Thank you
Edward J Cox, CPP
Image Interpreter
I have analyzed the the sonar images and scaled as best that could be done from the image without having the raw data . My opinion is there is a very high proability this IS NOT a submarine. But then again sonar image analysis is not an exact science.