The remains of the 100-meter-long ship were found off the coast of California at a depth of more than 1 km — the ship had been considered lost forever for the past 80 years.
The vessel was identified as the USS Stewart (DD-224), the only US Navy destroyer to be captured by Japanese forces during World War II.
According to The New York Times, the ship was found by underwater researchers from Ocean Infinity, SEARCH, and the Air/Sea Heritage Foundation — using the latest robotic hydroacoustic technology. A few days after that, another team used drones to capture images of the ship, which was upright and looked «almost intact».
«This level of preservation is exceptional for a vessel of this age. Potentially, this is one of the best preserved examples of the four existing «tubular» destroyers of the US Navy», — the publication quotes the researchers.
A team of researchers from the Air Sea Heritage Foundation and Search has deployed a fleet of autonomous underwater drones 100 kilometers off the coast of San Francisco. This technique is used primarily to create high-resolution maps of the seabed, but recently the devices have been linked to the discovery of the location of long-lost ships — such as the Endurance, which sank during Ernest Shackleton’s expedition in 1915.
«I believe we are in the midst of a radical change in ocean exploration,» says Jim Delgado, Senior Vice President of SEARCH Inc, the world’s leading marine archaeology organization.
After the DD-224 sank off Java in 1942, the Japanese raised it again and used it to escort their naval convoys. The ship returned to U.S. control in 1946, and the U.S. military even wanted to rename it RAMP-224 (an acronym for Recovered Allied Military Personnel» — a term used at the time for liberated prisoners of war).
In May 1946, the DD-224 was decommissioned and attempted to be sunk off San Francisco by being shot at by F6F Hellcat fighters. Despite being hit by 18 missiles and thousands of rounds of .50-caliber ammunition, the ship refused to go under, and only succeeded when the DD-224 «finished off the USS PC-799.
«The entire history of this ship has actually been extremely well documented,» said Russ Matthews, president of the nonprofit Air/Sea Heritage Foundation and a member of the research team. «The only part of that history that we didn’t have was what it looks like today.
Source: PetaPixel, The New York Times
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