An American submarine that went missing 75 years ago has been located off the coast of Okinawa, Japan by undersea explorers with the Lost 52 Project, The New York Times reports.
The USS Grayback left Pearl Harbor on January 28, 1944 for a combat patrol, but was listed as missing two months later. In 2018, amateur researcher Yutaka Iwasaki noticed an error of only a single digit involving the latitude and longitude listed for the location where the submarine likely sank, which was recorded in 1949 as part of a Navy history of lost submarines. Iwasaki reviewed files that included daily radio reports that the naval air base at Naha, Okinawa received at the time.
According to a report from February 27, 1944, a Japanese bomber dropped a bomb on a surfaced submarine, which exploded and sank, killing everyone onboard. The latitude and longitude of the attack were listed “very clearly,” Iwasaki told the Times, but they did not match the numbers listed in the Navy history from 1949.
This led researchers to locate the Grayback about 100 miles from where it was thought to have sank.
Iwasaki’s discovery was eventually brought to the attention of undersea explorer Tim Taylor, who funds the Lost 52 Project that aims to locate all the American submarines lost during World War II, who had received a copy of the 1949 Navy history from former Navy submariner Don Walsh. Using a 14-foot autonomous vessel, the group used sonar to survey the ocean floor. The wreckage of the Grayback was found on the second-to-last day of the expedition, after the drone malfunctioned a third of the day into a 24-hour trip.
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