The Navy divers on this mission included several permanently assigned to the ship, with the remainder from Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit 1 in Pearl Harbor. The latter were men and women we had worked with before in similar Seamark ventures from Pearl Harbor to Palau. With the tough diving conditions we faced on this project, their presence was particularly welcome. The water temperature hovered around 36 degrees, and the weather, for maritime purposes, is some of the most treacherous in the world.
In most theaters of World War II, the chief antagonist was the enemy; in the Aleutians, it was the elements. Even winter on the Russian front couldn’t match the Aleutians for nature playing havoc with the technology of war. Entire air and sea engagements took place in this West Alaskan archipelago with the opposing sides never seeing each other. In some phases of the campaign more faith was placed on blips on radar screens than ever before in military history.
There were instances in the conflict in which whole squadrons of planes were decimated without ever contacting the enemy; fog and 100-mile-per-hour winds caused them to miss not only the enemy, but the way home. Lost, returning stragglers, out of fuel, crashed into treeless hilltops, leaving stark testimony on the Aleutian landscape of the human costs of war.
The Japanese Pacific juggernaut, which began with the raid on Pearl Harbor, ended within a day of their opening attack on the Aleutians scarcely six months later. As their planes came in for a second raid on Dutch Harbor on June 4, 1942, several thousand miles to the south, two squadrons of American dive bombers engaged in the battle of Midway would happen upon the main carrier force of the Japanese combined fleet . . . with their planes refueling on the decks. Within minutes the fortunes of war would shift, and any dreams of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere would be in flames along with the cream of Japan’s naval air power. Would the result have been the same if Japan’s two remaining fleet carriers had been at Midway rather than wrestling fog banks in the Aleutians? Hard to say, but one may rest assured that this question was asked many times in the smoke-filled meeting rooms of the Japanese high command.
Alaska was purchased by the United States from the Russians in 1867 through an agreement that became known as Seward’s Folly. At roughly fifty acres per dollar, this folly ranks with the “purchase” of Manhattan Island from the Indians for $24 as one of the more inspired transactions in the history of real estate speculation in the New World.
The native Aleuts were almost killed off by the Russians before the war. The Japanese and Americans deported them during the conflict, and the latter effectively diluted the remains of their culture afterwards. The Aleuts were themselves latecomers in the eyes of the otters, seals, birds, and other inhabitants of an archipelago left blessedly undisturbed by human intrusion for all the preceding millenniums.
I felt that I’d long had some special connection with the Aleutians. Even though this was the first time I had actually been in the archipelago, the mental images painted by my wife, who had spent most of a decade there, made it seem familiar to me. During her years as a fisherwoman in the 1970s, Barb and her friends had spent considerable time scrounging through World War II detritus for materials to build their cabins around Dutch Harbor. All this occurred before the broken-down buildings were declared historic, or worse, declared junk by the Corp of Engineers and “cleaned up.”
My expectations from my “wife’s tales” were fulfilled immediately on arrival at Adak. I had no sooner left the legendary Reeves Aleutian airplane in the mandatory Aleutian rainstorm and started to drag my bags through the doorway to my quarters when the whole building began shaking from the by now expected Aleutians earthquake. I phoned Barb in Santa Fe to assure her that everything was pretty much the way she had left it.
Even with the tough conditions, Larry informed me he had successfully surveyed much of Kiska harbor with side-scan sonar with exciting results. He and our Navy comrades found several sunken vessels, including one submarine. The strategic bombing survey and other archival reports indicated these sites should be there somewhere, but now we knew where “somewhere” was.
The use of a Navy ship for three weeks was one of the more remarkable benefits of Project Seamark. The Navy was helping us expand our reach into places we couldn’t ordinarily touch. The NPS is technically responsible for helping to preserve National Historic Landmark Sites (such as Kiska and Attu) regardless of where they are located. No one, however, thought we could actually field an operation somewhere so remote. Except for C-130 flights to maintain a Coast Guard Loran Station (navigational aide) in Attu, these islands were only visited once every few years by an occasional fisherman or a Fish and Wildlife vessel. Not only had we gotten ourselves here through our Navy collaboration but a number of land archeologists and historians had taken advantage of the opportunity to pursue their own preservation responsibilities in this remote part of Alaska.
The landlubbers in the team had made excellent progress also, making good use of the brief window of opportunity afforded by the Navy ship to explore and document the remains of the war. They reported that the landscape of Kiska harbor was totally dominated by the almost fifty-year-old residues of the conflict. The next morning, with the ship moored in the comparatively calm waters of the harbor, I had a chance to confirm this for myself.
Standing alone on a walkway on the ship’s bridge I gazed at the shoreline, where the morning fog moved up to join the normal overcast and form a thick ceiling of clouds only a few hundred feet above us. Before the hillsides disappeared into the mist I could see they were heavily fortified and pockmarked with bomb craters. The tundra has preserved, in sharp relief, the cumulative results of many American air raids on the Japanese fortifications.
There are no trees in the Aleutians; severe rock outcrops contrast with the soft greens and rich browns, and reds of soil and tundra. Someone’s crab pots on the dock were the only sign that anybody had been there since the Japanese departed. Ships of the same gray color as the Safeguard, but carrying guns many magnitudes larger than the fifty-calibers that rested silent under the tarps on our vessel had bombarded the island for weeks. They supplemented the bombing runs by U.S. and Canadian planes from Adak.
In an effort to avoid the heavy losses and hardships encountered by Allied forces during the retaking of Attu, the American military spared no expense in air raids, or naval bombardments, to soften Japanese resistance on Kiska. On some of the raids an intense bearded man, a maker of propaganda films with some Hollywood experience, rode in the belly of one of the B-17s. That was how John Huston first set eyes on the rolling green and brown hills of Kiska.
On Attu, the last of the Japanese soldiers held hand grenades to their chest and pulled the pins rather than suffer the dishonor of being captured. Five hundred young men soaked several acres of the noncommittal tundra with their blood and body parts. They were successful in escaping dishonor as well as a future, taxes, old age, and death by natural causes. The defenders of Kiska were using a different manual.
One may recall the peace slogan from the sixties. “What if they started a war and no one came?” Battle was declared on Kiska, and the Japanese just weren’t there—none, not one. While the U.S. fleet headed north to intercept a series of radar blips that turned out to be an electromagnetic Aleutian fantasy, the Japanese defenders boarded destroyers that had slipped through the fog to take them home.
It would rank as one of the more spectacular no-shows of World War II. The lack of enemy forces wouldn’t prevent twenty-eight fatalities from accident, booby traps, and “friendly fire” when American and Canadian troops stormed the island and confirmed the growing suspicion of their officers that there was no one there to fight.
Briefly, the sun won out in its struggle with the fog, and I had a glimpse of a smoking volcano in the distance. I expected next to see a prehistoric creature stick its head up from the shallows, but instead a sailor summoned me to the back deck. The fantail was alive with activity—a break in the weather and all were in a frenzy to get
mobilized. The two thirty-five-foot launches were lowered and Larry, or “Griz,” as he was referred to by the sailors, arranged boat assignments with the Navy chiefs.
The larger launches began towing sonar gear and deploying shore parties while we readied rubber boats for the diving operations. I was soon bouncing my way out to my first dive with Mike Eng. Our bright red dry suits, designed for cold-water diving operations, contrasted wildly with the drab black boats and subdued tones of the Aleutian hillsides, especially since the overcast was already beginning to make up for its minor setback. Perhaps having just returned from a month diving in Bikini made the chill more tolerable.
It’s amazing how cold-water diving makes one aware of parts of the anatomy usually taken for granted. Sinuses, for example, are like donut holes: empty spaces, significant only because of their location. One is not likely to forget them, however, when diving in 36-degree water. It seems like they are linked to the eyes, inner ear, and teeth through some kind of icy bond of pain. I grabbed the video camera handed down to me from the rubber dive boat and began to come to terms with the cold water as I waited for my diving partner.
I began my usual soliloquy that preceded cold-water dives. Mike, with SCRU at this point for two years, paid no attention to my muttering as I confided to my regulator profane observations on the teeth-cracking cold, the slothful nature of my companions, and the general injustice of the human condition. As our descent began, my body adjusted to all the insults it had received, purpose came back to life, and my companions magically became competent and the salt of the earth once again.
We followed a white nylon buoy line that was set by a Navy team near one of our sonar contacts, a Japanese submarine. Soon we were filming and sketching the remains of what archival documents told us should be “RO 65,” in about one-hundred feet of water—a “Vickers Class” medium sub, noted in the Japanese records as an accidental loss, which conflicts with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey listing it as sunk by U.S. bombers out of Adak. We immediately noted that whatever “accident” sank RO 65 blew the entire conning tower off the vessel and left it (periscopes, snorkels, and all) several feet away from the upright, otherwise intact sub.
Northern Pacific anemones adorned the hull in splashes of white, red, and purple. Even some wood decking had survived but most of it was in poor condition. We passed the torpedo tubes through which swimming bombs were helped on their way toward their targets by a burst of high-pressure air. The greatly superior quality of the Japanese torpedoes that emerged from these tubes became a major military scandal for the United States during the early part of World War II. American sub skippers and their crews who had risked weeks of privation and danger waiting for the opportunity to launch torpedoes had to watch helplessly as their defective “fish” bounced harmlessly off their targets.
Next we passed the transducer for the upward-looking sonar: a sign of one of the inevitable technological turnabouts of war. The submariners had adapted one of their worst nightmares from the surface forces tool kit, sonar, to track its own prey from below. Suddenly, another feature of the sub immediately absorbed all my interest: the torpedo-loading hatch. It would hardly be remarkable but for the fact that it was wide open. I glanced at my air-pressure gauge, which assured me I still had over two-thirds of my air supply remaining in the double eighty-cubic foot tanks strapped to my back. The hatch was large enough to enter without removing any equipment and, like all openings into shipwrecks, it seemed to be beckoning frantically to be entered.
I looked over at Mike, my glance conveying much in the language of divers. He shrugged and nodded. Translation: “Yeah, I see it, okay by me if you go for it.” When we are accompanied underwater by a single partner, it’s our unwritten rule to get consent before doing anything that takes attention from your partner for more than a few seconds. In the forced silence, Mike had just momentarily absolved me of my responsibility to be an attentive buddy.
I pointed the video light down the hole. There were no entanglements that couldn’t be negotiated, so I pulled myself down the hatchway headfirst with my free hand. My movement dislodged a slight flurry of silt; then, my tanks scraped against the top edge of the entry-way and made a dull clank when I settled myself in a sitting position on a smooth surface.
I was mesmerized by what appeared in the beam of my light inside the sub. The water visibility in the still void was startling in its clarity. To my right was exposed wiring covered in shiny insulation, to which the omnipresent silt that collects in shipwrecks didn’t seem to adhere. Arrays of circuit breakers and electrical switches were interspersed along the overhead, along with valves the functions of which I hadn’t a clue. Small signs on electrical panels were at the fringe of my vision; they appeared to be in English, although I couldn’t quite make out specific words. As the case with much Japanese military hardware, this submarine derived from factories in the British Isles.
Japan, a nation limited in natural resources, had no such limits in imagination and cultural resourcefulness. Gazing at the British technology kluged together in the sub, I wondered how often American and British soldiers were torn apart by shrapnel recycled from old bicycles shipped to Japan before the war clouds had gathered or torpedoes from hybrid subs guided by British instruments.
I knew my movements, no matter how careful—even the air bubbles escaping from my regulator—would soon stir the sediment to mar the crystalline clarity of the water. Quickly I extended my hand back through the hatch, where Mike, anticipating me, was already handing down one of our small, self-contained video cameras. Leaning forward, I began to “film” with one hand whatever was caught by the beam of the light held in my other hand. I slid along the ramp I was straddling to see if I could find and film a torpedo. Steadying the camera against my cheek, I panned it down slowly, in synch with my eyes, following the light beam.
My eyes and the camera lens simultaneously recorded an important fact: I was not straddling a ramp—it was a torpedo, warhead in place. This made for exciting video. Luckily, the camera had no sound track to record the muffled exclamations from my regulator mouthpiece. I froze in place, afraid to move, and began to assess my situation using logic, since my knowledge of torpedoes is limited. I had been around a lot of munitions underwater (indeed weeks earlier at Bikini, they were everywhere), but, no ordnance expert, I firmly ascribed to the no-touch rule. My Navy EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) compadres say most of it is harmless, but the stuff that isn’t will turn you, in their words, into “red soup” very quickly. Charming imagery, but the humor was lost on me at the moment.
I reasoned the torpedo was probably not armed and that I really shouldn’t be as nervous about sitting on it as my gut reactions dictated, but there were many things I would rather be straddling. Although I couldn’t tell for sure, it made no sense to me that the Japanese would have had an armed torpedo sitting around . . . unless they were about to place it in a tube. Hell, maybe it was set to go, but then, I had read that they usually had to travel so many rotations of the propeller before arming themselves and a contact pin would provide the final push of the button. Then again, the EOD fellows had stressed to me that the inhibiting mechanisms in bombs and torpedoes tended to corrode faster than the detonating devices. In other words, it was time to slowly and gently leave. But since it hadn’t gone off yet, I decided it should make no difference to sit there quietly and finish my crude video sweep of the interior.
A moment more filming and I gingerly extricated my legs from around the lethal tube intended to sink U.S. warships and exited the compartment. Mike reached down for the camera and light and I was soon back on the sub’s deck. He was showing signs of interest in having a look himself until I put my finger in front of his mask and wagged it back and forth a couple times in a “no-go” signal.
As we moved toward the stern, further examination revealed that the sub had a large diameter chain stretched underneath the propellers and rudder assembly. It was obviously not part of the ship, and a Navy salva
ge diver later pointed out that this is a common step in the procedure to salvage a submarine. It seemed plausible that a Navy salvage diver would have a better sense for that than an archeologist, but it raised the question of who the would-be salvors were: Japanese or American? That question would take more time to answer.
We were at a point that we would have to stage-decompress already so we headed back toward our boat. A few minutes dangling on a line to clear excess nitrogen, a rush of bubbles and surface sounds, and I found myself bobbing on the surface in front of our black rubber boat. I couldn’t return the okay sign from the Navy divemaster because my hands were too full of cameras and other recording paraphernalia, so I nodded vigorously in answer to his signaled “Okay?” query. That seemed to satisfy him, so while the support crew bustled around getting Mike into the boat, I did a slow pirouette in the water by sculling my feet and scanned the brooding Aleutian landscape.
On our last day Larry and I opted to join the land crew. We were making our way back to the launch that would take us to the Safeguard, having witnessed the detritus of Japanese occupation forces spread over the entire harbor: artillery emplacements, flattened buildings, complex caves dug into hillsides with machine guns still lying in them, a midget sub still in its pen on land, and even a complete water system and fire hydrant with Japanese characters included.
I was most intrigued at this moment, however, by one of the bald eagles that had been circling our little party as we bounced back down the last green slope of springy tundra. He settled on a remaining communications pole and stared down at us, wings remaining outstretched as if he had forgotten to withdraw them in fascination with the scurrying humans below. He finally pulled in his wings, solemnly turned his back, and pointedly ignored us—apparently bored with the panorama of human destruction with which we were so fascinated.
Submerged: Adventures of America's Most Elite Underwater Archeology Team Page 26