Deep-sea explorers find Battle of Midway warship

(22 Oct 2019) LEAD IN:

Deep-sea explorers scouring the world's oceans for sunken World War II ships have found a second Japanese warship deep in the Pacific, where one of the most decisive battles of the time took place.

They've confirmed the identity of two out of the four lost Japanese aircraft carriers and are setting out to find other battle wreckage last seen amid the fog of war more than 75 years ago.



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It's the moment the crew had been waiting for.

With the autonomous underwater vehicle far below, Vulcan Inc.'s director of undersea operations Rob Kraft and Naval History and Heritage Command historian Frank Thompson review high frequency sonar images of the warship and conclude it's dimensions and location mean it has to be the Akagi.

The Japanese aircraft carrier that went down in the historic Battle of Midway.

The Akagi was found in the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, resting in nearly 18,000 feet (5,490 meters) of water, more than 1,300 miles (2,090 kilometers) northwest of Pearl Harbor.

Kraft says it was: "One of our final surveys of the mission, I mean we're winding down, we're coming to a close. Weather was actually pretty bad last night, so we had to make a decision whether we were going to go so we went ahead, and we dove and on the first line of that survey, we came across a wreck."

The researchers used an autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV, equipped with sonar to find the ship

"As the mission winds down, you get to that point to where, you know, are you going to be able to find what you're your looking for, and this was very gratifying," says Kraft.

The vehicle had been out overnight collecting data and the image of a warship appeared in the first set of readings Sunday (20 October) morning.

The first scan used low-resolution sonar, so the crew sent their AUV back to get higher-quality images.

"We're going to set up and do a high frequency, high resolution survey on it now, so we can just, really I just need to get a cross section and a length on the ship," Kraft explains.

He says: "And either one of those is going to tell us what it is because really what's left is Soryu and Akagi in this area and those two ships, there are major differences between them, so we should be able to tell what this is."

Engineer Eric Brager says: "We have a side scan sonar on the vehicle and it looks out on both port and starboard sides with sound and it emits a sound and receives it back and from that reflection off of objects on the bottom of the ocean, we can create a picture from sound."

Brager explains: "So for wide area searches we use a very low frequency sonar, 75 kilo hertz, and that allows us to see out a kilometer on either side of the vehicle." He adds: "But once we find something, we can go back with the higher resolution and get a better picture of the debris field and the shape of the ship and how it sits."

"I'm sure of what we're seeing here, the dimensions that we're able to derive from this image is conclusive," says Kraft.

"It can be none other than Akagi."

The vessel is sitting among a pile of debris and the ground around the warship is clearly disturbed by the impact of it hitting the seafloor.

"She's sitting upright on her keel, we can see the bow, we can see the stern clearly, you can see some of the gun emplacements on there, you can see some of the flight deck is also torn up and missing. So, you can actually look right into where the flight deck would be," says Kraft.



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