Whitefish engineer helps in the search for lost WWII submarine

The Daily inter Lake

Gray fog echoed the gray background of the sonar screen.

The fishing vessel methodically dragged an underwater sonar - maybe the size of an Indianapolis 500 race car - back and forth, back and forth in the sometimes smooth, sometimes bouncy Bering Sea.

The Alaskan island of Kiska was usually invisible anywhere from a mile to a few miles away.

Inside the F/V Aquila, Jay Larsen of Whitefish watched the sonar screen for signs of a lost World War II submarine - the USS Grunion.

For hours and hours, a dull, grayish scene slowly rolled by on the screen from the sonar device a few dozen feet beneath the sea's surface.

Topographic squiggles and circles peeked through the gray.

Day after day.

Larsen and the head sonar operator alternated shifts.

Twelve hours on. Twelve hours off.

Occasionally, a promising blip popped up on the screen, sparking anticipation and excitement. Each blip was a false alarm. Crew members became more and more blas/ with each new false alarm.

Maybe nothing was down there.

After all, the 240-square-mile search grid last August was charted from clues from old U.S. Navy reports and remnants of 64-year-old translated Japanese records. There was no guarantee that the Aquila was searching the right patch of ocean. And if it was, the ocean's rocky floor could easily hide a sunken sub.

THE AUGUST search was an expensive and calculated shot in the dark.

The sons of the skipper of the lost sub, which had 69 other dead crew members, footed the bill.

On day five, the ocean's floor - more than 3,300 feet deep - scrolled by on the screen in front of Larsen.

A tiny pin-like straight line drifted onto the screen - barely visible. If you weren't looking for it, you'd never notice it.

"Hey Mike, look at this," Larsen said. The lead sonar operator walked over. This did not look like a false alarm, the two agreed.

However, the Aquila finished its 1.5-mile-wide sonar sweep for the rest of the day. That next day, the vessel returned to the site of the tiny straight line and lowered a sonar device to within 115 feet of the bottom.

The tiny straight line now looked much bigger and bumpy on the sonar screen. The sonar waves cast a shadow as they struck the object. The shadow looked like a profile of a submarine or a destroyer. What looked like long skid marks on the craggy sea bottom came from one end of the figure.

"It was cool," Larsen said.

The search was a success - if that object could be confirmed as the Grunion.

Larsen said: "It fulfilled that part of human nature - the gamble - hunting, gambling, culminating with all of your expertise coming together. There are 70 lives sitting down there, and 70 family groups affected."

THE USS Grunion's life was short and violent.

The 312-foot-long, 27-foot-wide sub was launched from Groton, Conn. on Dec. 22, 1941, and was formally commissioned on April 11, 1942. Lt. Cmdr. Mannert Abele took command. The sub left Connecticut for the Pacific Ocean on May 24.

On the voyage, the Grunion rescued 16 survivors from a torpedoed ship in the Caribbean Sea. It went through the Panama Canal and reached Pearl Harbor shortly after the major battle of Midway in which the U.S. Navy defeated a Japanese fleet.

As part of the Midway campaign, Japan captured two Aleutian Islands - Kiska and Attu - as a feint to split the United States' attention.

On June 30, the Grunion - armed with 24 torpedoes - left Pearl Harbor to patrol north of Kiska.

During that patrol, it tangled with a Japanese destroyer, with neither ship scoring a hit on the other. Later on July 15, the Grunion sank two Japanese patrol boats and damaged a third.

On July 28, the Grunion fired torpedoes at some ships, and got depth-charged in return. Both sides escaped untouched.

The Grunion radioed July 30 that it had 10 torpedoes left. The Navy radioed back for the Grunion to return to its Aleutian base at Dutch Harbor.

No one ever heard from the Grunion again.

It disappeared.

LT. CMDR. Abele had three sons - Bruce, John and Brad.

Off and on for the next 64 years, they tried to find out where the Grunion likely sunk. John Abele, the multi-millionaire founder of Boston Scientific, a medical-equipment company, funded most of the search, Internet sites said.

Meanwhile, a Japanese World War II buff, Yutaka Iwasaki, has a hobby of tracking Japanese ships sunk during the war. He found a 1960s report written by an officer of the Japanese freighter Kano Maru, which arrived in the Aleutians two days before the Grunion disappeared. Iwasaki used that report as the core of two articles that were published in 1991 and 2000 in a couple of small, obscure Japanese magazines.

Pieces of those articles ended up on the Internet.

Internet postings from Japanese sources tell this story.

The Kano Maru arrived at Attu on July 29, 1942, with building materials, coal, landing craft and a seaplane. A sub-chaser vessel escorted the Kano Maru to Kiska. But heavy fog kept them out of Kiska's harbor on July 30, and the two Japanese ships lost each other.

At 5:47 a.m. on July 31, the Kano Maru's signal master spotted two torpedoes zooming at the ship's starboard from the front. The ship quickly turned starboard to dodge the torpedoes.

A Kano Maru deck officer wrote: "I prayed [to] God and got tense for a few seconds. That was the most intolerable moment in my life."

One torpedo missed. The other hit an aft machinery room, knocking out the Kano Maru's main engine, the generator powering the ship's radio, and one of the ship's two 8-centimeter [3-inch-in-diameter] guns.

"The sound occurred that was like a rumbling of the hell ground," the deck officer wrote.

Ten minutes later, two more torpedoes hit the Kano Maru. Both were duds. At least one more torpedo was seen racing toward the freighter, but it missed.

The American submarine began to surface, apparently intending to sink the Kano Maru with its deck gun. All the Japanese ship had left was the remaining 8-centimeter gun on its forecastle and some mounted machine guns.

The small Japanese cannon began firing at the surfacing sub. The fourth shell hit the conning tower.

Big explosion. Big geyser of water.

The sub - possibly the Grunion - sank.

Later that day, the Kano Maru's missing sub-chaser escort arrived from Kiska with another small ship and three seaplanes. They towed the damaged freighter to Kiska's harbor and beached it. A week later, U.S. Navy Catalina seaplanes bombed and sunk the Kano Maru in the harbor.

In 2002, John Abele learned about the Kano Maru material on the Internet and contacted Iwasaki, the Associated Press said.

After awhile, the Abele brothers came to believe that the Kano Maru probably sunk their father's submarine. They approached one high-profile underwater search group, which turned them down.

Then they went to another veteran underwater survey company, Williamson & Associates of Seattle.

CUBICLE LIFE in Seattle drove Larsen crazy.

The 1989 Flathead High graduate, now 35, earned an electrical engineering degree at Montana State University and worked as a power engineer in Seattle. Itching to get out of the office, he quit to earn an applied physics degree at the University of Washington. He then worked for Williamson & Associates for two years.

Williamson & Associates does underwater surveys for pipeline and fiber-optic cable ventures, while also tackling occasional searches for sunken vessels.

The company has its own equipment and hooks up with ships in the right areas to load the sonar devices and other machinery to do the jobs.

Larsen installs the equipment on ships. If equipment has to be modified for specific tasks, that's his job. When the equipment breaks on the ships, the pressure builds on Larsen to fix it quickly in an environment where lost time equals lost money.

" I like the challenge of being out on deck in a rolling, pitching sea with a wrench in my hand," Larsen said.

He also is a sonar operator when the equipment works, which is most of the time.

"Boring is good because that means everything is working," Larsen said.

The travel and adventure thrill Larsen, who has accompanied expeditions to Africa, Japan and Papua New Guinea.

In 2002, he and his wife Katrina moved back to Flathead County to raise their family in Whitefish. He now works for a Flathead engineering firm, but is still occasionally hired by Williamson & Associates for ocean work.

That led him to the Aquila this past summer. The fishing ship - loaded up with underwater survey equipment - left Seattle on Aug. 2 and returned on Aug. 25.

The Aquila's crew met briefly with the Abele brothers in Anchorage after finding and plotting the sub-like sonar anomaly.

The brothers' excitement at likely finding their father's resting place after 64 years also jazzed up the crew.

IS THAT sonar blip really the USS Grunion?

Internet speculation among sonar analysts is split between the blip being a sub or a destroyer - with each opinion falling short of certainty.

Larsen and the Williamson people note that the Grunion is the only legitimate possibility for a sunken vessel at that location.

"We're about 95 percent sure it's the sub," Larsen said.

But then he cautioned that no one has yet verified that their blip is the lost sub.

The Abele brothers tentatively plan to send another expedition out next summer to explore the supposed submarine. An unknown is whether the brothers will hire Williamson & Associates or another firm for the survey.

If the object turns out to be the Grunion, the follow-up survey will likely explore why it sank.

One mystery of the submarine's death is why did an 8-centimeter-wide shell - pretty small in naval gunnery terms - cause the spectacular explosion seen by the Japanese sailors.

Some theories contend that a small shell in the conning tower would be incapable of causing such an explosion.

Larsen noted that some theories zero in on Grunion's torpedoes.

American submarine torpedoes in 1942 were notoriously unreliable.

Many zoomed up and down at different depths during their runs - causing some to dip beneath the ships they were supposed to hit.

Some didn't explode when they should. Some exploded when they shouldn't.

Some curved away from their targets - occasionally circling to attack the subs that fired the torpedoes.

Larsen noted a couple of theories speculate on the Grunion's doom - a torpedo could have exploded in its tube, or a circling torpedo could have doubled back to kill its crew.

Larsen said: "I want to go back for two reasons - to verify that it's the Grunion and to do the forensics."

Reporter John Stang may be reached at 758-4438 or by e-mail at jstang@dailyinterlake.com