‘Ghost Ship of the Pacific’ wreckage found sunk off California coast. ‘Groundbreaking’
Following the conclusion of World War II, the battered USS Stewart made its journey home to California from Japan.
The “Ghost Ship of the Pacific,” used by both American and Japanese forces, was given a “burial at sea” and intentionally sunk on May 24, 1946, off the coast of San Francisco, according to a joint Oct 1. release from Ocean Infinity, SEARCH and the Air/Sea Heritage Foundation.
“The Stewart served its country one last time as a target ship, absorbing fire from aerial rockets, machinegun, and naval guns for more than two hours before sinking,” the team said. It marked the end of the historic vessel’s “remarkable globe-spanning odyssey,” which included time in enemy hands.
The ship’s story, however, wasn’t quite finished.
Rumblings of the sunken “ghost ship” circulated, intriguing historians, archaeologists and naval enthusiasts, the team said.
“The rediscovery of its wreck became a top national priority for exploration,” the team said.
And now, more than 78 years after it settled to the ocean floor, the century-old U.S. Navy destroyer’s wreckage has been found off the coast of northern California, marking a “groundbreaking discovery,” the team said.
“This level of preservation is exceptional for a vessel of its age and makes it potentially one of the best-preserved examples of a US Navy ‘fourstacker’ destroyer known to exist,” the team said.
‘An old American destroyer’
While the ship was commissioned in 1920 with the intent to be used in World War I, it was not completed in time and instead “found itself on the front lines at the start of World War II,” the team said.
The vessel “was stationed in Manilla (starting in 1941) as part of the US Navy’s Asiatic Fleet,” a collection of ships that faced Imperial Japan’s forces after its attack on Pearl Harbor, according to the team.
During combat the following year, the Stewart was damaged.
“A freak accident trapped it in a repair drydock on Java where its crew was forced to abandon it as enemy forces prepared to seize the island,” the team said.
A year later, Allied pilots reported seeing something strange “deep behind enemy lines” — “an old American destroyer,” dubbed the “Ghost Ship of the Pacific.”
“It was not until the Stewart was found afloat in Kure, Japan, at the end of the war that the mystery of the Pacific ghost ship was finally solved,” the team said.
The Imperial Japanese Navy had repaired the Stewart and used it in their fleet as Patrol Boat No. 102, the team said.
After being found in Japan, the Stewart was “recommissioned back into the U.S. Navy” during an “emotional ceremony” and towed home to San Francisco, where it was laid to rest, the team said.
“The whole history of that ship was actually exceptionally well documented,” Russ Matthews, president of the nonprofit Air/Sea Heritage Foundation and a member of the discovery team, told The New York Times. “The only piece of that story we didn’t have is, what does it look like today?”
A 24-hour search
Earlier this year, “a diverse team of undersea investigators” from Ocean Infinity, SEARCH and the Air/Sea Heritage Foundation set out to find the ship’s remnants.
Ocean Infinity deployed three autonomous underwater vehicles to scour the ocean floor in search of the “ghost ship of the Pacific” in August.
The “state-of-the-art unmanned submersibles,” which were “equipped with high-resolution synthetic aperture sonar (HiSAS) and multibeam echosounder systems,” scanned the seafloor over a 24-hour period, the team said.
Data from the vehicles showed “the stunning and unmistakable image of a sunken ship 3,500 feet below the surface,” within Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary, the team said.
The ship’s wreckage offers “a unique opportunity to study a well-preserved example of early twentieth-century destroyer design,” James Delgado, senior vice president of SEARCH, said in the release.
“Its story, from US Navy service to Japanese capture and back again, makes it a powerful symbol of the Pacific War’s complexity,” Delgado said.
After the initial discovery, the team also performed “an additional high-resolution sonar survey, then launched a detailed visual inspection of the site using a camera-equipped remote-operated vehicle,” the team said.
While watching the video, something struck Matthews: “a historical record about a touching tribute from the sailors who brought the Stewart home.”
The sailors referred to the ship as “RAMP-224,” a reference to both the “vessel’s navy hull number and a period slang term for returning prisoners of war or Recovered Allied Military Personnel,” the team said.
“It’s clear they thought of Stewart more like a shipmate than a ship,” Matthews said in the release, “and I know I speak for the entire expedition team when I say that we’re all very satisfied to have helped honor the legacy and memory of those veterans once again.”
This story was originally published October 2, 2024 at 3:18 PM