What REALLY Happened To The USS Grunion Submarine?: John Abele at TEDxBeaconStreet

this is a book that just came out in August that's the story of our family finding a submarine that our dad was was lost in this is the submarine in question it's a little bit longer than a football field but it's only about 37 feet wide on the outside but 16 feet wide on the inside think about by the way spending four months at sea where there are 70 people in a narrow tube so you get to know each other pretty well this was our family in 1941 and I'm the kid all sitting on the arm of the chair there I'm the youngest of three brothers it'll be important in the later part of this story this was actually the crew of that submarine in their wives meeting at the New London Connecticut submarine base because that's where they make submarines and they also train people because of the attack on Pearl Harbor that was December 7th 1941 remember the USS grunion that someone you saw was actually the first submarine launched after the u.s. declared war on Japan and unfortunately in September of 1942 my mother received this telegram which is that we went to inform you in this case it wasn't that he had died it's that he was missing my mother was a very responsible loyal mother she wrote a letter to the parents or the spouse or sisters or family members of every single member on that submarine several letters people wrote letters back to our mother and she became kind of a mother to them and a lot of them needed it young wives and so forth our dad won the Purple Heart he had sunk several Japanese ships and this process but my brother my mother wrote to all relatives again seeing that it was really in their honor all of their honors not just my dad my mother died in 1975 and my middle brother who by that time had become and retired from the Navy he was a Navy pilot started to wonder I wonder what happened to our dad because we never knew the Navy listed as missing and presumed lost my mother never remarried because she always thought that there was a chance that he might come back so anyway Brad put together this this research and what he did is he found names of people who had served with my dad in other submarines and so forth that he'd gone to school with and so forth and did a lot of research and he was able to dig up a fair amount of information but zero information in terms of what had happened to him all we knew and this was only through the grapevine was that it was probably somewhere in the Aleutians my brother's son's girlfriend's boss was a World War two history buff and my brother's son's girlfriend had given that what we called our Jim book the the research that my middle brother Brad had put together to this guy and he contacted us and said that he knew there was an information about a possible confrontation between the USS grunion and a Japanese freighter this was it came from an article in an obscure Japanese maritime journal this article was written by the captain of a freighter that the USS grunion had had a confrontation with very complicated in July 30th 1942 the USS grunion was guarding the approaches to Kiska an island in the western Aleutians this is the freighter in question it is actually beached on the island of Kiska in the western Aleutians and you can see it's a good sized freighter but it actually was an armed freighter it had guns or cannons on the bow and the stern and of course machine guns but in all fairness none of the shells that that ship had would be capable of sinking a u.s. submarine because the submarine was generally under water and it has a double hull so it would be very hard to penetrate where the very small shell there were several officers on this submarine on this freighter rather who had observed and recorded their observations about this confrontation between the submarine and the freighter and they reported that they had shot at it but in fact it had fired six torpedoes act the freighter one of them hit and blew up in the stern taking out the engine the radio room in the stern gun two more went underneath the freighter and then two more went directly into the side of the freighter in bounced off now think about that if you are the captain of a submarine and you're firing when this torpedo which by the way left little bubbles so it's a little trail that tells them exactly where you are and it bounces off you probably wouldn't be very happy and the captain you know documented this and apparently when the torpedo went off he said it was he thought they were absolutely done for but they were able to Beach it and later on it was bombed in 2005 I was at a medical meeting in Florida and the entertainment was dr. Robert Ballard dr. Ballard is the person who discovered the Titanic I remember going up after him after he talked to that meeting and talking to a little bit about the fact that we knew a little bit about our dad submarine and sort of an approximate location and did he think it would be possible to find it in his response to us well you don't have enough information and I would only go after ships that I'm sure I could find and he later came out this is at Boston Scientific and helped us go through the analysis of the strategy of how you go about doing it unfortunately he was working on a project in the Black Sea and wasn't available to work on our project and I remember saying after a while you know what I think we can do that in 2006 we hired a crab boat an Alaskan crab boat they have two creams on it and they we had some 40-foot freight containers in which we set up a little sonar Shack and on this ship we had sonar now sonar is using sound or echolocation as a way to find targets on the bottom and this thing there were two of them one is on the lower left that was a high frequency one and this one is a low frequency one low frequency goes further distance high frequency goes shorter distance and the ship would be sitting on the surface there having a long line going down to a very heavy weight which holds things down and then between that weight and what they call the side scan sonar or it's also called a tow fish that's hanging on a very flexible tether so that if the ship is bouncing up and down that acts as a cushion so the towfish does not move and that gives you a clearer image this is the inside of the sonar Shack quite a team this was the actual team there this was the first sonar image where we got a target that we thought was fairly interesting now I don't know about you but this looks like sort of a cigarette smudge on a piece of paper wherever people who know what they're doing said well you know that might be something the bottom as it turns out was fairly sandy if been full of rocks we couldn't have found anything and here's one with even more magnification after all that stuff was done we had them put together a collage of all the different sonar tracings they'd put together this occupies almost a square mile of distance and what's fascinating about this is there's a funny little mess over here which is where it might have hit the bottom and then there's a line that goes in front of a semicircle all the way up to that red circle up there where we said that's where the target was we didn't know it was the grunion but that was our hope that it would be in 2006 when we did this sonar trip for United States submarines that had been lost in World War two there was total of 52 that had been lost but most of them they know what happened - but four of them that were lost lost like our dads were found none of them were found by the US Navy three of them were found through efforts of family members who had gotten together and one of them was found by recreational divers who were searching for this is the ship again in 2007 and that is in the harbor at Kiska this is the crew we have now and this is actually on the island of Kiska in fact just to the left here there was actually a Japanese shrine when they had occupied it and this was the device we brought with us on the crab-boat this time that's an ROV remotely operated vehicle which is loaded with with television cameras when we got out there basically the night that we arrived at Kiska the ocean was calm the ocean has never come out there so we said you know we're getting some help here let's take advantage of it and and indeed we did this is the front of that ROV you can see there are a couple of video cameras and that vertical device on the right is is actually a short-range sonar this is after we lowered all about 30 minutes after we lowered our hour of the 3000 feet down and you can imagine looking at a ship like this you know that's not just a ship that's my dad and 69 other sailors graves this is getting a little bit closer that's the stern of the ship that's a laser beam we're shooting down to market that's the dive plane that it's hitting there's a rudder that's vertical that's on the left and that's the starboard propeller the right-hand propeller and up above that funny structure that comes out is what we're called at the time propeller guards and they were generally removed from submarines but the order to have them removed didn't come until October of 1942 and this ship was basically sunk in July of 1942 and there's that picture that I just showed you in 2007 on the left and the picture of the submarine that was launched in 1941 and you can see they both have rudder guards one of the challenges we had is getting to the Navy to recognize that in fact this really was the grunion we have some people help us reconstruct with a drawing of what it looked like about 50 feet of the bow had been broken off so apparently when it dived down it hit the bottom in and just broke it however it looked like it had been opened with a can over it would split little ray from one end to the other and that's because at 3,000 feet that submarine is not designed to last it will implode the operating depth was generally don't go below 300 feet it might have lasted until 600 feet and then absolutely instantaneously it would collapse the good thing is is they would have died instantly but it had torpedoes and the bow and the stern two huge engines submarines remember are really hybrid vehicles just like a Prius they operate with diesel on the surface and then they use batteries underneath but they could only stay about 24 hours underwater with the batteries this was one of the close-up pictures with a hatch that was open initially we thought that the only way they could open that hatch would to be on the surface but in fact we took a closer look and some people pointed out that that's that hatch dog they call it was broken off so when that submarine imploded it actually created so much pressure inside the submarine that it popped the hatch thousands and thousands of pressures a pound that's the four bladed propeller and the dive plane a little bit too far here some of the the middle looked as if it was almost news we basically created a network a crowdsource network and then we put together a video we had taken three hours of high-definition video at 60 frames a second which means that we could take adjacent pictures and create a three-dimensional and a glyph of that so you can get a three-dimensional still picture and passed it to people and they pass it back to us with the notes about what they thought went wrong though the next improbable was what we call the sub ladders all of these women are actually relatives of sailors who were lost on the grunion but they're all amateur genealogist and their goal was to find relatives for every single crewman on the sub 70 in all and they did just that here for example it was was was one of them and we were able to get pictures even when he was married he was one of the officers on the grunion and he had a son named Pierre but it wasn't Peter Thomas it was Peter Stevens his son's name now that was obviously the wife remarried and this is how viky of the sub lagers found Peter Stephens part of this process was to have a memorial service for every single sailor who had been sort of forgotten and get a little story so the sub ladies worked on that and they got a lot of stories published hundreds for every single one and lest you think that this is grandstanding the phenomenon is every time we did this every time a new story came out we got more information back and we were able to fill in all this very complex puzzle palace if you will with all sorts of information this submarine here is a Museum in Cleveland Ohio called the USS Cod it turns out it's the sister ship of the USS grunion which was very helpful to us when we're doing our engineering forensics because now we could actually look at what a model looked like and therefore when we took our wreckage pictures and compared them with the various elements of that we were able to figure out exactly what happened and we have several hundred people not bad since there were only 70 crew members but hey lots of relatives and were able to hold a service there and at that point the United States Navy recognized us officially and of course we thought that that actually was as big a task as finding the self in the first place we had a bell that was rung at this service and maybe you can't see it but what they did is they ring the bell it's a service for all the submarines that have been lost that's the sub that's the Bell now you gotta say wait a second that submarine is at the bottom of the Bering Sea 3,000 feet down where the Bell come from the Bell came from Greenville Mississippi in the Welcome Center and it turns out there was a Presbyterian minister there who was a chaplain in World War two and at one point he was stationed in Pearl Harbor and he saw this Bell in the trashy and said gee this is a beautiful bill I'd like to take it back to Greenville Mississippi and initially they said no as the Navy normally does and finally he got it they sent it to him and so that bill went back home and they in Mississippi outside of the minister didn't discover until we told them that one of the sailors on the grunion came from Greenville Mississippi this is sort of a famous Jewish book of Prayer thing that that relates I think to why we did what we did and just a reminder you know we talked about war deaths today and so forth there were four over four hundred thousand Allied or US military people lost in World War two there were 50 million people who died as a result of World War two that's two and a half percent of the world population that time World War two was the second war to end all wars now obviously we're not excited about getting a third in the way you helped do that is make sure you remember what happened the last time thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 243,065

Rating: 4.7665706 out of 5

Keywords: Ocean, tedx talk, English, ted talk, Navy, Boat, \United States\, Submarine, tedx talks, tedx, \Bering Sea\, \USS Grunion\, ted, Military, tedxbeaconstreet, \Boston Scientific\, ted talks, ted x

Id: JL9XAf_xAXE

Length: 20min 51sec (1251 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2013