Last year, a Japanese researcher, who has helped the Navy locate other lost submarines including the USS Grunion, discovered the discrepancy, which drastically changed the presumed location of the submarine. The Navy inadvertently had relied on a flawed translation of the Japanese records that got one of the digits in the coordinates wrong, the New York Times reported. The Grayback went undiscovered because of a single wrong digit in the longitude and latitude coordinates thought to be the location where it likely was sunk. In the case of the Grayback, it concluded from Japanese records that a Japanese aircraft dropped a bomb on the submarine, sinking it in open ocean in an area believed to be 100 miles east-southeast of Okinawa. The Navy has worked to piece together the locations of its missing World War II submarines using its own records and those turned over by the Japanese after the war. 25, 1944.īy March 30, after attempts to make contact with the Grayback failed, the submarine was reported as presumed lost along with all 80 sailors aboard. With just two torpedoes remaining, the Grayback got orders to return to Midway on Feb. John Anderson Moore, reported more successes the next day: three torpedo hits on two enemy freighters. 24 with the message that the boat had sunk two Japanese merchant ships and damaged an enemy freighter and tanker. The submarine's first war report from that patrol came on Feb. 28, 1944, for its 10th war patrol in the East China Sea. The Grayback, a Tambor-class submarine built by Electric Boat, left Pearl Harbor on Jan.
His uncle had three siblings, including his father, who died before the sub was found. George said he's spent the ensuing days poring over information about the efforts to find the submarine and the history of the Grayback, one of the most successful submarines of World War II. His family hardly talked about the tragedy.īut that connection to the uncle he never knew strengthened with the news last week that the Grayback had been located in 1,400 feet of water off Okinawa. George, 55, of Brooklyn, N.Y., was born 20 years after the USS Grayback went missing in 1944, so he never felt a strong connection to his uncle, one of 80 sailors assigned to the submarine. When Marshall George received a text message from his cousin on Veterans Day alerting him to news reports that the submarine that his namesake uncle served on had been found after 75 years, he was "completely caught off guard." The USS Grayback was sunk in 1944, and the 80 sailors aboard presumed lost.
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