The Unprecedented US Operation to Recover the Remains of Hundreds of Soldiers Drowned at Sea
The Wall Street Journal reported on a large-scale Pentagon operation to recover the remains of hundreds of American soldiers killed during World War II.
The Pentagon has carried out an extraordinary operation to recover the remains of American prisoners of war who drowned in the hull of a Japanese ship in 1944. For years, researchers surveyed the area and mapped the sunken vessel. In recent months, a special team of divers descended to the seabed and vacuumed the contents of the ship. The findings were sent for laboratory testing.
In December 1944, about 1,600 Allied prisoners of war from World War II, most of them Americans, were loaded onto the Japanese ship Ōryoku Maru. Shortly thereafter, the ship was attacked by American aircraft, which were unaware that it was carrying prisoners of war, and it sank with the bodies of 250 American soldiers in its hold. 82 years later, the US military launched an unprecedented operation to recover their bodies from the depths of the sea.
An in-depth article in the Wall Street Journal presented the extraordinary efforts of American divers to recover the bodies from the ship found near the coast of the Philippines.
"I don't believe that after so much time, this could even be possible," Christopher Schwartz told the American newspaper about the possibility that his grandfather's remains would finally be brought home. "I wish my father were here to see this."
The crushed skeleton of the ship lies on the seabed about 150 meters from the Philippine coast. The Wall Street Journal reported that removing the bodies from it is one of the most complex missions ever attempted by the US Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. The agency has conducted underwater excavations in the past, but usually, it involved locating one person or a small team.
Efforts to recover the bodies from the sunken ship began as early as 1946, when US Navy divers used explosives to break into the ship's remains. They managed to find only two skull fragments that crumbled, and eventually concluded that the mission was too difficult, recommending that the site be declared a maritime cemetery.
Only in 2016 did renewed efforts to recover the remains begin. A group of researchers surveyed the island's surroundings, managed to locate the ship's construction plans, mapped the remains, and checked access routes to its cargo holds. The surveys confirmed that recovery was possible. The Wall Street Journal team that accompanied the search efforts reported that the operation lasted more than two months and ended in early May.
As part of the efforts, a group of divers from the US Navy and Coast Guard attempted to penetrate the ship's forward cargo hold, where hundreds of soldiers were held. Underwater, the divers cut the ship's steel using a special torch burning at a temperature of thousands of degrees, while hydraulic tools helped move heavy metal parts. The divers' main tool was a vacuum-like system that sucked objects out of the ship and into baskets placed on the seabed. When the baskets were filled, they were lifted by a crane to a ship above the sea surface, where researchers manually went through their contents. The recovered findings will undergo chemical procedures to verify whether they indeed belong to the bodies of the soldiers who drowned more than 80 years ago.
