This article was originally published on WHerMoments
When a U.S. submarine vanished under mysterious circumstances 75 years ago, the U.S. Navy searched for answers for decades. But a recent interest in the lost craft — and the 80 sailors on board who vanished with it — was revitalized when a researcher named Tim Taylor set out to solve the decades-old mystery once and for all. When Taylor's team descended to the missing sub's last known location, however, their underwater vehicle developed a serious fault, forcing them back to the surface. Taking a look at the data they recorded, he didn't expect to find much... until he spotted a strange inconsistency. And what the technology finally unearthed was enough to make your hair stand on end.
Salvage mission
This salvage operation was carried out on behalf of the Lost 52 Project. The admirable group is dedicated to locating the 52 U.S. submarines that disappeared during World War II.
And the U.S. Navy had previously posted the Grayback – or S.S.-208, as it was less lyrically known – as missing in late March 1944. That’s how it remained until Tim Taylor got involved.
Finding the Grayback
Taylor felt that he had a realistic chance of locating the wreck of the Grayback. And, amazingly, the Lost 52 Project team did indeed find the lost submarine – with the help of a diligent researcher.
The hull of the sub was almost entirely in one piece even after several decades had passed. Yet this discovery was a cause for mixed emotions among the divers and researchers.
Mixed emotions
“We were elated,” Taylor told The New York Times after the discovery. “But it’s also sobering because we just found 80 men.”
And, of course, there were others for whom this discovery was a momentous event. They were the relatives of the submariners who had lost their lives aboard the Grayback. These families had been waiting a lifetime for answers.
Pearl Harbor bound
As far as they knew, the Grayback had embarked on a combat patrol from Pearl Harbor on January 28, 1944. The sub then sent a message back to base on February 24.
It reported that she’d sunk the Japanese freighters Toshin Maru and Taikei Maru and hit two others. Its final message came a day later.
First attack
On February 25, her crew related that the craft had done serious damage to the liner Asama Maru and sunk the tanker Nanpo Maru. And since these attacks over two days had left the Grayback with just two torpedoes, she had to set sail to Midway Atoll in the North Pacific for resupply.
Then... nothing.
Final message
Navy commanders had anticipated that the submarine would dock at Midway Atoll on around March 7, 1944. But there was no sign of her on that date.
Even more alarmingly, the Grayback still hadn’t appeared three weeks later. So the authorities had no choice but to declare her and her crew of 80 as lost at sea.
Gone without a trace
Dozens of men had seemingly perished, leaving their devastated loved ones looking for answers. And there was also no trace of the Grayback, a submarine that had proved to be a huge asset to the U.S. Navy.
The craft had been the work of the Electric Boat Company – and had almost immediately made an impact.
An early end
The Grayback was a Tambor-class vessel, of which only 12 were built. Seven of these were destroyed during the war, and Tambor submarines were ultimately taken out of combat service in 1945.
The Grayback, of course, was one of those subs that never made it to the end of the conflict. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t a force to be reckoned with.
Top-of-the-line vessel
She was a little over 300 feet from stem to stern and displaced 2,410 tons when submerged. At her widest point, she measured just over 27 feet, while her maximum surface speed was around 20 knots.
At a lower speed, the sub could stay submerged for up to 48 hours, and her range was almost 12,500 miles. She had real firepower, too.
Heavily armed
The Grayback was equipped with ten 21-inch torpedo tubes – six at the bow and four at the stern. There was also a 50-caliber machine gun and Bofors 40mm and Oerlikon 20mm cannons on the deck.
And her official crew strength was 54 enlisted men and six officers. Although, as we’ve already found out, she had 80 men aboard when she disappeared in 1944.
Commissioned into service
Yet the Grayback was launched on January 31, 1941, by Rear Admiral Wilson Brown’s wife. The submarine was then commissioned into the U.S. Navy on June 30 – only five months before America became embroiled in WWII.
So she was thrown almost straight into the action.
Shakedown cruise
After her shakedown cruise, the Grayback went on patrol to Chesapeake Bay and the Caribbean in September 1941.
Then, following maintenance at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard on the Maine coast, the Grayback headed for Pearl Harbor in February 1942 – as the U.S. was decidedly now a part of the conflict.
First wartime patrol
And things were about to get serious for the boat and her crew. On February 15, the submarine set off on her first wartime patrol.
She sailed into the Pacific and cruised along the coasts of the island of Guam, which Japan had attacked in December 1941. The sub saw her first action shortly afterward.
Japanese territory
The boat spent four days in a cat-and-mouse game with a Japanese submarine close to the coast of Saipan. The skirmish saw the enemy unleash two torpedoes at the Grayback, and while she emerged unscathed from this assault, she was unable to maneuver into position to return fire.
But it wouldn’t take long for her to record a direct hit.
Taking down the enemy
Yes, the first ship the Grayback sunk was a cargo vessel of 3,291 tons. But the Grayback’s second patrol was a relatively uneventful affair that ended when she docked at Fremantle.
This Western Australian port would be her base for most of the rest of her time in service. And she certainly didn’t waste any of that time.
Dark waters
The Grayback’s next two patrols in the South China Sea were blighted by Axis patrol boats, moonlit nights, and seas that were difficult to navigate. Yet she managed to hit an enemy sub and some merchant ships during these spells in the ocean.
Her fifth tour of duty began on December 7, 1942 – and was a great success.
Surprise attack
On Christmas Day 1942, the Grayback surfaced, catching four landing barges unawares and proceeding to sink them all. Four days later, an enemy sub fired torpedoes at the American craft, but the Grayback’s crew took successful evasive action.
The start of 1943 was similarly eventful, as the U.S. sub attacked the Imperial Japanese Navy vessel I-18. Then the Grayback carried out a daring rescue operation.
Narrow escape
Six Americans who had been aboard a wrecked Martin B-26 Marauder bomber were stranded at Munda Bay on the Solomon Islands. So two of the submarine’s men went ashore after dark and found the airmen.
Then, the following night, the two submariners successfully ferried the six survivors back to the Grayback.
Heroic rescue
The boat’s captain, Commander Edward C. Stephan, won the Navy Cross for this action along with a U.S. Army Silver Star.
Continuing on her mission, though, the submarine later torpedoed several Japanese craft. But she was ultimately damaged herself by depth charges dropped from an enemy destroyer.
A forced return
The weapons had damaged a hatch on the Grayback’s hull, and the resulting leakage forced her to return to port in Brisbane, Australia. And, unfortunately, the submarine’s next patrol in February 1943 saw no successful attacks.
But that all changed during her seventh tour, which began from Brisbane on April 25, 1943.
A string of triumphs
On this cruise, the Grayback came across a Japanese convoy and sank the merchant ship Yodogawa Maru with two torpedoes. Then, a few days later, the U.S. vessel torpedoed an enemy destroyer, causing extensive damage.
The following day, the Grayback also sank another cargo ship, the England Maru, and hit two more. Then it was time to sail back to Pearl Harbor for a new mission.
The wolfpack
The Grayback joined forces with the USS Shad and the USS Cero, with the three vessels becoming a “wolfpack.” This approach of combining submarines as joint attack forces had proved highly successful when used by German U-boats, although it was the first time that the U.S. Navy had tried the tactic.
And the new stratagem proved to be effective.
Decorated crew
Between them, the three subs accounted for the sinking of 38,000 tons of Japanese shipping and damage to a further 3,300 tons. Having used up all their torpedoes, the trio then turned back to Midway Atoll, arriving there on November 10, 1943.
And after the success of this mission, John Anderson Moore became the second of the Grayback’s skippers to win a Navy Cross.
East China Sea
Then, on December 2, 1943, the Grayback set off again from Pearl Harbor for the East China Sea. During this ninth patrol, the submarine fired the entirety of her torpedo supply in five days of attacks, sinking four Japanese ships in the process before returning once again to Pearl Harbor.
Commander Moore’s exploits on that tour earned him another Navy Cross.
The last mission
Finally, after stopping off in Pearl Harbor for just over three weeks, the Grayback set sail for her tenth – and final – active service mission on January 28, 1944. And as we learned earlier, her last radio contact with base came on February 25.
After that, nothing more was ever heard from the submarine, leading the Navy to duly declare her lost on March 30.
Eight battle stars
On that final mission, the Grayback had singlehandedly sunk a staggering 21,594 tons of Japanese shipping craft. It had been the third such trip she’d sailed on with Moore at the helm, and the commander was posthumously handed a third Navy Cross for his achievements at sea.
The Grayback herself was also ultimately awarded eight battle stars for her WWII service.
One crucial error
It would be many decades, though, before anyone found out exactly what had happened to the Grayback and her 80-strong crew. Initially, the U.S. Navy believed that she had sunk beneath the waves at around 100 miles to the southeast of the Japanese island of Okinawa.
Yet as it was later discovered, this assumption was based on data that included a crucial error.
Transcription mistake
The information that the Navy had relied upon came from records that had been kept by the Japanese. As it turned out, though, a single digit in a map reference had been wrongly transcribed.
That’s why the Grayback was actually far from the location that had been assumed over the years.
Lost 52 project
And it wasn’t until 2018, when American Tim Taylor decided to re-examine the case of the Grayback’s disappearance, that the mystery was untangled.
Taylor is the founder of the Lost 52 Project – a private enterprise working to find the remains of the 52 submarines that disappeared without trace during the Second World War.
Beginning with R-12
The Lost 52 Project started after a successful search for the U.S. submarine R-12, which had been lost in 1943 along with 42 of her crew.
Also known as the SS-89, the vessel sank during a training exercise off the coast of Florida.
Veteran sub
The USS R-12 was something of a veteran, as she had actually been decommissioned from the U.S. Navy in 1932 and assigned to the reserve fleet.
With war threatening, however, the Navy brought her back into service in July 1940. She spent time cruising the Panama Canal – until disaster struck in 1943.
Training submarine
In April 1943 she was sailing on an exercise when a forward section of the vessel began to take on water. And in mere seconds, the submarine was overwhelmed, leading her to sink to a depth of 600 feet.
There were only five survivors of the catastrophic sinking.
Mysterious catastrophe
As the R-12 began to plunge below the waves, five of her crew who had been above deck on the conning tower – including skipper Lieutenant Commander E. E. Shelby – were thrown overboard into the sea.
The remaining 42 crew members all lost their lives. The cause of the accident was never fully explained, and the wreck remained undiscovered for nearly seven decades.
Rediscovering R-12
But in fall 2010 Taylor and his crew aboard Research Vessel Tiburon discovered the remains of the R-12 using a high-tech remotely controlled robot. The team also went on to revisit the area on further expeditions, mapping the site and taking images of the wreck.
In addition, they made every effort to contact surviving relatives of the submariners who had died in the accident.
Inspiring the project
And it was that successful hunt for the wreck of the R-12 that prompted Taylor to found the Lost 52 Project. The 52 submarines that sunk without trace during World War II had an extremely high human cost, too.
In total, 3,505 submariners perished on the vessels.
Recovering history
All in all, then, the aim of the Lost 52 Project is a tall order indeed. But over the past decade, Taylor and his crews have come across five submarines whose precise whereabouts were previously unknown.
And their mission goes much further than that, too.
A project with many missions
Taylor wants to both uncover the fates of these sunken subs for posterity and, crucially, to give family members of the lost seamen some closure.
And along with locating the craft, Lost 52 works to create comprehensive surveys of the wreckage found, collects artifacts, and makes material available for educational purposes.
Bonus finds
The Lost 52 Project has also discovered two other WWII submarines alongside the R-12 and the Grayback. The USS Grunion was found off the coast of Alaska, while the USS S-28 was located in Hawaiian waters.
A Cold War-era vessel, the USS Stickleback, was similarly found off Hawaii. Altogether, then, Taylor and his team’s efforts have been rewarded by notable successes.
Looking back at the records
On the search for the Grayback, the ocean explorer got in touch with Japanese researcher Yutaka Iwasaki and asked him to comb through the files of the Sasebo base that had been used by the Japanese Imperial Navy during WWII.
The records there included daily radio updates from Naha on Okinawa Island, which had been the site of a Japanese naval air facility.
Spotting the error
So, Iwasaki duly got to work, upon which he spotted the crucial single-digit error. This mistake had been made in the transcribed version of a report that had been radioed into Sasebo from Naha on February 27, 1944 – just a couple of days after the Grayback had reported back to base for the last time.
And the relevant Japanese message detailed an attack by a Nakajima B5N bomber that had taken off from an aircraft carrier.
100 miles off
“In that radio record, there [are] a longitude and a latitude of the attack, very clearly,” Iwasaki explained to The New York Times in November 2019.
Astonishingly, though, these coordinates marked a location that was more than 100 miles distant from the one the U.S. Navy had assumed to be correct since 1949.
Relatives of the seamen
One of the people greatly affected by the news that the Grayback’s remains had been discovered was Gloria Hurney, whose uncle Raymond Parks had served aboard the submarine as an electrician’s mate, first class. In November 2019 she told ABC News, “There’s a book I read, and it says these ships are known only to God.
But now we know where the Grayback is.”
A touching tribute
Kathy Taylor is another relative of one of those who lost their lives aboard the Grayback, as John Patrick King – who served as an electrician’s mate, third class – had been both her uncle and godfather.
And while speaking to ABC News, she paid touching tribute to the late veteran, saying, “I committed from the very beginning, from a little girl, that I was gonna find him or follow him or keep his memory alive – whatever I could do.”
A second Grayback
But the loss of the Grayback didn’t spell the end of its legacy. That’s because a second Grayback submarine with the Navy designation of SSG-574 went into service in July 1957 – 14 years after the first craft had sunk.
And, fittingly, she was launched by Mrs. Virginia S. Moore, the widow of the original Grayback’s final skipper, Commander John A. Moore.
New and improved
The new Grayback was built at California’s Mare Island Naval Shipyard, and her cutting-edge technology made her a step up from her illustrious predecessor.
For instance, the weaponry on the ’50s sub included guided missiles – an innovation not available when the first Grayback was launched in 1941.
Going back to Pearl Harbor
In fact, the newer craft was the very first vessel to deploy a Regulus II sea-to-surface missile. As the weapons program was canceled not long after the Grayback’s launch, though, in practice she actually carried four Regulus I missiles that gave her the ability to hit targets on land.
And in February 1959 the submarine was based at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
A new design
This Grayback started out at a length of 273 feet – although she was later enhanced to 317 feet – and a little over 27 feet across her beam. And as well as being equipped to launch Regulus I missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, she possessed eight conventional torpedo tubes.
Two of these were positioned towards the stern, while the other six were at the bow.
Constant patrol
Sailing from her base at Pearl Harbor, the Grayback made a series of cruises as a deterrent, including through the waters off Alaska and Japan. And in the years up to 1963, the submarine was on almost constant patrol, spending much of that time cruising underwater.
Eventually, though, that tough schedule had a negative impact on the Grayback’s systems.
A minor setback
Then in August 1963 those years of service caught up with the Grayback. In that month, as the sub cruised near the surface to recharge her batteries, she was caught in heavy seas.
The sheer force of those strong waves caused a main battery fault, which resulted in a fire breaking out in the crew’s sleeping quarters. One submariner lost his life in the incident, while five others were injured. However, after a couple of weeks in repair, the Grayback was back on active service.
A good long career
The blighted sub had a life long after that, too, although at first it seemed as though she was surplus to requirements. By 1964, you see, a new generation of Polaris missiles and submarines had come online, and so ultimately the Grayback was decommissioned in May of that year.
But she came back into service in August 1968 after having been deployed in the role of amphibious transport submarine – and with the new designation of LPSS-574. Now, her adapted missile silos were able to carry up to 67 people on board.
Operation Thunderhead
In June 1972, then, the Grayback transported a unit of Navy SEALs to the coast of Vietnam. They had been deployed as part of Operation Thunderhead – an attempt to liberate two American airmen who were believed to have fled a Viet Cong prisoner-of-war camp.
However, unbeknown to the Navy, that dash to freedom had been aborted. And in the attempt to locate the men, one SEAL, Lieutenant Melvin Spence Dry, lost his life parachuting from a helicopter.
A new tragedy
More tragedy befell the Grayback in 1982, when she was involved in an accident that ultimately cost the lives of five Navy divers. After the men involved had been on a training dive, they subsequently returned to the craft, which had been cruising in Subic Bay near to the Philippines island of Luzon.
When a crucial ventilation valve failed to operate properly, however, the five perished inside a decompression chamber.
The end of Grayback
Not long after this sad event, the Navy finally decommissioned the second Grayback in January 1984. But she still had one last role to play.
Strangely, this required the submarine to be decorated in a glaring shade of orange. Sporting her new color scheme, the sub was then towed out to Subic Bay on April 13, 1986, before being scuttled and used for target practice. And that, finally, was the end of the Grayback’s story.