The wreck of the US Navy destroyer from World War II, “Ghost Ship of the Pacific,” has been found off the coast near California.
According to CNN, The Air Sea Heritage Foundation and Search Inc. on Tuesday, October 1, 2024, announced in a statement that the USS Stewart of the US Navy, which sank during the exercise in May 1946, has been found after nearly eight decades.
As per the release, the ship was damaged during a fight against Japanese forces in 1942, who captured it, and later it became the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Patrol Boat No. 102, which means that the Stewart has served with both the American and Japanese flags.
The statement read, “Preliminary sonar scans revealed that the Stewart is largely intact and that its hull, which remains sleek and imposing, rests nearly upright on the seafloor. 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 release further added, “Soon, far-ranging Allied pilots began reporting the strange sight of an old American destroyer operating deep behind enemy lines. 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.”
Moreover, the team used three autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) of Ocean Infinity to scan the ocean floor in the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary off northern California. After starting the search on August 1, 2024, they found the ship in just 24 hours.
USS Stewart was sitting 3,500 feet (1,036 meters) below the ocean’s surface.
