By Craig T. Kojima, Star-Bulletin
Against a backdrop of the world, the University of Hawaii
team headed to help in the search for the USS Yorktown shows
where on the globe they're headed: Midway Atoll. From left are
Todd Erickson, Karen Sender, Bruce Appelgate, Steven
Tottori and Nathan Becker.
The hunt for the
USS Yorktown
A UH team will play an integral
By Gregg K. Kakesako
part in the effort to find a piece
of WWII history
Star-BulletinFive University of Hawaii scientists and graduate students are an integral part of an ambitious effort to find and map the Pacific graveyard of the Battle of Midway, considered to be the turning point in the war against Japan.
The scientists next month will be looking for four Japanese carriers and one U.S. carrier -- the USS Yorktown -- which now rest three miles down, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean north of Midway Atoll.
Working with a research grant from Newport News Shipbuilding, the project will be the sixth collaboration between Robert Ballard, the Navy and National Geographic to find lost ships. The first involved the Titanic in September 1985. Other projects have been searches for the Lusitania and the German battleship Bismarck, surveying the World War II Guadalcanal naval battle site, and mapping ancient trading routes in the Mediterranean Sea.
The Yorktown was launched April 4, 1936, and commissioned a year later.
Bruce Appelgate, director of field operations at the University of Hawaii's Hawaii Mapping Research Group, said the job of the UH scientific team "is to do the reconnaissance."
"Our job is to cover as much ground as possible as quickly as possible," said Appelgate.
Using a sonar scanner called the Hawaii MR1, Appelgate and his team will have two weeks beginning April 30 to find the Yorktown, which was sunk on June 7, 1942, after being bombed by Japanese fighters and torpedoed by a submarine.
The team will concentrate its search in an area 200 miles north of Midway Atoll. Located 1,250 miles west-northwest of Hawaii, Midway Atoll now is one of 500 wildlife refuges administered by the Interior Department. The Navy relinquished control of the reef-encircled atoll in July.
After the Yorktown's position has been plotted, the UH team will turn its attention west about 150 miles to search for the Japanese aircraft carriers.
Three of them -- the Kaga, Akagi and Soryu -- are believed to be located together. The fourth carrier, the Hiryu, was the last Japanese carrier sunk and is believed to be 80 miles north of its sister ships.
Once the aircraft carriers are located, the second phase of the operation will kick in and the Navy, with its advanced tethered vehicle and high-resolution video cameras, will photograph the sunken vessels.
None of the five vessels has ever been explored.
Appelgate said the 6,000-pound MR1 was developed at the university eight years ago and has been deployed on 17 different vessels on 23 occasions.
"Up to now most of our jobs have been research surveys," said Appelgate, a geophysicist. "We have plotted safe routes for telecommunications on the ocean floor and done environmental studies looking for fish habitats."
Appelgate and his team -- engineer Steven Tottori and data processors Karen Sender, Todd Erickson and Nathan Becker -- will fly to Midway on April 29.
The MR1 was taken by boat to San Diego several months ago to be loaded on the Navy's deep-submergence support ship, the Laney Chouest.
During the search phase of the operation, the 15-foot MR1 will be towed 1,650 feet behind the Laney Chouest, transmitting a ping every nine seconds.
"It's like going out and mowing the grass," said Appelgate, describing the MR1's wide, sweeping search patterns.
"That sound travels through the water and bounces off the bottom while we record the echoes."
Lt. Lydia Le Porte, Navy spokeswoman, said plans call only for videotaping the five warships and not for disturbing the grave sites.
There also is the possibility the Navy will leave a plaque there marking the Battle of Midway.
Several Midway survivors, including Harry Ferrier and Harno Yoshino, will accompany the scientists on the Navy vessel. Ferrier served in a squadron lost at Midway, while Yoshino was a crew member on the Kaga.
Their recollections will be included in the documentary film of the expedition. It is expected to air in September 1999.
Midway turned
the tide in WWIIThe battle cost 3,800 lives and sent the
By Gregg K. Kakesako
USS Yorktown and four Japanese carriers
to the bottom of the Pacific
Star-BulletinFive of the greatest carriers ever built lie at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Four belonged to the Japanese Imperial Navy: the Kaga, Akagi, Hiryu and the Soryu, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto's flagship.
The fifth, the USS Yorktown, was part of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in World War II. The Yorktown and two other U.S. carriers - the Hornet and the Enterprise - participated in the Battle of Midway, considered the most decisive naval engagement of the war.
It was there, about 1,250 miles west-northwest of Oahu, that the U.S. Navy on June 4-6, 1942, destroyed what was then the world's largest carrier task force.
No one has seen the five aircraft carriers since they were sunk 56 years ago on June 7, 1942.
Japanese losses were put at 3,500 pilots and sailors. America's casualties numbered 307.
Besides the Yorktown, the U.S. Navy lost one destroyer, the USS Hammond, and 147 aircraft. In addition to the four carriers, Japan's losses included 332 planes and one heavy cruiser.
The 19,800-ton Yorktown was operating in the Atlantic when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. A bomb damaged the carrier during the Battle of the Coral Sea, but it took only three days for Pearl Harbor shipyard workers to repair her damage.
At Midway, the battle was fought by opposing aircraft carriers about 150 miles apart, and for the first time neither side came within visual range of the other. The battle was waged entirely by naval planes.
Japanese Kate and Zero fighters hit the Yorktown's decks with three bombs. Torpedoes from the Japanese submarine I-168 slammed into her hull on the afternoon of June 6, but the Yorktown did not go down until early in the morning of June 7.
The Japanese had hoped to use Midway as a stepping stone to an invasion of the Hawaiian Islands. The Japanese objective at Midway was to destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet and all of its carriers.
After a half-century of military control, the Navy last July relinquished its authority over the tiny Pacific atoll to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Since then, a private company has been hired to conduct blue-water and light-tackle fishing tours from the island.
There have been five naval vessels bearing the name Yorktown, the latest being a 9,000-ton Aegis guided missile cruiser commissioned in 1984.
The first Yorktown, named after a decisive battle of the Revolutionary War, was a sloop-of-war commissioned in 1840. The second, in 1889, was a steel-hulled gunboat, and the third was the carrier that was sunk at Midway in 1942.
A year later another carrier was pressed into service and commissioned as the Yorktown. It saw extensive action in the Pacific from 1943 to 1945.
It was decommissioned in 1970 and is the centerpiece of a display of warships at Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum at Mount Pleasant in South Carolina.
