Researchers locate and photograph 3 undersea shipwrecks, remnants of bloody WWII battle for Attu

Dominic Bush spent four years planning to look for sunken World War II ships in the waters around Attu at the farthest edge of the Aleutian Islands.

This summer, he and a crew of 13 other researchers had just a brief window to conduct their work: five days.

“We were really just kinda exploring, in the truest sense of the word,” said Bush, a doctoral candidate at East Carolina University.

The wait paid off.

The team found three ships on the seafloor, recording them with state-of-the-art equipment and marking the first time any of the vessels, two Japanese and one American, have been seen since sinking more than eight decades ago.

“Those were definitely three of our highest-priority targets,” Bush said.

The project aims to locate, survey and study wrecked vessels and debris from the Battle of Attu, a bloody three-week fight between American and Japanese forces in 1943 over control of the western Aleutian Islands. Sometimes called the “forgotten battle,” the Allied push to reclaim Attu Island has been eclipsed in popular memory by other fights in the Pacific theater, despite the fact that 549 American service members died and 2,351 Japanese soldiers perished in what was the only WWII battle fought on American soil.

“This wasn’t just a little side note to the bigger Pacific campaign. This was its own theater of war, the North Pacific theater of war, which has largely been forgotten,” Bush said. “We’ll hopefully bring more awareness to the public’s mind of the sacrifices made.”

Bush and the other researchers flew to Adak in July to meet the crab boat that served as their research vessel. Each day, they spent 12 hours putting sophisticated equipment into the cold ocean water hoping to spot relics.

Dragging behind the boat was a synthetic aperture sonar device, a tool that’s been used in the energy sector but was a novelty for a maritime archaeology project. According to Bush, it captured details of the undersea debris field in exceptional detail down to the centimeter level, helping locate not just the big shipwrecks but an array of small nautical detritus like anchors, moorings and anti-submarine netting resembling enormous lengths of chainmail.

A team of Japanese researchers used cameras mounted on aerial and underwater drones to spot wrecks and then explore them up close.

“This isn’t just an American story, this isn’t just a Japanese story. It’s a shared story. We’re hoping that archaeology can heal some of those divides,” said Bush, who grew up in Hawaii and traveled to Alaska during summers to visit members of his mom’s family in Chenega in Prince William Sound.

The underwater footage captured by the researchers shows masses of corroded metal reclaimed by the sea, much of it covered in kelp and gauzy anemones, with bright blue fish, crabs and sea stars languishing in crevices.

One ship, Japan’s Kotohira Maru, was found a full kilometer away from where it reportedly went down, nearly 300 feet below the surface. The 5,000-ton freighter had been carrying building supplies and fuel to the Japanese soldiers holding Attu when an American Navy weather plane dropped a large bomb on its bow. Of a crew that could have been as big as 70 people, just two survived.

“It was kind of a tense moment, because we had been spending hours looking for it,” Bush said. “At the exact moment of discovery everybody celebrated, but that was tempered by remembering that this was a significant loss of human life.”

Another freighter, the Cheribon Maru, was located just 30 feet below the surface, blanketed in kelp.

The one American ship discovered was the SS Dellwood, a cable-layer that had been stringing communication lines between islands when it sank July 19, 1943, exactly 81 years to the day when Bush’s research team spotted it.

The researchers have no plans to recover any material from the wrecks, and are coordinating with partners in the Japanese government to figure out next steps for potentially repatriating any remains that might be at the sites.

Another important part of the story surrounding Attu is the removal and imprisonment of the Unangax who lived there before the Japanese invasion. Their village and homes destroyed, 42 Unangan Alaskans were moved to Japan as prisoners of war, where they remained for 3 1/2 years. Half of them died from disease and malnutrition before the survivors returned to Alaska, though not their home island.

Bush and his fellow researchers coordinated with Unangan partners in designing the research project, and among their crew were two members with roots in the region who worked observing and interpreting the group’s findings.

“We’re really trying to bring attention to it,” Bush said of the Attu saga, “both from the military perspective and from the Native perspective.”

The researchers’ next step is processing and analyzing the extensive detailed footage captured during the survey.