Dive Truk Lagoon: The Japanese WWII Pacific Shipwrecks

283 Pages·2014·12.35 MB·English

by  Rod Macdonald

DIVE TRUK
LAGOON
The Japanese WWII Pacific Shipwrecks
Rod Macdonald
Published by
Whittles Publishing Ltd.,
dunbeath,
caithness, KW6 6EG,
Scotland, UK
www.whittlespublishing.com
© 2014 Rod Macdonald
all rights reserved.
no part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, recording or otherwise
without prior permission of the publishers.
ISBn 978-184995-131-9
Printed by
also by Rod Macdonald:
Dive Scapa Flow
Dive Scotland’s Greatest Wrecks
Dive England’s Greatest Wrecks
Into the Abyss – Diving to Adventure in the Liquid World
The Darkness Below
Great British Shipwrecks – a Personal Adventure
Force Z Shipwrecks of the South China Sea – HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse
www.rod-macdonald.co.uk
www.whittlespublishing.co.uk/Rod_Macdonald
www.amazon.co.uk/Rod-Macdonald
To Rob Ward, Ewan Rowell, Paul Haynes, cindy Hall
and Rob McGann
Tuuno ina turunai
Tha sinn air ar beò ghlacadh le daoibheadh

conTEnTS
acknowledgements i
Introduction iii
BOOK ONE
1
WAR
1. Japan in the Pacific 2
2. The Gibraltar of the Pacific – the secret is out 12
3. Photographic overflight. The Japanese navy scatters as Task Force 17
TF58 is formed
4. operation Hailstone. 17 February 1944. DOG-DAy MINUs ONE 23
(i) 0600hrs. Grumman Hellcat fighter sweep 23
(ii) The aerial torpedo and bomb strikes commence 27
5. 18 February 1944. DOG-DAy 30
6. aftermath 33
BOOK TWO
37
THE sHIPWRECKs OF TRUK LAGOON
chuuk lagoon map 38
1. Aikoku Maru 40
2. Amagisan Maru 51
3. Fujikawa Maru 57
4. Fujisan Maru 65
5. Fumizuki 71
6. Futagami 77
7. Gosei Maru 79
8. Hanakawa Maru 83
9. Heian Maru 87
10. Hino Maru No. 2 96
11. Hoki Maru 99
12. Hokuyo Maru 105
13. Hoyo Maru 110
14. I-169 114
15. Inter-island supply vessel 119
16. Katsuragisan Maru 120
17. Kensho Maru 125
18. Kikukawa Maru 132
19. Kiyosumi Maru 136
20. The lighter 142
21. Momokawa Maru 143
22. Nagano Maru 146
23. Nippo Maru 150
24. IJN Oite 159
25. Ojima 164
26. Patrol Boat No. 34 (ex-Susuki) 166
27. Reiyo Maru 169
28. Rio de Janeiro Maru 173
29. San Francisco Maru 182
30. Sankisan Maru 190
31. Sapporo Maru 197
32. Seiko Maru 199
33. Shinkoku Maru 203
34. Shotan Maru 211
35. Taiho Maru 215
36. Unkai Maru No. 6 217
37. Yamagiri Maru 221
38. Yubae Maru 228

JAPANEsE AIRCRAFT WRECKs OF TRUK LAGOON 231
1. The ‘Betty’ bomber 232
2. The ‘Emily’ flying-boat 237
3. The ‘Jill’ torpedo-bombers 241
4. The ‘Judy’ dive-bomber 243
5. The ‘Zeke’ (Zero) fighters 246
U.s. TAsK FORCE 58 sTRIKE AIRCRAFT 251
1. curtiss SB2c Helldiver 252
2. douglas SBd dauntless 252
3. Grumman TBF avenger 253
4. Grumman F6F Hellcat 254
Bibliography 256
Index 258
acKnoWlEdGEMEnTS
When my good friend and regular dive buddy Paul Haynes and I were asked to present at
oZTeK 2013 in Sydney we thought we might have a bit of a detour and come home to
Scotland via chuuk lagoon. now chuuk isn’t really on the way back home to Scotland
from australia at all – in fact it’s completely the wrong way – but I’d been to chuuk several
times before; Paul hadn’t, and has had to suffer hearing all about it from me for years. So
we decided to go.
I asked my good friend Ewan Rowell, who did most of the underwater photography
for my early books, and who now lives in Perth, Wa, if he’d like to come to oZTeK and
then head up to chuuk with us – and he agreed. and so the team of three musketeers was
formed, and after a whale of a time at oZTeK in Sydney the three of us headed up to chuuk
in March 2013. Thank you guys for your fine company, for looking after me – and for the
laughter and craic we shared.
I hadn’t decided to write a book about chuuk wreck-diving at that stage, but once there,
it became clear that although chuuk is one of the world’s great wreck-diving locations,
other than a few good but older books and some rudimentary line drawings of the wrecks
done in the early 1990s, there was almost a complete lack of good hard diver information
on the wrecks as they are today.
and so, on the long flight home, this time in the right direction via Guam, Seoul, london
and aberdeen, I decided to write the book and make my contribution to chuuk wreck-
diving. Given the unparalleled number of large important wrecks at chuuk it turned out to
be a particularly arduous and time-consuming project, but at last here is the result.
We stayed at the Truk Stop Hotel & dive center on Weno Island (formerly Moen Island)
and once there, we were looked after handsomely by Rob McGann and cindy Hall – thank
you, Rob for the cigar; I haven’t forgotten and will return the favour next time I’m out in
chuuk. cindy looked after us and set everything up locally, giving us detailed pre-dive briefs
that were extremely helpful. She also asked a local chuukese, nuwa Paul to act as our dive
guide – he turned out to be one of the most accomplished and cool divers I have dived with.
The Truk Stop Hotel & dive center is set right on the water’s edge of the lagoon and
has its own jetty where the dive boats leave from. It caters for both sport and technical
divers like me – and was particularly well set up for technical divers. a row of large wet-gear
lockers, each of which can easily take four full sets of Tek kit, is just a few feet away from
the edge of the lagoon. Right beside the gear lockers is a row of kit preparation tables for
building up your rebreathers. any combination of 2–3-litre diluent and oxygen cylinders
was available, as was sofnalime carbon dioxide scrubber. any sort of stage cylinder and
breathing gas we needed was available; all suitably banded with clips. It is truly a great
technical diving base. There is also an open-air bar right on the edge of the lagoon, which
plays the coolest sunset music, so once the day’s diving is done you can sit and relax with
a beer or one of those strange-coloured things, often seen with a paper umbrella in it, and
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Dive Truk Lagoon
watch the sun set on the lagoon. cindy was also able to kindly check some of my wreck
illustrations and confirm depths and features about particular wrecks that I was unsure of.
and so the four of us started diving the chuuk wrecks. nuwa turned out to be a top-class
dive guide and very soon cottoned on to the sort of things we wanted to do and see. our first
dive was straight into the engine room of the Shinkoku Maru for forty-five minutes – before
exiting to explore the rest of this massive tanker in a two-hour dive. That was followed by a
second two-hour dive in the afternoon. Thank you so much for your time, nuwa.
Ewan has always been into underwater photography, and is getting really good at it,
despite his vehement denials. He worked extremely hard taking some 100 photographs on
each dive, continuously marshalling Paul and myself into the right place and position to get
that shot. The results have been staggering, with some awesome photographs, which over
the years will become iconic of chuuk lagoon.
While at oZTeK I met Pete Mesley for the first time. Pete runs lust4Rust diving
Excursions and has pioneered technical diving trips to places like the Force Z shipwrecks
HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse (200 miles north of Singapore), Bikini atoll and
chuuk lagoon where he has a fantastic technical dive set-up with Blue lagoon Resort &
dive Shop, the other major dive resort in chuuk. – and with who I dived on my first trip
to chuuk back in 1991when my enthusiasm for diving in the lagoon was first kindled. Pete
excels at underwater photography and is building quite a reputation for himself. He has very
kindly let me use some of his wonderful photography in this book.
My thanks also must go to Rob Ward of Illusion Illustration, Bridge of Muchalls in
Scotland for the wonderful illustrations of the main chuuk wrecks. Rob and I started out
in 1989 creating the illustrations of the German World War I High Seas Fleet wrecks for my
first book, Dive Scapa Flow, and since then Rob has illustrated all my other books. I was
surprised that although chuuk lagoon is perhaps the best-known wreck-diving destination
in the world there were only some basic line drawings of the wrecks prepared in the early
1990s. I hope that the wreck illustrations I have prepared for this book will help divers for
years to come to understand what they are going to be diving on.
Much though I would have liked to do so, there are so many wrecks in chuuk lagoon
that it was simply economically impossible to prepare illustrations of them all at this point. I
have had to cherry-pick and select the wrecks that divers are most likely to visit on a week or
two’s dive expedition to chuuk. over the coming years, where possible, I will illustrate more
of the wrecks and add them to successive editions. This book is really a work in progress at
this stage.
There have been so many wrecks to research that it has been perhaps the most time-
consuming and challenging of all the books I have written. My thanks to my understanding
wife, claire, for putting up with me locking myself away in my study to write and for the
helpful ideas for the book that she came up with – and for generally being my soul mate and
helping me to get through the laborious writing process.
Finally, thanks to Murdina Macdonald and nuwa Paul for the translations that I hope
will baffle a few folk.
Good diving
Rod Macdonald
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InTRodUcTIon
chuuk lagoon, as Truk lagoon has been known since 1990, is a great natural harbour
ringed by a protective reef some 140 miles in circumference and 40–50 miles in diameter
and is just one of the many lagoons and atolls that make up chuuk State.
Rising up from the deep blue oceanic depths of the western Pacific, chuuk State is one
of the Federated States of Micronesia, an independent sovereign island nation formed in
1979 that consists of four states: Yap, chuuk, Pohnpei and Kosrae. Together the four states
comprise some 607 islands scattered over almost 1,700 miles just north of the equator to
the north-east of new Guinea. Truk was one of the six districts of the Trust Territory of the
Pacific Islands administered by america under charter from the United nations from the
end of World War II until 1986. Today chuuk lagoon, or Truk lagoon as it is still more
internationally known, is perhaps the most famous wreck-diving location in the world.
at the start of World War II in 1939 Truk lagoon became the Imperial Japanese
navy’s (IJn) Fourth Fleet Base and it became the combined Fleet’s base from 1942 to
1944 acting as Japan’s main forward naval base in the Pacific. In the early part of the war,
as victories came easily to the Japanese onslaught, Truk served as the forward anchorage
for the Japanese Imperial Fleet. When the Imperial Japanese army (IJa) arrived in numbers
in January 1944 Truk was considered poorly equipped to defend itself. consequently, to
defend against an amphibious invasion, the army established numerous coastal defence
and anti-aircraft-gun positions, and heavily fortified and defended Truk with a military
infrastructure of roads, trenches, bunkers, caves, five airstrips, seaplane bases, a torpedo-
boat station, submarine repair centres, a communications centre and a radar station. The
Japanese garrison comprised almost 28,000 Imperial Japanese navy personnel and almost
17,000 Imperial Japanese army service personnel. a significant portion of the Japanese Fleet
was based there and it was a focal point for supplying and resourcing the recently conquered
Japanese Greater asia Prosperity Sphere islands and territories.
The 140 miles of barrier coral reefs around the lagoon protect some 245 islands and
islets within it. although there are a number of passes into the lagoon, in all 140 miles of
barrier reef, only five were safely navigable to allow large vessels to enter and leave the
lagoon. These five passes were heavily defended during the war – flanked by coastal defence
guns set on the islands on either side of the pass. With the exception of north Pass and
South Pass (used by the Japanese), the other passes were mined.
With the lagoon being 40–50 miles in diameter, the main islands in the centre of the
lagoon, and the fleet anchorages chosen around them, were relatively safe from a naval
bombardment from outside the lagoon by enemy capital ships, which had a maximum
range of just over 20 miles. The high stone cliffs of the islands themselves acted as natural
fortifications.
coastal defence guns can usually be classified as either close-defence guns or counter-
bombardment guns. counter-bombardment guns were usually large-calibre naval guns with
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