full fathom five

Finding Lost Subs

In the last few years, three lost WWII submarines have been found, thanks to remotely operated vehicles (R.O.V.s).  These are robots developed in the mid-eighties equipped with lights, cameras, steering thrusters, and other technology that can find objects as deep as a mile underwater.  These were used to locate the Lagarto in May, 2005 - in the Gulf of Thailand in about 225 feet of water; the Wahoo in 2006 - in the La Perouse Strait South of Sakhalin Island in about 213 feet of water, and - most recently - the Grunion.  The Grunion, lost in May of 1942 on its first patrol, was found last August on a slope 3000 feet down in the Bering Sea ten miles northeast of Kiska Island, the Aleutians.   

The three sons of Grunion's commander, Lt. Cmdr. Mannert L. "Jim" Abele, launched the expedition to find their father's lost sub.  Its discovery combined dogged persistence and determination by the Abele brothers, international cooperation by volunteer and professional search teams, the latest high-tech equipment, and a massive research effort to locate the descendants of all seventy crewmen lost on the sub.  John Abele, who was five when his father was lost, sent vials of seawater from the discovery site to all seventy families of the missing men.   

These families were united by wonder, old and new.  When seventy men simply disappear without a trace, their loved ones cling to the hope they're alive somewhere, wondering when they'll walk through the kitchen door.  One of the Grunion's widows would often go down to the local train station to wait for her lost husband to return.  And then, in 2007 when the families got the call that the Grunion had been discovered, they were bonded by wonder at the discovery itself, and the feeling of having found their lost tribe: others who had wondered with them for some or all of the last sixty-five years. 

Read all about it here: http://www.rd.com/stories/action-adventure/recovered-navy-submarine-grunion-photos/article51160.html         

Why submarines?

A new reader e-mailed to ask me why I had the submarine links on the lefthand margin of this blog, and I was reminded that it's high time I explained.  My father commanded submarines in WWII, and was lost on one in the Fall of 1943, five months before I was born.  In those days, widows weren't encouraged to talk about their lost men; the culture as a whole frowned upon it.  We'd won the war, and people didn't want to look back.  Widows and orphans were encouraged to paste on smiles and move on, make up for lost time. 

So it was not till my mother, keeper of the silence around our lost dad, passed on in 1997, that I finally started looking into my father, trying to find out who he was and what happened to him.  Even though I was late to take up this search, there were, thankfully, still some veterans and war widows left who had known him. 

I spent about three years collecting their impressions, reading recently declassified Naval documents, and learning about WWII submarine operations, to gather an impression of my father's character.  I wrote his biography, framed by my quest to get a sense of who he was and thus complete my identity.  And now, after extensive rewrites, I'm sending the book proposal around to maritime, university, and military presses.

So that's why I have the submarine links.  I also gave this blog the name of the passage from Shakespeare's Tempest that launched me on this search.  Ariel, a magical sprite, sings a song in Act I, scene ii describing a beloved father lost in a storm at sea:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea change

Into something rich and strange.