The wreck of USS Stewart, a century-old destroyer that earned the peculiar distinction of serving in the Pacific under both American and Japanese flags during WW2, has been discovered more than 1km deep off the northern California coast by a team of undersea investigators.
USS Stewart (DD-224) was located during a collaborative expedition between robotic marine survey company Ocean Infinity, the non-profit Air/Sea Heritage Foundation, cultural resources company SEARCH, NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries and the Naval History & Heritage Command (NHHC).
The wreck lies within NOAA’s Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary in an area consistent with historical accounts of its deliberate sinking as part of a naval exercise on 24 May, 1946.
Built in Philadelphia and commissioned in September 1920, the Stewart was completed too late to participate in WW1 but saw front-line action in WW2.
In 1941 after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor she was stationed in Manila in the Philippines as part of the US Navy’s Asiatic Fleet, which consisted mainly of obsolete warships. Damaged during combat in February 1942, a freak accident then trapped the destroyer in a repair dry dock on Java in Indonesia, forcing her crew to abandon the vessel as Japanese forces moved in.
A year later, the repaired Stewart was pressed into service with the Imperial Japanese Navy as Patrol Boat No 102, and Allied pilots began reporting sightings of an elderly US destroyer operating deep behind enemy lines – giving rise to the legend of the “Ghost Ship of the Pacific”.
Mystery solved
The mystery was solved only after the war had ended, when the battered Stewart was found afloat in Kure in Japan.
Recommissioned back into the US Navy in what was described as an “emotional ceremony” on 29 October, 1945, she was towed home to San Francisco for “burial at sea” as a target ship on 24 May, 1946, absorbing rocket, naval and machine gunfire for more than two hours before sinking.
The story of the USS Stewart was kept alive by naval historians and enthusiasts, but more than 78 years passed before her final resting place was found.
Ocean Infinity had wanted to test some of its new undersea technology, so consulted with the other organisations involved in the expedition to identify a useful target of public interest. Only now revealed, at the start of August the company deployed three HUGIN 6000 AUVs to search for the wreck of the USS Stewart.
Equipped with high-resolution synthetic-aperture sonar and multibeam echo-sounder systems, the AUVs were programmed to conduct a simultaneous 24-hour search of an extensive area of seabed. This resulted in a clear image of the sunken ship ship emerging from a depth of 1,070m.
Largely intact
The initial scans showed the 96m Stewart to be largely intact, with its hull resting almost upright on the seabed. The level of preservation is rated as exceptional for a vessel of its age, making it potentially one of the best-preserved examples of a US Navy “fourstacker” destroyer known to exist.
An additional high-res sonar survey was then carried out, along with a detailed visual inspection of the site using an ROV to provide a live video feed to experts on shore. The data produced is being provided to Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary to support future environmental assessments and to the Naval History & Heritage Command to assist with future site-management.
USS Stewart’s sailors had taken to referring to their ship as “RAMP-224,” a combination of her navy hull number and a period slang term for returning prisoners of war or “Recovered Allied Military Personnel”. “It’s clear they thought of Stewart more like a shipmate than a ship,” commented Air/Sea Heritage Foundation president Russ Matthews.
“I know I speak for the entire expedition team when I say that we’re all very satisfied to have helped honour the legacy and memory of those veterans once again,” said Dr James Delgado of SEARCH.
“The USS Stewart represents a unique opportunity to study a well-preserved example of early 20th-century destroyer design. Its story, from US Navy service to Japanese capture and back again, makes it a powerful symbol of the Pacific War’s complexity.”
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