The wreck of a destroyer that was the only U.S. Navy ship to be used by the Japanese during World War II has been found on the California ocean bed, eight decades after it was last seen.
Found almost 3,500 feet beneath the surface, the ship, known as the ‘Ghost Ship of the Pacific,’ was discovered through the use of powerful robotic sonar technology.
Known as the DD-224 or U.S.S. Stewart, the 314-foot-long ship was the only U.S. Navy destroyer to be captured by Japanese forces during World War II.
The Stewart joined the Atlantic Destroyer Squadron in 1921 and was then sent to Chinese ports and the Philippines until the war broke out. She received two battle stars for her service in WWII.
In 1942, the Stewart came under Japanese attacks off Java. She was shot below the waterline and her engine room was flooded with two feet of water. She was placed in a floating drydock in Surabaya, Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), but as she was raised she fell onto her side in 12 feet of water, causing further damage. She was then hit with a Japanese bomb that damaged her even more. She was left behind when the Dutch colonial port was evacuated as the Japanese closed in.
Later in the war, U.S. pilots reported that they saw an American warship deep behind enemy lines. The Japanese had repaired the Stewart and put her into service for their own navy to serve as a convoy escort.
The Japanese moved her to Kure in 1944. In April 1945 she was bombed and damaged by the U.S. Navy and taken back into U.S. possession at the end of the war.
She was recommissioned by the U.S. Navy in October 1945 at Kure and nicknamed ‘RAMP-224’ for ‘Recovered Allied Military Personnel.’ When her engines gave out near Guam, she was towed to California. She was decommissioned in May 1946 and used for target practice off San Francisco where she sank after two hours of gunfire.
For the next 82 years her exact location was unknown. Ocean Infinity, which owns the world’s largest fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles and has drones that are used to create high-resolution maps of the seafloor came in to look for her.
Ocean Infinity had previously helped find the wreck of the U.S.S. Nevada in 2020 and in 2022 also contributed to the rediscovery of the Endurance, which sank during a 1915 expedition by Ernest Shackleton.
“The whole history of [the Stewart] was actually exceptionally well documented,” Russ Matthews, a member of the discovery team told The New York Times. “The only piece of that story we didn’t have is, what does it look like today?”
Matthews had spent years trying to locate the ship. A lead from a colleague turned up a 1946 U.S. Navy communiqué that narrowed the search to what is now known as the Cordell Bank sanctuary off California, but he couldn’t get the funding to locate the ship.
Ocean Infinity came in to do the search because it wanted to test several of its biggest autonomous drones at the same time and offered to look for the DD-224.
The search required mapping 37 square nautical miles, which should have taken weeks. Instead, the Ocean Infinity drones spotted the ghost ship within hours, which was found upright and in remarkably good shape. The find makes her one of the best-preserved examples of a U.S. Navy ‘four-piper’ destroyer.
Jim Delgado, a senior vice president at SEARCH, Inc., a maritime archaeology firm involved in the DD-224 discovery told The New York Times why the discovery was such a big deal. ‘This ship, in its own way, basically was humanized by the Navy,” he said. “People pour so much into ships—and we have since the beginning of time. They represent us.”
