An amazing discovery on the sea bed, the wreckage of the Imperial Japanese National battleship Musashi, was found by Microsoft’s co-founder, Paul Allen, and his team. She was the biggest sunken battleship in history. Class Yamato, the Musashi, was one of a pair of colossal titans of naval engineering, displacing 73,000 tons and carrying the largest-caliber guns ever mounted on a warship. It met its fate during the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea, a critical engagement in the larger Battle of Leyte Gulf, widely considered the largest naval battle of World War II.
Musashi’s final resting place had eluded search for over a decade, with minutes taken from various sources—the “official” Japanese and U.S. Navy positions, a log from a Japanese destroyer, a survivor’s drawing—crossreferenced with navigational clues to pinpoint a search area of 360 square nautical miles in the Sibuyan Sea, according to David Mearns of Bluewater Recoveries.
Initial side-scan sonar searches proved fruitless because blind spots were created by tangled fishing lines, so Allen’s team turned to an MBES. This provided the bathymetry of the search area, although this has proved not useful because the region lies across a large, prominent volcanic ridge and the underwater relief was quite rough. On the other side, the team deployed an AUV that could perform an even and continuous sonar survey over that difficult landscape.
Finally, on dive 3 on the 2nd of March 2015 and in the reduced area of search, the AUV managed to find the wreck. An ROV with an HD camera was then deployed to explore and identify the remains. The first concrete evidence was a valve wheel with “open” and “main valve handle” inscribed on it in Kanji Further searching showed the axillary structure for the Imperial Seal of Japan, the mounting area for the catapult for launching float planes among other markings.
It ended dramatically and tragically for the Musashi. Nineteen strikes of torpedoes and 17 hits of bombs later, the ship capsized and went to the bottom by early evening – taking over 1,000 crew with it. The commander, Vice-Admiral Toshihira Inoguchi, went down with his ship. It was vastly armored and excellently armed, but no match against the incessant aerial assault that it was facing.
Historian and World War II history enthusiast Paul Allen said it had been an honor to find the Musashi as a way of paying respects to the sacrifice of the crew. An expedition to the wreck was live-streamed for the occasion, watched by hundreds of thousands around the world, including 94-year-old Shigeru Nakajima, who survived its sinking. Nakajima, an electrical technician who worked on the ship, was grateful to the team for making the find.
The discovery of the Musashi was undoubtedly part of naval history and simultaneously an ode to memory, a grim reminder of the great human tragedy that happened more than 70 years ago in the most brutal phase of naval warfare.