Memories From Micronesia: Driving Chuuk’s Ghost Fleet

Imagine, if you will, traveling over twenty-four hours on three different planes from the Eastern United States, observing one sunset through your jetlag while somehow landing nearly two days later. Your final destination is a small airport, barely four rooms large. Dazed and discombobulated, you haul your bags from the baggage bin to the airport’s driveway, where two men are waiting with a van to pick you up. In between brief exchanges, you hear them speaking a language wholly unfamiliar. You drive 30 minutes, barely cresting 18 miles per hour across a pimpled, jagged stretch of not-quite-road, shaking violently with each flooded pothole. You finally arrive, shaken, at a small resort, though not for long. You traverse the deserted hotel grounds, blindly following the van drivers with your suitcases under the black night sky.

When the clock strikes 10pm local time, well after sunset, you hop onto a small metal boat with two outboard motors and another crew of two men. As the boat inches slowly away from the dock, one of the crewmembers carefully illuminates the water out in front with a small handheld spotlight, panning back and forth to ensure safe passage. As you settle down and prepare yourself for another sluggish, dimly lit crawl, the spotlight is turned off, and the captain goes full-throttle into the black abyss, flying across the water towards a tiny gleam of white light far in the distance. The gleam, as it turns out, is a former whaling ship. And it will be your home for the next week.

I found myself in these circumstances last August. I had arrived in Chuuk, also known as Truk Lagoon, one of the four states that make up the present-day Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). The language spoken by the local crewmembers in the van and boat was Chuukese. The former whaling ship I was on was the SS Thorfinn, which had been specially reconfigured as a diving liveaboard, founded and run by Lance Higgs, a Canadian expat that has lived in Micronesia for over thirty years. This ship would be my home base for the week I spent there.

[su_pullquote]For a brief moment in 1944, Truk Lagoon was likely the most violent place on the globe.[/su_pullquote]When I awoke the morning after I arrived, I gazed upon the lagoon from the top deck of the ship, gawking at my surroundings. Looking out from the upper deck, the only visible sights were the smooth surface of the sea and a few lush, green mountains jetting out of the blue below and shooting up towards the sky a hand to God. Aside from the howl of the wind, there was an overwhelming sense of calm. This was not always the case. For a brief moment in 1944, Truk Lagoon was likely the most violent place on the globe.

Chuuk was formerly the largest and most significant Japanese naval base in WWII’s Pacific Theatre. It was considered by the American military for years to be impenetrable, known as the Gibraltar of the Pacific and likened to Pearl Harbor in size and scope. The American island hopping campaign finally reached the lagoon in 1944. In the early hours of February 17, the US commenced Operation Hailstone, an aerial offensive on the Japanese Imperial Navy’s Combined Fleet at Chuuk. Bullets and bombs set it alight as hundreds of planes and dozens of ships from the American side sought to bring down the Japanese fortress. As February 18 came around, the base had been crippled. The Japanese lost more than 40 ships, 250 aircraft, and 4,500 men.

Today, there is no obvious indication from the surface that Chuuk was the center of a key WWII offensive, suffering thousands of casualties in less than two days. At sea level, there is almost no discernible visual suggestion that a battle ever occurred. The buoys marking the shipwrecks are located, rather oddly, fifteen feet or so below the surface, invisible except to the experienced eye of a local guide. The only clue of the war’s legacy is the squared-off outline of Etten Island airfield, now completely overgrown with foliage. Small homes and local residents have since replaced the planes and Japanese soldiers. It is not until you plunge below the surface of the lagoon that you’re faced with the sobering remnants of wartime destruction.

The shipwrecks in Chuuk are often referred to as the ghost fleet, and the term becomes scarily apparent underwater. The ships remain in largely the same condition as they did when they went down in ’44, rife with artifacts. In some wrecks you can find fuel barrels, artillery shells, and unexploded ordinance; in others, you gaze upon disconnected cables and hoses in engine rooms and the corroding gauges and levers once used to operate them. You can swim through mazes of mangled ladders used by the crewmen to run their vessels. Dining ware and sake bottles lie just yards away from plane parts, truck frames, and even tanks.[su_pullquote align=”right”]In some wrecks you can find fuel barrels, artillery shells, and unexploded ordinance; in others, you gaze upon disconnected cables and hoses in engine rooms and the corroding gauges and levers once used to operate them.[/su_pullquote]

The remnants on the seafloor reflect a military operation of elaborate scope. The San Francisco Maru, a passenger-cargo ship built in 1919, was laid to rest at even keel with three light tanks still on deck and trucks in one of its cargo holds. The Hoyo Maru, a 475-foot tanker, capsized when a bomb exploded on impact, leaving its hull and propellers pointed skywards. In the engine room of the 510-foot Heian Maru, Chuuk’s largest wreck, the skull of a deceased crewmember greets divers as they swim along. The ghost fleet is a symbol of death and destruction. And yet, in the decades after the attack, the wrecks have transformed into artificial reefs, supporting a healthy and vibrant marine ecosystem. Coral has encrusted the colossal metal gravesites, providing a lush habitat for a host of sea life.

[su_pullquote]I observed something strangely poetic yet profoundly unsettling about the remnants of destruction on a massive scale juxtaposed with the idyllic beauty of the vast Pacific.[/su_pullquote]It is difficult to describe the feeling of this place. During my week there, I observed something strangely poetic yet profoundly unsettling about the remnants of destruction on a massive scale juxtaposed with the idyllic beauty of the vast Pacific. As I carefully folded myself through the narrow spaces where crewmembers went down with their ships, I was simultaneously surrounded by the remnants of conflict yet so far removed from it. After just one week, I had dived on over fifteen ships and barely scratched the surface of what remains in the lagoon. The unique opportunity left me with a crystalline set of memories of the ghost fleet and postulations about what the attack must have been like.

Chuuk is a testament to how wartime events are selectively remembered or forgotten. As Americans, we recall only the most decisive movements in wartime. We remember Pearl Harbor as an act of tragic aggression that pulled the United States into WWII. We learn of D-Day, when the Americans supported the allied invasion on the shores of Normandy, turning the tables in the war against the Axis powers. We are reminded of the bloodshed on Iwo Jima, with Joe Rosenthal’s famous photo of Marines raising the American flag. But offensives like Hailstone are often swept away in the tide of history.

With the passing of time, the fate of Chuuk and its people is uncertain. As metal erodes and superstructures collapse, it will only be so long before engine rooms and cargo holds will be inaccessible to divers. It may soon be too dangerous to enter the wrecks, and the already limited number of tourists will dwindle. It is unlikely that a beach or ecotourism industry will ever emerge due to Chuuk’s extremely remote location. The Federated States of Micronesia has extremely limited resources and relies heavily on the United States for economic aid. Climate change poses an existential threat the inhabitants of these low-lying islands.

As the remnants of the attack decay, awareness of Chuuk will fall, and memories of the destruction will fade. As time passes, Chuuk will be a place where few but the World War II scholar, the avid diver, and the occasional curious mind will ever learn about or wonder what it must have been like on those shores during Hailstone and how it affected the Chuukese people. Behind all wars lie battles that go unremembered, and lives and lands affected by these battles risk being left behind. Although the legacies of Hailstone and other similar engagements fail to claim a significant place in the textbooks, they deserve our consideration and memory just the same.

Ryan Mendelson ‘19 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at ryanmendelson@wustl.edu.