Missing U.S. WWII submarine located 75 years after it never returned from mission

A U.S. submarine that sunk during World War II and was missing for 75 years has finally been found.

Tim Taylor of the "Lost 52 Project" organization announced the discovery of the USS Grayback on Sunday, NBC News reported.

Taylor and his team found the submarine in the depths of the Pacific Ocean 1,400 feet underwater.

The Grayback was resting roughly 50 south of the Japanese island of Okinawa.

Hit by a Japanese bomber, the sub sunk on its 10th war patrol on Feb. 26, 1944. It had set out from Pearl Harbor in January of that year.

Eighty sailors were on board. All lost their lives when the Grayback went down.

According to a YouTube video published by the Lost 52 Project, the Grayback had been commissioned in June 1941.

It was ranked as the 20th most successful U.S. submarine of the war.

A seemingly minor translation error led to the sub's being missing for so long.

After World War II ended, the U.S. Navy tried to compile a history of all 52 submarines lost at sea, The New York Times reported.

Part of that history included the locations of where the subs were thought to have sunk.

An entry for the Grayback's location was off by a hundred miles.

The Navy had apparently used an incorrect translation of Japanese records when making its history. As a result, the latitude and longitude of the submarine's location was off.

The error was only found in 2018 when a Japanese researcher found Imperial Japanese Navy radio reports that included coordinates for the sunken Grayback's location.

Those records did not match the U.S. Navy's history, prompting Taylor to begin his search.

The undersea explorer was excited by his eventual find but tempered his emotions with the solemnity of uncovering the graves of dozens of U.S. servicemen.

"We were elated," Taylor said. "But it’s also sobering, because we just found 80 men."

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.

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