Years Later, Unearthing Answers to Submarine's Loss

By Steve Vogel
Thursday, October 18, 2007

Growing up in Southeast Washington in the years before World War II, Michael Francis "Moe" Collins was the apple of his mother's eye.

He was the fourth child of John and Marie Collins, who operated a plumbing firm in Anacostia. Moe was the thoughtful kid who did chores and accompanied his mother to the store. "It was a family thing that he was the best of them all," recalled his niece, Mary Anne Marino, of Fort Washington.

Collins enlisted in the Navy Reserve and was called to active duty in 1940.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he served as a fireman second class aboard the USS Grunion, a submarine that disappeared in summer 1942 somewhere in the Bering Sea between Japan and Alaska. Collins, 23, and the rest of the 70-man crew were eventually declared missing in action.

The news hit hard at the Collins home on Valley Place in Anacostia. Marie Collins was devastated.

"When he died, it was like her whole world closed up," Marino said. "She was never the same."

What was particularly hard was not knowing for sure what had happened. "She believed he was coming back, because they didn't find him," Marino said.

The Collins family was not the only one hoping for answers. A search effort has been underway for five years, funded by the three sons of the submarine's skipper, Lt. Cmdr. Mannert L. "Jim" Abele.

In August, a team working in waters near Kiska, one of Alaska's Aleutian Islands, found the mangled remains of a submarine that searchers think is the USS Grunion.

"This is the most incredible experience you can possibly imagine," Bruce Abele, the skipper's eldest son, said in a phone interview from his home in Newton, Mass. "It was a sequence of events as improbable as you can imagine."

Family members representing many of the Grunion's crew members, including relatives of Collins, are gathering today in Newton to meet one another and see photos and video footage of the sub's wreckage.

"This is going to be a very emotional time," said Mary Parziale Bentz of Bethesda, whose uncle, Torpedoman's Mate 3rd Class Carmine Anthony Parziale, was lost aboard the Grunion at age 21.

"My father would talk about the war, and about his brother, and wonder where he was," Bentz said. The uncertainty "just went on and on and on."

For the past year, as hope of finding the submarine grew, Bentz has been working with two other women, who also had uncles aboard the Grunion, to locate as many relatives of the crew members as possible. They have found at least one relative for each of the 70 crew members, Bentz said. "We've become affectionately known as the 'sub ladies,' " she said.

The Grunion left Pearl Harbor on June 30, 1942, with orders to proceed to the Aleutians and patrol westward toward Japan. The submarine was directed to the waters around Kiska, which shortly before had been captured by the Japanese. In mid-July, the Grunion reported sinking several Japanese patrol boats.

The sub's last message, describing a heavy enemy presence at the Kiska harbor, was received at the submarine base at Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians on July 30, 1942. Efforts to contact the submarine were unsuccessful, and search planes were unable to find signs of the Grunion. The Navy listed the submarine as missing in action, cause unknown.

In 2002, the Abeles came across a reference to a translated article that had been published in a Japanese trade magazine describing a confrontation between a U.S. submarine and an armed Japanese freighter in the waters off Kiska on July 31, 1942.

The freighter, Kano Maru, reported that it was hit by a torpedo fired by a submarine but that it had managed to sink the sub with fire from an 8cm gun when it surfaced. The article included information on the ship's position east of Kiska.

Intrigued, the Abeles researched further and hired a firm, Deep Sea Systems International, to launch an expedition to Kiska in August 2006. Sonar images of a sub-shaped silhouette were promising and led to a return expedition this year.

On Aug. 22, a remotely operated vehicle took photographs and video footage of the wreckage on a rocky slope about 1,000 feet below the surface.

The search team has found no nameplate or identifying number for the Grunion. But the wreckage's location and appearance leaves Abele with no doubt that it's the Grunion. "It's roughly the equivalent of certainty that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow," he said. "There's no question that what we found is the sub."

For many of the relatives of the Grunion's crew members, the news of the discovery resonates even after 65 years.

"I was so excited," said Marino, who was 2 when her uncle died. "My husband told me, 'You never knew this man. Calm down, you're going to have a heart attack.' I told him, 'You can't understand what it means to find out what happened.' "

Military Matters is published twice each month in the Extras. Steve Vogel may be reached atvogels@washpost.com.