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In 1998, Dr. Robert Ballard led a search for lost wrecks from the Battle of Midway. The aircraft carrier YORKTOWN was discovered.
The Battle of Midway was a decisive naval engagement of World War II, which gave the United States sea power over the Japanese. It was fought in June 1942 near the Midway Islands by Japanese and U.S. aircraft carriers. In early June, American naval reconnaissance planes observed at a distance of 966 km (600 mi) a Japanese armada of 185 ships advancing on the Midway Islands. On June 4, American fighters and bombers sent from Midway airfields, and three aircraft carriers attacked the Japanese fleet. At the same time Japanese carrier-based planes attacked aircraft installations on Midway in preparation for an invasion; damage, however, was not sufficient to prevent the American planes from refueling and taking off again. During the ensuing battle between the American and Japanese naval forces, the two fleets neither saw each other nor exchanged gunfire; all contact was made by Japanese carrier-based planes and American land- and carrier-based planes. By the night of June 6, when contact by aircraft between the two fleets was lost, the defeat of the Japanese was accomplished. Losses for the Japanese combatants included four aircraft carriers, two cruisers, and three destroyers; those for the Americans were the aircraft carrier Yorktown and one destroyer. The victory at Midway terminated a major Japanese attempt to capture the islands as a possible prelude to an invasion of Hawaii. The success of the operation, only a month after the important but indecisive Battle of the Coral Sea, effectively tipped the balance of sea power in the Pacific Ocean in favor of the United States. Fifty-six years later, Robert Ballard went in search of the lost ships of Midway. On May 2, 1998, the search ship Laney Chouest began towing the MR-1, a torpedo shaped device that transmits sonar signals to the ocean floor and records them as they bounce back. Computers convert the pings into video displays or printouts that show us the ocean floors. The search area covered a 22-mile by 10-mile search box. During this search, Dr. Robert Ballard found the Yorktown. Yorktown - A lost ship of the battle of Midway was a turning point of World War II. The 800 foot long Yorktown rests upright on the bottom as if moored at the bottom of the Pacific. On June 6, 1942, as a salvage crew struggled to save her, the carrier was struck by two torpedoes fired by a Japanese submarine. She sank the next morning. Her three-mile plunge ended when she burrowed into seafloor silt, which today covers the hull to the waterline. Searchers got their first glimpse of her on May 19, 1998. Searching the deep by remote control, Robert Ballard watched a sonar image of the Pacific seafloor as U.S. Navy crewmen maneuvered their ATV (advanced tethered vehicle), which transmits the image. The search ended when a sonar image revealed the square black hole of an elevator shaft on Yorktown's flight deck, 16,650 feet below. |
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