Sub loss still haunts man

Joe Franck said his cousin, Seaman 1st Class Leon Henry Franck, liked to smoke Lucky Strikes when he would come home to Long Island, N.Y., on leave from submarine duty in the early 1940s.

"He'd leave me a cigarette and would say, 'When I come back, I'll smoke it,' " Joe Franck recalled

"He left one and I still have it here somewhere," he said as a grandfather clock chimed at his Las Vegas home last week, marking another of the many quiet hours he's spent in the house during the past 35 years.

Leon, or "Limmy," as Joe's second cousin was known in the Franck family, never came home in the summer of 1942.

Ever since, the image of red-haired Leon "having a ball" and fishing with him at Bayside Long Island where they grew up has remained frozen in Joe's mind.

"He was like a big brother to me at that time," he said about 19-year-old Leon, who was much taller and seven years older than he was.

"He was 6-foot-4. How Leon managed to get around inside that sub I'll never know. They were much smaller than they are today," Joe said.

"He said the favorite song of the crew was, 'You Are My Sunshine,' probably because they were under water all the time and never saw it."

For 65 years, it was a mystery what happened to Leon and 69 other sailors aboard the USS Grunion. The sub was sent to sink Japanese ships near Kiska Island at the tip of Alaska's Aleutian chain.

"We knew the sub was missing. We assumed it sunk. We didn't know," Joe Franck said.

On Oct. 30, 1942, Leon's father, Jacques Franck, who Joe described as a "typical Frenchman with an old-era waxed mustache," penned a letter, replying to the wife of the Grunion's commander.

"It was a very thoughtful idea to write me as the father of Leon Henry Franck, a member of your distinguished husband's crew," the letter begins.

"Let us all hope that boat with all on board is not lost. A miracle will let me see my young son of 191/2 years again.

Jacques Franck died the following year, and Leon's brother, Jacques Jr., was informed by the Navy Department that Leon had been declared "missing in the performance of his duty." His brother, an airman, later died, leaving Joe Franck as the only relative who remembers Leon.

For decades, he lived with the uncertainty of never quite knowing what happened to his cousin's vessel.

But in 2006, a search party organized by the three sons of the Grunion's commander, Lt. Cmdr. Mannert Lincoln "Jim" Abele, located a sonar "target" that was the right length and width to be a submarine. It was also in the correct location and the image depicted a propeller guard characteristic of the same class of submarines as the Grunion, SS-216.

The three Abele brothers were at an old Navy base, 240 miles east of Kiska when the firm they hired to conduct the side-scan sonar search reported the find in an Internet message.

"One day we got a reply that we have an image and they were 95 percent certain it was the Grunion," the oldest brother, Bruce Abele, 78, said in a recent telephone interview from Newton, Mass.

After all those years of wondering about the final resting place of his father and the Grunion's crew, Abele said his emotions were indescribable. "You can't explain it," he said.

The search continued in August 2007 aboard the crab boat, Aquila, with cameras mounted on a remotely operated vehicle that was sent to a depth of 3,000 feet to confirm that the sonar image was, in fact, the Grunion.

Maneuvering through the near-freezing, pitch-dark water of the Bering Sea, the vehicle's cameras captured 31/2 hours of high-definition footage of the Grunion and photographs that show holes on the sub's hull designed to let water out when it surfaced. They match those in a photograph taken before the Grunion was launched in December 1941 at Groton, Conn.

"I was always confident we would find it," Abele said. "We found a chart. This person in Japan (Yutaka Iwasaki) played a tremendous part in this whole thing."

Iwasaki found a map from the commander of the armed Japanese freighter, the Kano Maru, that gave the coordinates of its battle with Grunion.

The encounter took place in the early morning of July 30, 1942.

According to Iwasaki's account and other eyewitnesses aboard the Kano Maru, a torpedo from the Grunion hit the freighter's starboard machinery room, stopping its main engine. With the ship adrift, a second torpedo passed beneath it 10 minutes later.

Ten minutes after that, at 6:07 a.m., two more torpedoes hit the ship but didn't explode. "The Grunion intended to surface and sink by gunfire," according to Iwasaki's account.

Abele said, however, it's still unclear why the Grunion sank. "Our goal is to figure that out," he said. "What happened to the sub is extremely complex."

The Grunion's last transmission described heavy anti-submarine activity.

According to Abele, the Kano Maru fired more than 80 rounds from its bow-mounted, 8-centimeter gun.

"On the 84th shot, it hit a wake caused by the (sub's) bridge. There was a dull thud and some liquid shot up. It did not appear to penetrate the pressure hull at all," he said, referring to accounts of two witnesses on board the Kano Maru, who reported that the crew shouted, "Banzai!"

Photographic evidence gathered during the August search show that the sub's hatch was open and that one of the sturdy "doglegs" that held it closed had been broken, indicating there was a strong explosion.

"Twenty-four feet of the bow was gone and all of the top of the sub was squashed down very severely," Abele said.

"The sub slid down a hill (underwater) like a snowplow for almost three-quarters of a mile. We can see the path today," he said.

Joe Franck, a former New York National Guard soldier who worked as chief clerk at the Riviera for 20 years, tracked down Abele after reading a news account two years ago about the hunt for the Grunion and relatives of its crew.

"I searched so many years. That's why I got so excited when I saw that article," he said about the Associated Press account out of Anchorage, Alaska.

He said the discovery of the Grunion has given him closure but the thought of how his cousin's last minutes still haunts him.

"It creates a terrible picture in your mind how they died," he said. "I hope it was instantaneous."

Contact reporter Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0308.