On Nov. 30, 1942, the USS New Orleans was in the middle of a pitched battle off of Guadalcanal. A Japanese torpedo scored a direct hit on the bow of the U.S. Navy cruiser. The blast ignited the ship’s forward magazines, triggering a massive explosion that killed 182 of the crew. Roughly 100 feet of the bow was blown off, sinking beneath the waves.
The Battle of Tassafaronga saw approximately 400 American losses and the loss of a destroyer. The USS New Orleans would have joined them if not for the surviving crew’s refusal to abandon ship. Instead, missing a bow and taking on water, the sailors pulled off a remarkable escape.
And 83 years later that missing bow has finally been located. This week the Ocean Exploration Trust and the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration announced they’d located the partial shipwreck. The sunken portion of the USS New Orleans was found approximately 675 meters below the water, in the Solomon Islands’ Iron Bottom Sound.
The Ocean Exploration Trust, led by Navy veteran and oceanic explorer Robert Ballard, is currently in the middle of an archaeological expedition at Iron Bottom Sound this month. The explorers are looking at confirmed shipwrecks and mapping the area for potential new discoveries; the waters around the area saw heavy fighting during World War II with several ships lost to the waves. The USS New Orleans’ bow was found after the crew of the expedition’s ship, the Nautilus, found an object that wasn’t big enough to be a full shipwreck but was still big enough to possibly be part of a ship. Using a remote-operated underwater vessel they got live footage and imagery of the wreck. People on the Nautilus as well as experts brought in via teleconference worked in real-time to piece together clues to identify the wreckage. They spotted the turret and anchor of the sunken bow, and were able to confirm it was the missing part of the USS New Orleans.
“The wreck was located during seafloor mapping operations by an uncrewed surface vehicle, then investigated shortly thereafter by a deep-diving remotely operated vehicle,” Ocean Exploration Trust’s Chief Scientist Daniel Wagner said on the findings. “This imagery was viewed in real-time by hundreds of experts around the world, who all worked together to make a positive identification of the finding.”
By the Battle of Tassafaronga, the USS New Orleans had seen plenty of action. Commissioned in 1934, it survived the attack on Pearl Harbor and went on to fight at the Battle of the Coral Sea and at Midway. The American defeat in the Battle of Tassafaronga saw it take its most significant losses to date, and the battle damage should have sunk the USS New Orleans. The explosion had torn off the bow up to turret two, leaving a cross section of the ship exposed. After taking the heavy damage from the torpedo, three sailors with the ship’s damage control stayed at their posts, helped to keep the ship afloat, ultimately dying from asphyxiation from the smoke.
“By all rights, this ship should have sunk, but due to the heroic damage control efforts of her crew, USS New Orleans became the most grievously damaged US cruiser in World War II to actually survive,” Rear Adm. (retired) Samuel J. Cox, the director of Naval History and Heritage Command, said in a statement on the discovery.
An auxiliary ship helped the USS New Orleans escape the battlefield and get it to a nearby island. The surviving crew then McGyvered a solution. They quickly chopped down coconut trees and fastened a working bow. Or at least a partially working bow. Although it kept the ship afloat, the cruiser could no longer turn, so the sailors had to sail to Australia backwards. And on Dec. 24, 1942, they succeeded, despite the odds.
The USS New Orleans would be fully repaired and go back to combat in several major naval campaigns for the rest of the war, including the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The ship would finally be decommissioned in 1947.
The USS New Orleans’ bow is the latest in several partial or full discoveries of sunken World War II ships in recent years. Explorers in the Pacific have been able to locate destroyers and cruisers lost in heavy fighting between 1942-1944.
The Iron Bottom Sound expedition is still currently underway, and is set to conclude July 23. There were no plans announced for any recovery efforts for the USS New Orleans’ bow.
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