Diving the yamashiro at 200m/660fsw June 2, 2006
Posted by Andy Carroll in : WreckDiving , trackback
There are some crazy people in diving it has to be said, and what could be crazier than diving to 200mtrs to explore a sunken battleship in the Phillipines, for a bottom time of 15 minutes which will require over 5 hours of decompression? The Yamashiro Project entails doing exactly that, and was founded by Cedric Verdier, a keen diver who has trained almost 1500 diving instructors all across Europe. The project hopes to achieve a number of goals;
To positively identify the different wrecks in the Surigao Strait.
To confirm the resting place of one of Japan’s greatest Naval Commanders and his Battleship.
To dive the deepest battleships ever explored by Technical Divers worldwide. (Might have already been beaten)
To help the victims of the mudslide in Leyte, a small village in the area which was devastated by a mudslide in February, killing 1800 people.
Apparently there is some controversy surrounding the identities of the two vessels, Yamashiro and the Fuso, and one of the goals of the project to to ascertain the facts. From the project website;
“Not only did the sister battleships YAMASHIRO and FUSO die under a deluge of shells and torpedoes, but their identities have been continually transposed by historians ever since. Indeed, since both were members of BatDiv 2, both battleships shared most of their careers together, and by an interesting quirk, died on the same night within miles of each other, victims of the same enemy, during the Battle of Surigao Strait (October 24-25, 1944). Thus stated in this bare form, it is obvious that such circumstances, particularly during a night battle, could easily produce confusion. Such indeed has been the case, aggravated by the fact that FUSO seems to have had no survivors post-war and YAMASHIRO only ten.Predictably, these factors have led to confusion, even among the Japanese who were present during the action. As a result, down through the decades since World War II’s end some authors have said that it was YAMASHIRO that fell to gunfire and FUSO to destroyer torpedoes, and others the opposite of this. When Samuel Eliot Morison and the U.S. Naval War College published their distinguished histories of the naval conflict, they came down decisively in favor of the view that FUSO was torpedoed first, fell out of line and blew up at approximately 03:38, while flagship YAMASHIRO continued into the storm of gunfire and sank later, at 04:19.”
Hopefully Cedric will update the site as the project gets underway.
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[…] Congratulations Cedric. Please let us all know how the Yamashiro wreck exploration goes […]