This Newly Discovered Sunken Warship Served on Both Sides of World War II

In May of 1946, the United States Navy gave one of their own battleships, the USS Stewart, a burial at sea—sinking it in a barrage of gunfire off the coast of San Francisco. Now, that vessel, called the “Ghost Ship of the Pacific,” has been rediscovered and photographed, thanks to high-tech underwater drones.

This August, the marine robotics company Ocean Infinity sent three autonomous underwater vehicles into the Pacific to conduct a scan of the seafloor and search for the wreck of the Stewart. According to a joint statement by Ocean Infinity, the nonprofit Air/Sea Heritage Foundation and the archaeology company SEARCH—collaborators on the mission—the drones came back with “the stunning and unmistakable image of a sunken ship 3,500 feet below the surface.”

The 314-foot-long ship, also known as DD-224, is largely intact, with its “sleek and imposing” hull resting upright on the seafloor in the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Per the statement, its level of preservation is “exceptional” for a vessel of its age: It may be the best-preserved U.S. Navy destroyer of its type.

The Stewart was built in Philadelphia back in 1919. A rugged, heavily armed destroyer, it was part of a fleet of similar ships later dubbed the four-stackers. Most of these warships, including the Stewart, were completed too late to participate in World War I, but they factored heavily into the U.S. Navy’s World War II armada. And the Stewart has an especially unique WWII history: It served on both sides.

In 1941, the Stewart was stationed in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. After Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor that December, the U.S. Navy employed the Stewart in combat against Japan in the new Pacific Theatre of WWII. In February of 1942, the damaged ship was trapped in a repair drydock on the Indonesian island of Java, and its crew was forced to abandon it as Japanese forces moved in to seize the land. A year later, the Stewart—raised and repaired by Japan—entered the Imperial Japanese Navy as a patrol boat.

The United States learned of the ship’s new ownership when Allied pilots began reporting “the strange sight of an old American destroyer operating deep behind enemy lines,” per the statement. At the end of the war, when the Navy found the Stewart floating near Kure, Japan, “the mystery of the Pacific ghost ship was finally solved.”

Symbolically, the U.S. Navy recommissioned DD-224 before towing it to California, where they bid the vessel farewell. On May 24, 1946, soldiers used it for target practice. As the New York Times’ Michael Greshko writes, “After withstanding two hours of fire, the stubborn ship relented and sank.”

“The whole history of that ship was actually exceptionally well documented,” Russ Matthews, president of the Air/Sea Heritage Foundation, tells the Times. “The only piece of that story we didn’t have is, what does it look like today?”

Matthews had been trying to locate the Stewart for a while before connecting with Ocean Infinity. By April 2024, he’d finally found coordinates from the tugboat that pulled DD-224 to its final floating place, and he proposed that Ocean Infinity send drones to that area—a span of 37 square nautical miles. As Andy Sherrell, Ocean Infinity’s director of maritime operations, tells the Times, mapping a region that size typically takes weeks, but the drones spotted the shipwreck in hours.

Ocean Infinity’s robotics technology also helped discover the sunken battleship USS Nevada in 2020, and in 2022, it helped find the Endurance, the ship that Captain Ernest Shackleton attempted to sail to Antarctica in 1915. As Jim Delgado, senior vice president of SEARCH, tells the Times, “We’re in the midst of, I think, a radical change in ocean discovery.”

Back in 1946, as Americans pulled the Stewart back to home waters, they renamed it RAMP-224, borrowing the acronym “Recovered Allied Military Personnel.” That label was reserved for liberated prisoners of war.

“This ship, in its own way, basically was humanized by the Navy,” Delgado tells the Times. “People pour so much into ships—and we have since the beginning of time. They represent us.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.