Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has discovered yet another World War II shipwreck, taking his tally to six finds.
The billionaire philanthropist located five of the six in less than a year after buying a multipurpose support vessel from Subsea 7, the 76-metre Petrel (ex-Seven Petrel, built 2003).
This time, Allen located the wreck of the USS Juneau, which is the famous light cruiser that had been carrying five brothers, the Sullivans.
All five died, along with 687 other sailors, when the USS Juneau was torpedoed at the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942.
Joe, Frank, Al, Matt and George Sullivan had enlisted in the US Navy under the condition that they could serve together, while recruiters ignored a policy for separating siblings.
Their deaths, which caught US public attention, is one of the cases that led to the Sole Survivor Policy to protect family members from combat duty if other siblings are lost.
The plight of the Sullivans is the premise of Steven Spielberg’s 1998 film Saving Private Ryan, although that film’s story is loosely based on another set of unfortunate American brothers, the four Nilands.
Allen’s exploration team used the Petrel to find the wreck of the USS Juneau at a water depth of 4,200 metres (about 2.6 miles).
But the Petrel has four other finds to its credit, all made in 2017 and this year.
As On Watch detailed at length earlier, one was the ill-fated USS Indianapolis in the Philippine Sea. Out of 1,196 crew, 880 sailors died, many by shark attacks.
The Petrel also found the Italian destroyer RN Artigliere, which was sunk by the British cruiser HMS York in 1940; the Japanese battleship Yamashiro, which was sunk by the US Navy in 1944; and the aircraft carrier USS Lexington, which was scuttled in 1942.
Before purchasing the Petrel in 2016, Allen’s team discovered the wreck of the Japanese battleship Musashi in the Sibuyan Sea.
