Okinawa Island in Japan, located in the Pacific Ocean, offers a journey full of historical and natural beauties. Now it’s time to explore underwater, which is our main purpose of coming here. We met our friend Alex from South Korea, who has been a diving instructor in Okinawa for a while, the night before and became guests at her house. Because our first dive in Okinawa is USS Emmonds (DD-457), an American battleship sunk in the Second World War.
We arrived at the port where our boat is located after a 1 hour car ride just for this wreck dive. We share the boat with a total of 6 people from two different dive centers. Normally, many dive centers depart from the port in the city center, but instead of a long boat ride, it is much easier to get here by car and reach the dive point with a small boat.
After loading our equipment on the boat, we started to make our way to the USS Emmonds Wreck, where we will make 2 dives today. The ship, which was launched on August 23, 1941, was named after Admiral George F. Emmons. After serving in Normandy and Southern France for a while, it was converted into a mine sweeper in Hawaii in 1944 and sent to Okinawa.
World War II witnessed very brutal battles in the Pacific Islands as much as it burned Europe. Okinawa is just one of these islands. It was a war in which the Japanese people made kamikaze attacks by flying their planes on enemy ships without blinking an eye to protect their lands or soldiers ran to the enemy trenches as live bombs. In the middle of such an atrocity, the USS Emmons Battleship was heavily hit by 5 different kamikaze attacks in just 2 minutes while on duty in Okinawa on April 6, 1945. At the time of the attack, 65 people were killed, including 60 crew members and 5 Japanese pilots, and 77 people were seriously wounded. But the USS Emmonds did not sink immediately. When the fire that broke out could not be brought under control, it was sunk on April 7 by another American Battleship, the USS Ellyson, to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. From that moment on, it slept quietly in the depths with 60 sailors until 2001, when a fisherman noticed oil puddles on the surface and reported it.
After the 2001 discovery, a group of Japanese scientists came here and announced that the wreck was the USS Emmons. Today the wreck lies between 36m and 45m North – South. When we started to descend to the wreck, the first thing that caught my attention was that the ship was still in an anchor chain by the bow, as if she was preparing to leave. When I looked at the stern of the ship, the anti-aircraft guns facing the sky attracted my attention. That’s when I realized again that I was in a shipwreck that had buried many sailors.
The water temperature is 24-25 degrees and the visibility is very fragile but good. When we started to walk around the wreck, it is possible to see the damages of kamikaze attacks. A plaque with the names was left in memory of the sailors who lost their lives. The parts of the ship are scattered around the environment, but the main hull is still almost whole where it is.
After the first dive, we went back to our boat and after a little diving chat and some surface interval, we started descending again to make a farewell dive to the wreck. My eye was caught on the bow again , as if I had not dived to the same spot in the morning. Although the visibility decreased a little in the second dive due to the effect of the increasing flow, we completed two very enjoyable dives and returned to land.
The USS Emmons Ship is under protection today, but after its discovery, it was subjected to vandalism by unconscious divers. Parts were removed or artifacts were relocated without permission. Here we have responsibilities as diving instructors. It should be emphasized to our trainees that reefs and wrecks are not souvenir shops, but places that should be respected and protected.
Our first diving day in Okinawa was both enjoyable and thought-provoking in history. We ended the day and started our way back to Okinawa to make our next dives on the reefs of Okinawa.
