The recent announcement of the Royal Australian Navy’s discovery of the battle-battered wreck of the USS Edsall (DD-219) in approximately 18,000 feet of water in the Indian Ocean was a powerful reminder of the role of destroyers and the “tin can sailors” who served in them in World War II. (See “Naval History News,” p. 4.) The Edsall came to a heroic end as she fought a valiant but doomed fight on 1 March 1942. Alone and facing a Japanese force of larger battleships and cruisers, the Edsall’s captain and crew battled for more than two hours until dive bombers crippled her and the Japanese ships sank her with gunfire. The discovery of the Edsall brought closure to the families of the lost, as these discoveries often do.

The Edsall announcement came right on the heels of another exciting deep-water discovery—of one of the Edsall’s sister ships, no less: the four-stacker, Clemson-class destroyer USS Stewart (DD-224). Both destroyers were part of a group built between 1919 and 1920 at the Philadelphia shipyard of William Cramp & Sons as part of a post–World War I buildup of the U.S. Navy in response to the rise of the submarine as an effective weapon in that conflict.

A diverse team of undersea investigators located the wreck of the Stewart off the coast of Northern California during a recent collaborative expedition undertaken by Ocean Infinity, the Air/Sea Heritage Foundation, SEARCH, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, and the Naval History and Heritage Command.

The wreck of what was once known as “the Ghost Ship of the Pacific” was found approximately 30 miles from shore, within the boundaries of the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary and in an area consistent with historical accounts of her final disposal. The Stewart was deliberately sunk on 24 May 1946 as part of a naval exercise in the post–World War II era, seemingly bringing the story of this historic vessel to its close after a remarkable globe-spanning odyssey.