Nearly 82 years to the day after the USS Herring went missing during World War II, the Navy said it had found the wreck of a submarine that fought in three major theaters during the war before disappearing without a trace.
On Monday, the Navy’s Naval History and Heritage Command said that it had confirmed that a submarine wreck located nearly a decade ago off of Matsuwa Island, about 500 miles north of the Japanese mainland, was the Herring. The final confirmation ends the mystery of what happened to the submarine, which saw action near North Africa, northern Europe and the Pacific over a three-year period.
The wreck is more than 300 feet below the surface and “maintains a high degree of integrity,” the Navy said. The wreckage is sitting upright on its keel and shows battle damage near its conning tower.
A joint expedition led by the Russian military and Russian Geographic Society discovered the wreckage of a submarine near the Kurile Islands in 2017 (the Soviet Union took control of the island after the war). That expedition team said that contextual evidence of the wreck made it likely to be Herring, and a second expedition in 2022 put a commemorative plaque at the wreck site to honor the crew. However. U.S. Navy heritage experts were not definitively sure until now.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member