https://www.facebook.com/pg/rvpetrel/photos/?tab=album&album_id=2185795551455914
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/02/08/wreck-discovered-first-japanese-warship-lost-second-world-war/
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a26238698/sunken-japanese-world-war-ii-battleship-solomon-islands/
A previously uncharted wreck was located by the Tokyo-based Asian-Pacific Remembrance Honouring Association in February last year, but the
organisation lacked the technology to examine the debris field, which lies at depths of as much as 3,200 feet, and confirm the identity of the ship.
A survey of the site was taken on by Vulcan Inc., the Seattle-based philanthropic organisation that was set up in 1986 by Paul Allen, the joint founder of Microsoft Corp.
Underwater craft remotely controlled from the R/V Petrel explored the wreck in late January, revealing the warship’s 6-inch guns in the
debris field, crates of anti-aircraft rounds and portholes that are gradually being swallowed up by encroaching rust.
The images also show a large breach in the hull that it sustained during the November 1942 First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal with US Navy warships and aircraft.
“Hiei was crippled by a shell from the USS San Francisco on the 13th, which disabled the steering gear”, the crew of the R/V Petrel said in a Facebook post on Sunday.
“For the next 24 hours, it was attacked by multiple sorties of torpedo, dive and B-17 bombers.
“Hiei sank sometime in the evening with a loss of 188 of her crew.
Hiei now lies upside down in 900 plus metres of water Northwest of Savo Island”.
More pictures can be found on RV Petrel's facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/pg/rvpetrel/photos/?tab=album&album_id=2185795551455914
Some of the portholes are still intact
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/89/8cce369f-f18e-4433-9320-3af083299ae9/port.PNG
The last known picture of the Hiei being bombed by planes and trailing oil from damage
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/89/9941c9bb-af9b-4526-843c-d2938f6ebd57/HieiB17Nov13.gif
Incredible, it's insane that it wasn't found until now. Just goes to show how little off the ocean we have charted.
The pictures of theses immense warships under water are really powerful to me. WWII naval warfare is just morbidly fascinating. Its the corpse of small cities of steel, which sank in hours or minutes, sometimes because of one small tactical decision or pure luck.
What boggles my mind is how so many of them sank in such a small...relatively speaking...chunk of ocean yet how few of them we've found. Some of these battles were HUGE with tens, even hundreds, of ships sinking on both sides in the same area.
My understanding is, a lot of major naval pacific battles were fought over extremely deeps oceans, creating some the deepest wrecks ever, especialy naval battles around the Phillipines. That's a big reason why so many of them are extremely hard to find to this day.
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