THE USS ALBACORE was one the deadliest American submarines in the Pacific—and one of the unluckiest. In the fall of 1943 it was hit twice by friendly fire, once sustaining heavy damage from American bombs. A year later, the 312-foot,Gato-class submarine went missing in the heavily mined Tsugaru Strait off Japan’s Hokkaido island. All 85 men aboard were lost.
Nearly eight decades later, a retired University of Tokyo engineering professor located the wreck of the 800 feet underwater. Tamaki Ura, who has developed unmanned mini-submarines to scour Japanese water for the wrecks of wartime submarines, raised $15,000 via crowdfunding sources to search for the Using documents from the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, Ura zeroed in on the lost
