ML161629
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Subject: (Interview). Subtitle: Robert Ballard. Timecode In: 00:26:59. Timecode out: 00:44:51. Notes: Underwater archaeology; PT-109. Equipment Notes: Two-Track Mono; Electrovoice RE50 Dynamic Omni Microphone. Show: Ballard PT 109 Log of DAT #: 14 (Ballard Finale only) Engineer: Neal Conan Date: May 24, 2002 BB = Bob Ballard Dw = Dwight Coleman NC = Neal Conan 27:44 Track 3 Begins 27:53 BB There's the Tokyo express, there's where the collision occurred, based up on all the sights, there's approximately Where Kennedy left the floating bow to swim, and there is where we are. 28:14 the current..? 28:15 Brought it down this way, and it was sighted, and then it was no longer seen, and then something else appeared and it turned out to be Japanese, they went in/on to the reef and they actually took rifles out of it. Now if some other pt boat somewhere else on the planet had the miraculous ability to land in the same spot - perhaps they're on top of one another - but there you are. 38:44 sir, will you be releasing that map to the public? 28:46 at the behest, you know, you're going to have to ask n.g. 29:00 I don't think that belongs to anybody else but¿ and there's the tube, the sonar target, and there's the reality. So¿ I don't know.. I'm sorta happy with it. 29:23 I was thinking last night, the search box for Yorktown was 350 miles, and a target of 30000¿ a huge target! 29:33 yeah, and we ran over it on the first run, but we had a lot more information. The Yorktown was surrounded by destroyer escorts. When the japs torpedoed it¿ and I had all those logbooks from the destroyers, and it really narrowed it. the biggest problem I had was the Samuel Morison's analysis put it so far away. The reason I had such a large search area was it was hard to ignore Samuel Morrison, and the navy war college did an analysis and both of them put it so far away from our analysis. So this is why I had this area and that area, and that's what made it a big area. Their position was so vastly different than ours. 30:23 but given the search area and the size of the target this is two orders of magnitude more difficult 30:29 yes, I mean, and also nothing gets buried of 17000 feet of water - there's no current. The culprit here - and there is a number of culprits - the major culprit is the current. You're bottom is changing dramatically. Things are getting buried - that's not normal in the deep sea. Titanic plowed in but it created it's own pile¿ the Yorktown - I mean the Bismarck, created an avalanche and slid down. But that was all self-imposed stuff¿. And the Yorktown went smack dab right into the bottom, but it was a flat bottom. None of them were affected subsequently by currents. Now our Phoenician ships were in aoeron because they were in the same water depth - a couple thousand feet of water. The culprit here is the strong strong current coming through this narrow passage way and the venturi affect. And that buries things, and that's unusual - that's not my kind of normal world, and that's what I had to deal with here. That, plus the boat's very small, at best, 40some feet, and that it was wood and it could have been diminished so you're now down to the main pieces of metal, which the biggest pieces are torpedo tubes - so it's not surprising that's what we found, was the torp tubes, because they're the largest objects that had a chance of surviving. But still, it was a needle, because another thing that we didn't have in the other searches is you didn't have a 1000 foot wall throwing off big blocks of coral. You didn't' have a big volcano that erupts and throws all sorts of pyroclastics. So.. you didn't have any other areas a lot of false targets. Here we had 100s of them. We are just fortunate that the bow ended up in a benign part of the search area, which was at best about... (Notes truncated)
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- 29 Apr 2010 - Ben Brotman
- Digitized
- 29 Apr 2010 - Ben Brotman
- Edited
- 29 Apr 2010 - Ben Brotman