One of the great battles of World War II was the American attack on Truk Lagoon, called Operation Hailstone.  Truk Lagoon was the Japanese Navy's Central Pacific fleet anchorage.  It was a mysterious, heavily fortified bastion, projecting Japanese military power throughout Micronesia and beyond.  Beginning on Feb. 17, 1944 Truk was attacked by wave after wave of American carrier based bombers and torpedo bombers.  The U.S. wreaked havok on the Japanese forces at Truk, neutralizing the Japanese presence there.  In the process they sank a vast fleet of Japanese ships.  That fleet of ships is now a wreck diver's paradise.

On Feb. 17, 1984, I had the good fortune to find myself diving the legendary shipwrecks of Truk lagoon, exactly on the 40th Anniversary of their sinking.  On many of my dives I had the honor of diving with Kimuio Aisek and Klaus Lindemann, the world's foremost experts on the wrecks at Truk.  Kimuio, the famous Trukese dive guide who personally witnessed the attack on Truk, showed me the best of his undersea wonders.  He and the others from his Blue Lagoon Dive Shop made sure that each of my dives in their lagoon was beyond compare.  Klaus Lindemann, author of Hailstorm over Truk Lagoon, gave me a view of the history and character of each of the ships.  What a pair they were!  Between the two of them they knew just about everything there was to know about the shipwrecks at Truk.  They had, in fact, discovered many of them, and they had explored and documented every dark corner of every known wreck in the lagoon.

Here you will see some "snapshots" of my visit to the shipwrecks of Truk Lagoon, a ghost fleet 40 years under the sea.

WRECK DIVER'S HEAVEN!