He’s in the chilly waters off Alaska with his submarine shipmates.

It took six and a half decades for the resting place of Machinist Mate 1st Class Howard A. Sanders Sr. to be discovered.

Today is the first Veterans Day that a retired Colorado Springs schoolteacher will know for sure what happened to the father he never met.

Clarity came this summer, 65 years after a terse telegram arrived telling Lucy Sanders that her husband and his shipmates aboard the USS Grunion were missing and presumed lost at sea.

In August, an expedition financed by the family of the Grunion’s skipper found the sub on the ocean’s bottom off Kiska Island, a part of the Aleutian chain that earned a spot in World War II history during Pacific Theater battles.

The discovery gave some comfort to Lucy Sanders, who rarely spoke of the turmoil that followed that telegram.

And it ended the mystery for the boy she was carrying in her womb when she got the news. She named him Howard Sanders Jr. in memory of the man who never got a funeral.

Howard Sanders Jr.’s sailor father would forever be the man in a black and white portrait, a happy 24-year-old with movie-star looks and stylish, slicked-back hair.

“I remember in grammar school knowing that my dad died in World War II,” Howard Sanders Jr. said while sitting amid a spread of memorabilia at his kitchen table in northern Colorado Springs. “People used to make a fuss because I looked just like him.”

In the 1940s, he said, families didn’t dwell on grief the way they do today. When someone was lost in war, the family mourned, but briefly, and then locked the pain and the memories away, hoping to somehow imprison the sorrow.

Faulty torpedoes

According to Navy records released after the war, the Grunion, a new diesel-electric submarine, was sent to the Pacific not long after it was launched.

Its mission was to avenge the Pearl Harbor attack and to use its torpedoes to stem the Japanese surge across the Pacific that American leaders feared might end with an invasion of California.

Howard Sanders Sr. was one of the veterans on the Grunion’s crew. He joined the Navy after high school in 1936 as the Great Depression still raged in his hometown of Bemidji, Minn. The teenager started out on the Pacific fleet’s flagship, the battlewagon USS California.

“If he had have stayed on that ship, he could have died at Pearl Harbor, and I would not exist,” his son said.

But long before the Pearl Harbor attack that sank the California, Howard Sanders Sr. had moved on to submarine duty, serving on the small, oily, smelly vessels that were called “pigboats” by blue-water sailors.

In 1940, he met Lucy in a Connecticut dance hall near his submarine base. The two fell in love while dancing to swing music.

Photographs show the two of them in 1941, the year they married, at a gathering of the just-launched Grunion’s crew.

The press of war ensured the couple didn’t spend much time together.

Just a few letters, long since lost, connected the two as the submarine headed west to war. One of those letters informed him that he was going to be a father.

Early in the war, America’s submarine warfare plans were ensnared by technical difficulties. New torpedoes, designed to break the back of warships with a single blast, didn’t work most of the time.

Often submarines would fire torpedoes only to have them thud without exploding against enemy hulls.

But the Grunion seemed to have beaten the curse as it sailed off Kiska in July 1942,

according to Navy records.

The sub had lanced its torpedoes into the sides of two Japanese destroyers, sending them to the deep.

It must have been a rush of confidence, if not bravado, that Howard Sanders Sr. and his shipmates possessed when the Grunion encountered a fat Japanese transport ship on July 31, 1942.

Retracing history

Research into what happened next was started in the 1990s by the sons of the Grunion’s skipper, Lt. Cmdr. M.L. “Jim” Abele. Bruce, Brad and John Abele combed records and tracked down families of fellow survivors, including Howard Sanders Jr. By 2002, they had pieced together what likely happened as the sub encountered the freighter.

More than a half-century after the war, Yutaka Iwasaki, a Japanese crewman of the transport Kano Maru, revealed the Grunion’s fate to the U.S. Navy, Brad Abele wrote in an essay on the search.

The Grunion attacked the freighter, but only one of its torpedoes detonated, and it didn’t sink the Japanese ship.

When the Grunion surfaced to finish off its prey, the crew got a terrifying surprise. The Kano Maru was heavily armed, a Navy report said. The transport lobbed a 3.2-inch shell that hit the sub’s conning tower — basically the vessel’s bridge.

“As the shell hit the washing wave, a column of water was observed, and a dull water explosion sound was heard,” Abele wrote. “Also much spouting oil, a piece of a lifeguard buoy and pieces of wood chips that appeared to be material from the submarine deck were observed.”

Armed finally with knowledge of what happened to the Grunion, the Abele brothers set out to find it.

Howard Sanders Jr. was fascinated by their efforts. They spoke to the child inside him who never knew what had happened to his father.

“I always thought about going and finding the sub myself,” the former Widefield High School business teacher said. “But there was no way.”

Years earlier, Sanders had launched a search of his own — for information, not wreckage. Tracking down his father’s relatives in Minnesota and pestering his mother in Connecticut for photographs, letters and anything else she had, the son of a submariner worked to discover more about the man who shared his name.

He walked the halls of his dad’s high school in Minnesota.

“I could picture my dad and and my uncles walking through there,” he said.

It was a deep need that had been building for years, but in the end, there really was not a revelation, Howard Sanders Jr. said.

That came later.

The Abele brothers found a possible location for the wreck of the Grunion in 2006 on an expedition that searched the depths with sonar waves.

Last August, a second Abelefinanced expedition located the Grunion with a camera-carrying unmanned submarine.

The discovery of the wreck was well-publicized. Just a month later, a television news

show produced a computer reenactment of the Grunion’s sinking, which Howard Sanders Jr. watched in tearful amazement.

The sailor with the slickedback hair was mourned by his son like never before.

“My wife was there in the living room with me,” Howard Sanders Jr. said. “She said it was like going to a funeral.”

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0240 or tom.roeder@gazette.com

ONE MYSTERY REMAINS

There’s still debate about why the USS Grunion went down. Many submarine veterans say that it’s unlikely one 3.2-inch shell destroyed the sub, and that an explosion the size of the one reported by witnesses couldn’t have originated in the conning tower.

The Grunion was armed with Mark 14 torpedoes, which had a history of problems including failure to detonate and “circular runs,” in which a torpedo that misses its target returns to hit the sub that fired it.

Such a failure could have doomed the Grunion.