TOKYO — Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul Allen and his research team have found the wreckage of a Japanese World War II battleship off the Philippines, where it sank more than 70 years ago, he said Wednesday.
The apparent discovery of the Musashi, one of the largest battleships in history, comes as the world marks the 70th anniversary of the war’s end.
Allen and the team aboard his yacht M/Y Octopus found the ship Sunday, more than eight years after their search began, Allen said in a statement issued by his publicity agency, Edelman.
Images captured by a high-def inition camera mounted on an underwater probe confirmed the wreckage as that of the Musashi, the statement said.
Kazushige Todaka, head of a private museum specializing in the battleship Yamato, Musashi’s sister vessel, said the details in the images matched those of the Musashi, which was the only battleship that sank in the area.
“Judging from the location, it must be the Musashi,” Todaka told NHK television.
The Musashi, commissioned in 1942, sank in October 1944 in the Sibuyan Sea during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, losing about half of its 2,400 crew members. The ship was repeatedly hit by torpedoes and bombs dropped by planes from Allied aircraft carriers.
The naval battle, considered the largest of World War II, crippled the imperial fleet, cut off Japanese oil supplies and allowed the U.S. invasion of the Japanese-held Philippines.
Allen’s team found the battleship at a depth of 3,280 feet in the Sibuyan Sea.