I am looking at the most extraordinary nautical chart today.
Over the weekend, I visited with the Jacobson family, and one of the items they allowed me to borrow was a chart of the Balabac Straits. This, on its own, would be interesting enough, but thanks to both Al Jacobson’s son, and Jim Liddell’s son, this chart is extraordinary.
From what I have been able to find out, after the Flier survivors reached the States, they went home to their families then on to their new assignments. With the exception of Cmdr. Crowley and Lt. Liddell who were stationed together on USS Irex and remained close friends after the military, the survivors lost contact with one another.
But in 1994, with the help of Dr. Elaine Foster who located all eight Flier Survivors, they decided to meet together at Cmdr. Crowley’s home in Baltimore. Only Crowley, Liddell, Jacobson, Miller and Russo were able to make it.
It was in a video recording of that meeting that I first saw this chart. Lt. Liddell’s son came with his father, and recorded as the men pinned this chart up on the wall in Cmdr. Crowley’s living room and talked about where they had gone down and where they had swum.
In 1944, Cmdr. Crowley had to guess where the Flier went down, and he guessed “Comiran Island bearing 190 degrees T at 6700 yards”. That bearing put the location of the sinking at 7 degrees, 58 minutes, 45 seconds North Latitude and 117 degrees, 13 minutes, 10 seconds East Longitude. I marked that position below.
Now, the men also debated whether they swam in a straight line to the islands ans even which islands they landed on. During WWII, Crowley decided that they must have landed on Mantangule, which you can see above, but Al, after studying the maps, was more inclined to believe that they landed on Byan, the tiny speck of green to the left of Mantangule.
They debated this for a while, and decided that the sinking position was correct, though they did land on Byan, not Mantangule, and probably either swam around the Roughton Reefs in the current, or swam between them.
It was a fascinating bit of video to watch.
In 1998, Al decided he wanted to go back to that area in the Philippines and see the places he didn’t mean to pass through in 1944. While there, he took this same chart along with him, and traced the route that he took in visiting his old haunts. I can follow his 1998 boat coming down the eastern side of Palawan, passing within photo distance of Cape Baliluyan (where he met up with a guerilla outpost) snaking through the reefs until he made it to Comiran Island where they spotted the light that the lookouts on Flier saw moments before she went down, to the spot where she went down, back to Byan Island and Bugsuk Island, then back up the eastern coast of Palawan. I also have the photos from this trip, which is helping me get a sense of what happened. I’ll see if I can get permission to post them.
The most interesting thing to me is when Al got to the accepted coordinates of Flier’s sinking, he decided the surroundings didn’t match his memory from that night. See, Al wasn’t watching the stern of Flier just before the mine hit, he was admiring the surrounding scenery. It was, to his dying day, one of the most beautiful this he had ever seen.
So he asked the captain of his charter boat to keep moving until the scenery matched. When it did, he marked it on the chart, but also recorded the GPS coordinates of it. It was south(ish) of the accepted WWII estimate by more than a mile.
Al hoped someday that he could come back with professional gear and divers to look, but his health did not permit it. When the Dive Detectives came calling after Al passed on, this chart was one of the things that they were given in the hope that the wreck could be found.
Al was always known for his thoroughness in his research and planning. I wonder if he knew just how closely he had nailed the location. From what I’ve been told, when the Dive Detectives ship dropped the weighted sandbags down on the 1998 coordinates, they landed on the Flier herself.
Provided the Navy does not object to the display of this chart (they’re a little touchy about revealing the locations of their wrecks for security reasons) this map will hopefully make it into the exhibit.
