A Legendary Missing World War II Destroyer Has Emerged From the Ocean After 82 Years
The USS Edsall, nicknamed the “Dancing Mouse,” was recently found by the Royal Australian Navy after being sunk by the Japanese military in 1942.
The 314-foot destroyer was located largely intact, and is resting upright on the seabed roughly 200 miles east of Christmas Island
Despite having been relegated to convoy duty, the ship went down during an engagement with several Japanese ships and dive bombers.
The “Dancing Mouse”—the Clemson-class destroyer more formally known as the USS Edsall—and its more-than-200 servicemen went down at the hands of the Japanese military on March 1, 1942, during World War II. Now, the doomed ship has finally been located, in a happenstance occurrence by the Royal Australian Navy.
The Edsall was commissioned during World War I, and was stationed in Asia for the extent of its deployment—from 1920 until that fateful March day in 1942. The ship participated in military exercises aplenty, and even joined in on an attack that sunk a Japanese submarine. But eventually, a depth charge that had been dropped from the ship prematurely went off and damaged the Edsall, limiting its ability to maneuver and making it unfit for combat.
It was subsequently relegated to convoy duty, but that didn’t stop Captain Joshua Nix from eventually engaging with a Japanese convoy. According to an official historical account of the ship put together by Samuel Cox—a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral and head of the Naval History and Heritage Command—reports from Japanese ships say that the Edsall performed like a “Japanese Dancing Mouse,” which was a popular pet at the time.
The Edsall adeptly switched speeds and directions, and employed smoke screens during the maneuvers. Nix reportedly returned fire on the attacking Japanese ships—including by launching torpedoes, of which the ship had only nine—and evaded the significantly better-armed craft for over an hour. Finally, 26 Japanese dive bombers were called in to help, and one bomb is thought to have been the blow that ended the USS Edsall.
“Captain Joshua Nix and his crew fought valiantly,” U.S. Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy said in a statement.
At the time of the attack, the American ship may have been heading to the aid of an oiler (the USS Pecos) with hundreds of survivors picked up from damaged ships. 185 U.S. Navy personnel and 31 U.S. Army Air Force pilots on board the Edsall at the time—according to a statement from Lisa Franchetti, U.S. Navy chief of naval operations—but the final resting place of both the ship and most of the servicemen were unknown (with the exception, according to Cox, of a handful of survivors who were later killed in an enemy prison camp).
In light of this recent discovery of the ship, however, that unknown has turned to confirmation and certainty. The Royal Australian Navy made a surprise discovery of a sunken ship during an unrelated mission that featured “advanced robotic and autonomous systems normally used for hydrographic survey capabilities,” Mark Hammond, head of the Royal Australian Navy, said in a statement.
Once the ship was located (in late 2023), experts spent about a year using sonar and underwater robots to explore the find. A team confirmed that the ship was indeed the Edsall and not the USS Pillsbury (a ship of the same class known to have sunk nearby), and the find was officially announced on Veterans Day.
The 314-foot destroyer was located largely intact, and is resting upright on the seabed roughly 200 miles east of Christmas Island (south of Java, Indonesia).
“The USS Edsall served valiantly during World War II, most notably in the early Pacific campaigns,” Hammond said. “She operated alongside Australian war ships protecting our shores and played a role in sinking the Japanese submarine I124 off Darwin. The joint efforts in engagements such as the Battle of the Coral Sea and the defense of allied territories in the Pacific forged bonds between U.S. and Australian sailors that continue to this day.”
Before Nix ordered the ship abandoned, Cox told the Washington Post, he pointed the vessel toward the Japanese fighters. “It’s a maritime version of flipping the bird.”
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