They Located USS Harder After 80 Years — This Is What They Found

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]3,000 ft beneath the Philippine Sea, explorers recently found one of the most feared submarines America ever put in the water. And what they found when they got there, it didn't look like a wreck. It looked like a submarine that had just dived and never came back up. The USS Harder disappeared on August 24th, 1944.

[00:00:22]79 men went down with her and for 80 years, nobody knew exactly where she was. But the wreck they found was not what expected. The whole was upright, largely intact, still recognizable as a submarine after eight decades on the ocean floor. And cut into the metal just behind the conning tower, a gash, deep and clean, the kind of damage that tells you exactly how a submarine dies.

[00:00:50]That gash solved an 80-year-old mystery.

[00:00:53]Before we get into it, drop a comment and let me know where in the world you are watching from. And if you or anyone you know has any connection to any warship anywhere, I want to hear about it.

[00:01:05]Before we get to the ocean floor, you need to understand what kind of submarine Harder was because Harder was not just another submarine. The USS Harder was commissioned in December 1942 under Commander Samuel Dealey.

[00:01:18]And from the moment Harder entered the Pacific, Harder started doing things that should not have been possible.

[00:01:25]On her fifth war patrol alone, Harder sank five Japanese destroyers in four days.

[00:01:31]Destroyers are the ships specifically designed and built to hunt and kill submarines.

[00:01:36]They are faster, more agile, and they carry depth charges.

[00:01:40]Going after a destroyer in a submarine is like a fish attacking a fishing boat.

[00:01:45]Dealey did it five times in four days.

[00:01:49]The Japanese Navy started calling him the destroyer killer.

[00:01:52]The crew called their boat hit him harder. The US Navy awarded Harder the Presidential Unit Citation for five consecutive patrols, one of the highest honors a ship can receive. Commander Dealey was recommended for the Medal of Honor.

[00:02:07]You see, a Gato-class submarine like Harder carried 10 torpedo tubes and 24 torpedoes. Six tubes forward, four aft.

[00:02:16]Harder also carried a deck gun and anti-aircraft weapons. In the right [music] hands, Harder was one of the most dangerous submarines in the Pacific Ocean. And in Dealey's hands, Harder absolutely was. But on August 24th, 1944, Harder went silent.

[00:02:34]Harder was on her sixth patrol off the coast of Luzon in the Philippines.

[00:02:38]Operating with two other submarines, Harder had been hunting Japanese shipping in Dasol Bay.

[00:02:44]>> [music] >> At 7:30 in the morning, the submarine Hake, running nearby, went deep and silent to avoid a Japanese attack.

[00:02:52]Hake's crew reported hearing 15 rapid depth charges, and then nothing.

[00:02:58]Japanese records later confirmed what happened. Harder had fired three torpedoes at a Japanese escort ship in a last attack. The escort evaded them and responded with depth charges. The fifth [music] depth charge sank her. The Navy declared Harder presumed lost in January 1945. 79 men, >> [music] >> no wreck, no survivors, no confirmed location. For 80 years, Harder was simply gone.

[00:03:25]Then in late 2023, a team called the Lost 52 Project, an organization dedicated to finding every American submarine lost in World War II, located a wreck off Luzon in the Philippine Sea.

[00:03:40]>> [music] >> The team was led by explorer Tim Taylor, chief executive officer of Tiburon Subsea.

[00:03:46]Using sonar-equipped underwater vehicles, the Lost 52 Project scanned the site and built a four-dimensional photogrammetry model of the entire wreck.

[00:03:57]The Naval History and Heritage Command reviewed the findings and confirmed the identification in May 2024.

[00:04:04]It was Harder and what the scans revealed >> [music] >> answered questions that have been open for 80 years.

[00:04:10]The wreck sits upright on the ocean floor at more than 3,000 ft nearly intact. The submarine is still recognizable in almost every detail. The hull, the conning tower, the overall shape of a Gato-class boat resting quietly on the seabed. [music] But just behind the conning tower there it was. A gash in the hull. Deep.

[00:04:33]>> [music] >> Catastrophic.

[00:04:35]The unmistakable signature of a close depth charge [music] detonation.

[00:04:39]That single piece of evidence confirmed what the Japanese records >> [music] >> had suggested. Harder did not implode.

[00:04:46]Harder did not flood slowly. Harder was killed by a single precise depth [music] charge at close range and Harder went down fast. You see that matters because for 80 years the exact cause of Harder's loss was officially listed as unknown.

[00:05:01]The Navy knew Harder was gone.

[00:05:03]They knew roughly where. But how Harder died was a question that had no answer.

[00:05:08]The wreck answered it.

[00:05:10]>> [music] >> And then there is the other detail that is harder to think about. Harder is sitting upright, largely intact. And Harder went down with 24 torpedoes aboard, 10 torpedo tubes, and 79 men who never All of it is still down there.

[00:05:28]The wreck is a formally designated war grave. The Lost 52 project documented the site non-intrusively.

[00:05:35]No penetration, no recovery, no disturbance.

[00:05:40]The exact coordinates were shared only with the US Navy and relevant authorities. Not the public, not salvage operators. Because Harder is not just a wreck. Harder is a tomb. And that is the part [music] that stays with you when you think of think about what the wreck actually looks like from the outside.

[00:06:00]You see a Gato class submarine is not a large vessel. 311 ft long, just 27 ft wide. Inside that hole, 60 [music] men lived, worked, ate, and slept in spaces so tight that sailors had to share bunks in rotation. One man sleeping while another was on duty.

[00:06:21]There was no privacy, no space, no silence. The engines ran constantly.

[00:06:27]>> [music] >> The air recycled endlessly. Every man on board knew every other man by name.

[00:06:35]On the morning of August 24th, 1944, [music] those men were at their stations. Dealey was in the conning tower. The torpedo men were at their tubes. The crew of Harder had no reason to believe that morning would be any different from the hundreds of mornings before it. Harder had survived depth charge attacks before.

[00:06:54]Harder had dived beneath destroyers and come out the other side.

[00:06:58]>> [music] >> Harder had done things no submarine was supposed to survive.

[00:07:02]But this time, the depth charge found them. The fifth one, at 3,000 ft in the darkness of the Philippine Sea, that moment is still frozen.

[00:07:12]The wreck that explorers found in 2023 is not just a piece of military hardware. It is the exact place where those men were going about their morning. And then were not.

[00:07:24]That is what the wreck of Harder actually is. Not a museum, not a monument. The last place those men ever were. Commander Samuel Dealey was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for Harder's fifth war patrol. The citation described Dealey as making deliberate and repeated attacks on Japanese destroyers. The ships designed to kill him with what the navy called conspicuous gallantry.

[00:07:48]The most feared submarine commander in the Pacific took Harder down for the last time on August 24th, 1944.

[00:07:55]Dealey fired his last torpedoes at a ship that was coming straight for him, and when the depth charges came, Harder went to the bottom of the Philippine Sea.

[00:08:04]80 years later, Harder is still there, upright, intact, exactly where Harder came to rest. And now for the first time, we know exactly where that is.

[00:08:16]If you want to see more videos like this one, drop a comment and let me know where in the world you are watching from, and make sure you subscribe so you do not miss the next one.