The Airplane Graveyard has been called the most extensive collection of American WWII planes in one place. These planes can be found at both deep and shallow diving depths, most around 30 metres, and in one area as many as 13 planes can be seen on a single dive. It was decided it would be cheaper to get rid of the planes than to bring them back on ships, so they were simply pushed off the back of barges in the lagoon near Roi half a dozen square kilometres.
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When the war ended, the Americans were faced with the question of how to get their excess material back, including around 150 planes.
In early 1944 American forces invaded Kwajalein, bombarding and destroying all of the Japanese aircraft and sinking many ships. The Japanese took over and colonised the Marshalls in 1914 and used Kwajalein as an important military defence base during WWII. The lagoon of Kwajalein Atoll is the resting place for a huge concentration of Japanese and American WWII wrecks, including more than 25 ships and over 160 planes. Flat and skinny islands of sand are left behind, usually with sheer walls on the ocean side and a protected lagoonal area fed by tidal influxes on the inside.įor Kwajalein this means spectacular walls dropping hundreds of metres right offshore with untouched, healthy corals and lots of pelagic life, and a lagoon of around 20 to 40 metres deep with sporadic coral heads and, thanks to World War II, copious wrecks including American and Japanese warships and planes. They are formed by coral reefs that built up around a former island that has since disappeared over millions of years due to erosion. The islands cover over 1.26 million square kilometres (larger than South Africa), although only 171 square kilometres of that area is land (about the same size as Indonesia’s Komodo Island).Ītolls are ring islands that enclose a saltwater lagoon.
So far to the east, the Marshall Islands are just slightly west of the International Date Line and just a bit north of the equator. Located in the geographic region of Micronesia, Kwajalein (kwa-ja-leyn) is one of 29 atolls belonging to the Republic of the Marshall Islands. A master diver and superb underwater photographer, Brandi Mueller has dived to depths of 120 feet to capture rare images of these forgotten war birds, many looking as if they could still take off and return to the war-torn skies at any moment.Įncrusted in coral, these haunting aircraft are now home to a colorful array of tropical Pacific marine life, including fish, turtles, and even the occasional shark. At the end of WWII, around 150 American airplanes, all veterans of the Pacific war, were dumped in the lagoon of Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands.
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