Unfortunately no-one started salvaging war artifacts in the Solomons until the 1970s, when an Australian chap suggested to some local villagers that they pull the wrecks out of the jungle and set up a little museum, which I visited a few years ago – even bought a WW2 Coke bottle in mint condition for about $US2! There was also a NZ beer bottle, but it didn’t seem to have the same cachet as the Coke bottle!
Sadly other great stuff has been lost; another Australian dynamited the Japanese submarine sunk by the two NZ Corvettes Kiwi and Moa, which is an amazing story in itself – one of the corvettes, considerably smaller than the submarine, repeatedly rammed it until the submarine’s hull split. They ran the submarine onto a reef just offshore, a wartime photo shows the front 20 feet of the bow sticking out of the water. But as I mentioned it was dynamited to recover the brass and lead. When I dived on it there was little to see.
However, there is an American LST (or half of it) which also has a lot of interesting history – it was torpedoed and the rear half with most of the men on board sank. I’ve had a lot of correspondence with different people who had relatives on the LST or were in some other way associated with it.
Richard.
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