If you’re in the market for a classic 1940 or 1941 Ford Super Deluxe Woody Wagon, I think I have a great lead for you. There happens to be an unrestored one available, and it looks like it ran when parked. To check it out, you just need to get into your submersible or bathyscaphe and head over to about 1,000 miles northeast of Midway Island – look for signs for the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument – then descend down about three miles until you find the wreckage of the USS Yorktown. The car should be parked on the aft hangar deck.
Yes, that’s right, there’s a car parked on the wreckage of the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown (CV-5), which sank in June of 1942 after being torpedoed by a Japanese submarine during the Battle of Midway. The wreckage of the carrier was found in 1998, and just a few days ago the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) sent the ship Okeanos Explorer to explore the wreckage with a remote-operated vehicle (ROV).
While exploring, the team discovered what appears to be a Ford woody wagon on the aft hangar deck. You can see the moment the car was discovered here, about five hours into the expedition:
Holy crap, right? That’s pretty astounding. I especially like this exchange heard over the radio feed:
“Alright everyone, I stepped out for two minutes – is that a vehicle?”
“That is a vehicle.”
“I need to stop stepping away.”
Nobody seemed to expect to find a car with the wreck, for a number of reasons, including the fact that, generally, in WWII civilian-type automobiles were generally not taken to sea, likely because of the lack of good roads in the ocean, and the fact that hangar space was at a premium. Also, when the Yorktown was crippled before it eventually sank, a lot of heavy equipment was jettisoned overboard, like guns and other machinery, and it’s not clear why the car wasn’t tossed overboard then.
Someone must have really liked that car.
Here’s what the NOAA said about the discovery:
A Surprise Automobile
Exploration often provides some surprises. During the dive on April 19, we noticed a faint outline of an automobile while peering into the aft hangar deck from the port side of USS Yorktown. The team aboard Okeanos Explorer and contributors ashore analyzed diagnostic features of the vehicle observed during the follow-up April 20 dive and tentatively identified the car as a 1940-41 Ford Super Deluxe ‘Woody’ in black. With “SHIP SERVICE ___ NAVY” written on part of its front plate, this car is hypothesized to have been used for Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, Captain Elliott Buckmaster, or other ship crew while USS Yorktown was conducting business in foreign ports.
It’s also interesting that the car doesn’t seem to be the military version of the Ford Super Deluxe woody wagon, which was called the C11:
Note the simple bumpers used on the C11; the civilian version used more elaborate chrome bumpers:
If we look at the video from the RAV, we can just barely see a chrome overrider peeking out from the silt:
…which just makes this all the stranger! I guess if you’re a Rear Admiral you can demand such decadent luxuries as chrome bumpers. Another photo shows more civilian-spec chrome, as detailed in the caption of this NOAA photo:
The civilian spec and the fact that the car wasn’t jettisoned while the ship was foundering all suggest that this car very likely had some sort of special significance to someone important on the ship.
Much of the wood of the body has deteriorated, the roof has almost entirely rotted away, but I’m surprised just how much of the car remains intact after all these years at the bottom of the sea.
Interestingly, it seems like having civilian cars on aircraft carriers may not be entirely unheard of; look at this 1983 picture of crew members’ personal cars on the deck of the USS Kitty Hawk:
The caption to the photo reads:
“Crew members’ and their dependents’ cars are parked on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63) as it enters the harbor at San Diego. The ship is returning to San Diego after being overhauled at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington.”
I’m not sure of the context of when crew members can park their cars on the carrier deck, but perhaps there are times when the ship is transferring home ports they can move cars for crew? I don’t really know. What I do know is that there are some fantastic cars in this row:
Look at that! A Ford EXP, a Corvette, a Pinto, a Baja Bug, a Toyota Celica, and a Plymouth Horizon (or maybe a Dodge Omni)! And so many good colors!
But back to the Yorktown’s Ford: I suppose the car is property of the Navy, so I suppose if you want to make an offer on it, email the current acting Chief of Naval Operations, James W. Kilby. You may have better luck DMing the CNO on Insta? Just make sure you mention you’re interested in the car in your first message, because I imagine he’s a busy man.
DT: I have 10 days to get a car found 3 miles down running for Moab.
I don’t know if the US Navy have a similar custom, but in the Royal Navy aircraft carrier captains (at least used to) have the perk of taking a car or two with them to sea.
Useful for port calls. Usually the issued vehicles were Land Rovers, but Mini Mokes and sometimes actual cars (Rovers, Jags) have been known.
Other ships lack a space suitable to store a fueled car.
lol I emailed this y’all yesterday, I guess you were already on the case Jason!
On the chrome, it’s entirely possible they just resprayed the stock cars OD and the paint has come off the chromes parts.
On cars parked on the Kitty Hawk, I mean it was going to San Diego anyway, no way the weight of the cars was noticed, so it was basically free, and safer (Naval deck crews do not mess around).
Probably one that was on the line when everything shifted over to military production and the navy got it and used it for executive staff car.
People joke about Ford’s quality control problems, but the original radiator is still full of water after 82 years
The picture of the cars on the ship reminds me of a former Hemmings feature called ‘Car Spotting.’
They would post a vintage picture of (usually) a parking lot and the readers would try to identify all the cars
I used to spend my lunch break looking at them
There are a lot of streaming services that air shows from the 60’s and 70’s; when I’m watching CHiPs, Adam 12, Movin’ On, or Chico and The Man, I often oooh and aaah about the cars in the background. I sometimes am surprised by the number of VW Bugs.
I binge watched Adam 12 during Covid and the exact same cars keep appearing in the background over and over and over. And I’m not talking about stock shots. I’m talking about plot driving scenes and it’s the same background cars every show.
CHiPs too
There’s a YouTube channel called Car Chase Wonderland which has been posting a lot of CHiPs lately, just the action, and people comment on seeing certain members of the non-sacrificial automotive repertory company of extras: the two blue Accord hatchbacks (with and without stripes), the greige Datsun 510 wagon and so on.
Surprising that the NOAA wasn’t so completely DOGE’d that they were actually allowed to send the Okeanos Explorer’s ROV down there to explore the USS Yorktown.
Three miles deep? Dang. While the USS Yorktown isn’t included here’s a pretty good video showing the depths of a number of well-known shipwrecks: https://youtu.be/aGPiQ47ahsE?si=pA1cUWPiRrR7NvzI
And the Mary Rose Museum has a good thread on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/maryrosemuseum.bsky.social/post/3lmtngy3ulc2w that uses a scaled diagram to answer the question “If they raised the Mary Rose, why not raise the Titanic?” (Yeah, you gotta keep scrolling…)
This is not that unusual, my brother who did six years in the NAVY had a couple of PORSCHES that he kept shipboard. Rumor has it there were as many a six residing onboard for almost a year.
He called it free storage…
You would expect that a rear admiral would know where to stick his Woody.
Then again, nobody expected that whole boat to go down on a torpedo.
I’m going to stop now.
No. I’m not.
Just gotta point out that even in the 1940’s people were underwater on cars.
Out of respect to those lost souls and heroes I will refrain from expressing my take on your comment. Mine was probably even more woody inappropriate.
Well done!
My dad was a Naval officer during WW2 and Korea (and in the reserves after that).
In WW2, he met Halsey for a “hey kid, go get them!” pep talk, but other than that, he didn’t deal with anyone with Chicken crap on their hat.
In Korea, he did deal with the top brass and got to meet a lot of guys with a lot of chicken $^@ on their hats.
In the build up to Incheon in Korea, Dad’s job was to go through all the old WW2 ships that had been mothballed, get them cleaned up and working again, take them on a shakedown cruise, then hand them over. One of the ships he worked on was a fancy cargo ship that was the flagship for the invasion fleet.
After a shakedown cruise, he became the engineering officer for the ship during a mock invasion of Cuba. The Admiral and staff loaded up on the ship and during the loading the Admiral’s private Lincoln was brought aboard. The plan was that after invading Cuba, they would go to Miami and the Admiral would cruise around south Florida with his Lincoln until the final prep was completed. In Miami, my dad was called in to find out why the Lincoln had broken down. Ends up, it had taken a wave and there was sea water in the oil pan.
Soon afterward, the Navy decided to put a luxury car in the motor pool at most bases because they were sick of having to buy new cars for high ranking officers.
Since my dad’s experience was from Korea, it doesn’t surprise me that this Woody is with the Yorktown that went down years earlier.
If we want to stray into some naval repairs and patch jobs the Yorktown would provide some good source material. Really the US Navy as a whole during WWII was a smorgasbord of “that’ll do her” fixes. There was a cruiser that had its bow blown off by a torpedo so the crew built a new bow out of coconut logs to get it back home for permanent repairs. A destroyer that lost about the first 1/3 of its length was sailed backwards to safety. Did the Navy total it? Hell no, they attached a new 1/3 destroyer to what was left and sent it back to war. So the next time an insurance adjuster tries to total your car over a fender bender you can tell them the Greatest Generation never gave up on a ship over a little paint and sheet metal.
So we recover the ship and let Laurence and David resurrect it? Project Marine Cactus.
Yorktown has some holes in her but the deep ocean has preserved the hull beautifully. Get me the mother of all lifting straps and let’s get to work!
Yamato was blown to bits but they put her back in service. Sure we can do the same to Yorktown?
In the spirit of cactus being local slang, I nominate FUBAR for this one
I sent a Signal message to see if it’s still available.
THAT’S where I parked it! *head slap*
“Twenty Thousand Leagues, row C, spot 117”
Wait, it’s Little Mermaid now?! How long was I asleep?
I can’t believe it has been 80 years and we’re still sorely bereft of any good roads in the ocean.
No worries, it’s all off-road so you can legally drive your Kei mini-truck there.
For the modern photo, yes, you are correct, it happens when the ship changes homeports, you may as well load the ship with any extra cars or belongings, so the crew has one less thing to drive themselves to their new homeport.
I gotta ‘41 wagon and they call it a Woody
(Surf City here we come)
It’s not very cherry, kinda moldy and a sooty
(Surf City here we come)
Well it ain’t gotta a backseat, but some chrome still shows,
And if you wanna go to see it, just dive three miles below
Yeah we’re going to Surf City where the cars are sunk
We’re going to Surf City gonna see some junk
Oh yeah, we’re going to Surf City where my Ford went kerplunk
We’re going to Surf City and get nitrogen drunk
N2 for bendy joy
This is the only correct reference and parody. COTD
This is a detail of a tangent, but I think the Navy’s caption on that modern* photo is wrong. The Kitty Hawk is clearly in my home state of Washington, probably leaving Bremerton, not entering the Harbor at San Diego. Why? Because:
Everything about that photo reads Puget Sound. I wish I had a marine chart to figure out where there are two markers so close together next to a ferry route leaving Bremerton, but I’ve been staring at this familiar scene for too long already! =)
* I don’t know how I feel about this, but this photo was taken closer to when the Yorktown went down than to today….
yep, I was thinking the same. The ferry is a dead giveaway. That is not SD Harbor.
and we all know San Diego was discovered by the Germans in 1904
That’s correct, if only we knew what the name originally meant in German, too bad it was lost to history
I think Ron Burgundy answered that one for us.
That looks like the north end of Blake Island in the middle of the photo with the Seattle-Bremerton ferry approaching the Kitty Hawk and the Southworth-Fauntleroy ferry in the distance. This would suggest the Kitty Hawk is heading south in the passage between Bainbridge Island and the mainland after leaving Bremerton.
The photo was definitely taken as Kitty Hawk was leaving Bremerton for San Diego, not the other way around.
You don’t see Washington State Ferries in San Diego. However, you will see Staten Island Ferries in Norfolk, Va. That’s where they go for shipyard work.
https://www.13newsnow.com/article/news/local/mycity/norfolk/access-daybreak-staten-island-ferry-among-ships-at-colonnas-shipyard/291-339788198
Its definitely a 1941 Super Deluxe Woody wagon.
High chance some enterprising E-6 (or whatever the Navy calls an E-6) got sick of doing some mundane tasks involving moving dead weight from point A to B. Then talked his way into them hoisting some non-mission approved equipment, because A.) in time honored military tradition, whatever he was supposed to use didn’t work or B.) didn’t exist. Depending on your stations Pit Crew willingness to keep things alive, using civ vehicles happens somewhat often.
My dad’s experience in the Korean war with a guy with a lot of chicken crap on his hat, a Lincoln and a lack of common sense tells me that it was almost certainly the Admiral’s car. Dad told me it was common practice for flag officers to carry their own cars until so many got damaged by being in the weather that the Navy started putting luxury cars in the motor depots.
I was going to replace the wood panels and get it back running, but I had some family stuff come up. Should be an easy fix for a decent mechanic. No lowballers. Must tow it from where it’s parked. Sorry for the blue, unclear photos; I’m not a great photographer and don’t know how to change the settings. Looks great in person!
I think it’s because the car doesn’t weigh much when compared to something like one of the guns: chucking it overboard would have been work for no real benefit/ROI. (The wheels would help, but still.)
For comparison, a 1949 Ford Custom station wagon weighs about 3500lb. A slightly newer (1970-ish) five-inch naval gun weighs about 48,000lb, or about as much as 14 cars.
Only in a very, very narrow range of circumstances could 3500lb be the difference between sinking and not sinking.
Maybe they weren’t too crazy about tossing the admiral’s car in the drink in case the ship had survived… but I suspect you are correct that it wasn’t looked at because there were other heavier things they went after first.
Or two new M5s.
We worked late last night so At Dawn We Slept. I just woke up and read this Miracle at Midway.
Parked, then ran!
Is this still available?
The C11 was mostly built for supply to Britain & the Commonwealth allies, the US military would certainly have purchased at least some standard Ford wagons for regular transport functions prior to the end of civilian production in February 1942