After a lunch break and required shore time (for decompression reasons), Alfred led us on a second dive not too far away from the Coolidge. Million Dollar Point has a fascinating and somewhat startling history.
From 1941-1943 the US rapidly deployed its forces in the South Pacific, trying to stem the rapid advance of the Japanese through the islands. By 1942 the Solomon Islands, only a few hundred miles distant from Vanuatu, had been taken by the Japanese forces and the Vanuatu archipelago was next. Then US troops arrived to establish a massive sea base, the largest in the Pacific. Battles were never fought here. Luganville on Santo Island was the staging grounds for battles fought further afield. 50,000 troops were stationed in the town at any one time, and more than 100 ships anchored nearby – so many that observers said it was nearly possible to cross from one side of the harbor to the other without getting wet, just going from deck to deck to deck of the warships anchored in close proximity to each other.
Here hospitals tended the wounded and sick, repair stations patched up damaged ships and planes, and soldiers were sent out to bitter fighting in the jungles of the Solomons. Jack Kennedy’s survival story from the sinking of his PT109 took place in the Solomon Islands.
But in 1945, Japan defeated, the US withdrew its military presence from Vanuatu equally as rapidly as the build-up, abandoning massive amounts of military equipment including tanks, jeeps and cranes as well as more mundane items such as tents and cooking pots. The US offered the unwanted equipment for sale to the remaining governing body, the French, for a price as low as 8¢ on the dollar, but were declined on the premise that the equipment would be abandoned and available for no cost at all.
Instead the US dumped it all into the ocean! A jetty 70 meters long was built out from the beach to access deeper water 50 meters in depth, and bulldozers and cranes pushed everything into the deep blue sea. At the end the bulldozers were lined up, keys in the ignition and engines running, and sent driverless to plunge into the water on top of each other and everything else. And finally, in closing, the military dynamited the jetty into oblivion.
Thus was born Million Dollar Point, where millions of dollars of equipment deteriorate on the sandy bottom. Local fishermen say the waters surrounding this area were unfishable for years due to the contamination from diesel fuel, gasoline, and rusting metal. However as the years passed, this has created an astonishing dive site unequalled anywhere else in the world. Piles of tires and jeep axles are slowly growing a reef of coral and fish habitat now that the pollution has washed away.
