The wreck of the SS President Coolidge

A 615 foot liner you can dive from the shore

SS President Coolidge was an American ocean liner, delivered by the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company on 1 October 1931 for the Dollar Steamship Lines. She and her sister, President Hoover, were the largest merchant ships built in the United States up to then. She was launched on 21 February 1931 when Mrs. Calvin Coolidge broke a bottle of water from a brook on the Coolidge farm in Vermont on her bow. Turbo-electric, with 180 electric motors aboard, she carried holidaymakers between San Francisco and Manila via Kobe and Shanghai, with two saltwater pools, private telephones and a soda fountain, and set speed records between Japan and San Francisco.

When war came she evacuated Americans from Hong Kong and east Asia, brought 125 critically injured naval patients home from Hawaii after Pearl Harbor, and was converted into a troopship for 5,000, painted haze grey. On 6 October 1942 she left San Francisco for the New Hebrides with 5,340 men, most of them of the 43rd Infantry Division. The harbour at Espiritu Santo was heavily mined, but the safe entry instructions had been left out of her sailing orders. On 26 October Captain Henry Nelson, fearing Japanese submarines and unaware of the mines, took the largest and most obvious channel. A mine exploded near the engine room, killing Fireman Robert Reid, and moments later a second hit near the stern. Nelson ran her aground and ordered the troops off. In 90 minutes all 5,340 got ashore, some of them walking.

A coral reef stopped her from beaching. She listed onto her side, sank stern first and slid down the slope into the channel. Captain Elwood J. Euart of the 103rd Field Artillery, already safe, went back in through a sea door when he heard men were trapped in the infirmary, got them out, and went down with the ship; he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Long afterwards his remains were found deep in the silt inside the wreck, still with his dog tags, and DNA matched them to his relatives. Nelson was acquitted by a military commission, which found that merchant ships had not been given the mine positions.

She lies on her port side with the bow at 21 metres and the stern at 73. Since 18 November 1983 Vanuatu has forbidden any salvage. Divers swim through holds and decks among guns, Jeeps, helmets and trucks, chandeliers, a mosaic tile fountain and the porcelain relief known as The Lady, riding a unicorn, while reef fish, turtles and moray eels live on the hull. The wreck is reached from the beach, and with care and decompression stops recreational divers can explore much of her.