June, being the calendrical host of Father’s Day, seems a good time to recall the six-decade search of three sons for their long lost father, from Groton to the bottom of the remote Bering Sea.

On Sunday, May 24, 1942, the Abele family enjoyed lunch at the Officers Club on the submarine base in Groton. Afterwards, Lieutenant Commander Mannert “Jim” Abele, commander of the submarine USS Grunion, stayed on base to “finish up some work on the boat.” His wife Kay and their sons Bruce, Brad and John went back to their home in Mystic.

Jim Abele never came home.

That evening, the Grunion slid silently down the Thames River, heading to Pearl Harbor. Jim soon apologized for the wartime secrecy, but his Navy family understood.

Four months later, Kay Abele received a telegram from the Navy stating that Jim was “missing in action.” Bruce was 12 years old, Brad was 9, and John was 5.

The Grunion was simply considered “missing and presumed lost.” The Navy would provide no further information, remaining forever silent. Yet the Abele family never gave up seeking the truth, and Kay kept in touch with Grunion families over the years. She died in October 1976 without knowing what happened to her husband.

As the boys grew older, the mystery of their father’s disappearance haunted them. By 1998, Brad Abele had compiled a manuscript of his father’s life. He contacted retired Commander Edward Beach, author and submarine historian. Beach sent him a decoded July 30, 1942, message, the Grunion’s last garbled transmission, which placed her off Kiska Island, Alaska, part of the Aleutian Islands.

At the same time, in an incredible twist of fate, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Lane, a naval history buff, poked around a military antique shop in Denver, Colorado, and purchased an obscure wiring diagram of a deck winch from a Japanese supply ship, the Kano Maru, for one dollar.

Four years later in 2002, Lane posted it on a Japanese naval historical website and was contacted by Yutaka Iwasaki, a Japanese naval historian, who provided an article by the Kano Maru’s commander, Captain Seiichi Aiura.

The piece chronicled a July 30, 1942, battle off Kiska Island between the Kano Maru and an American submarine. Iwasaki was confident the sub was the Grunion.

Back in Massachusetts, the fiance of Bruce’s son showed Brad’s manuscript to her boss, a history buff. He steered Brad to a website where he discovered Yutaka’s post.

Over the following years, the Abeles searched for more information with the help of volunteers, including Iwasaki.

They found Shinoda Chiyo, the wife of the captain who went down on a ship sunk by an American submarine off Kiska Island. She had “ironclad eyewitness reports that her husband died in action in the Aleutians.”

The Abeles now had a general location and knew their father had gone down fighting.

Another extraordinary happenstance occurred when, back in Japan, Yutaka Iwasaki stumbled upon the misfiled Kano Maru’s logbook. It included a chart that Captain Aiura of the Kano Maru had drawn after the battle. The chart reduced the search area from hundreds of square miles to four square miles.

A former submariner and sonar expert was hired to outfit an old 165-foot Alaskan crab boat named Acquila. Sonar equipment and heavy winches were installed on the boat over the summer of 2006, funded by John Abele, who had become a wealthy businessman in Boston.

August was the only month a search could be conducted on the violent Bering Sea.

The Acquila departed Dutch Harbor on Aug. 10 without the Abeles onboard. They eventually discovered something five miles off the Aleutian coast that looked like a submarine but couldn’t be verified. They needed better equipment and had to wait until the following summer to confirm the find.

With John Abele onboard, the Acquila returned to the site in August 2007. Using a remotely operated vehicle with high-definition cameras, the Grunion was discovered 3,200 feet down on the bottom, heavily damaged from the implosion suffered when she passed “crush depth.”

A reverence overcame those in the Acquila wheelhouse, now floating directly over the gravesite of 70 men. Abele could see the Grunion clearly on the computer screen before him. Being this close to his father after 60-plus years was a spiritual moment that moved him deeply.

He considered how the water directly over the wreck seemed “preternaturally calm.” The belligerent Bering Sea was offering John Abele a quiet moment with his father.

Something else weighed heavily on the Abeles, shedding an even darker light on their loss. The MK 14 torpedoes in use at the time displayed serious, sometimes fatal deficiencies. They were known to miss their target and make a circular run, homing in on the submarine that launched it.

Subs were far slower than torpedoes and couldn’t escape. Four American submarines were lost by such friendly fire.

Experts later agreed the Grunion had indeed been sunk by its own defective MK 14 torpedo.

A Kano Maru officer’s diagram actually showed the torpedo making a circular run, returning back to the Grunion. Such an attack would have caused Commander Jim Abele to put the sub into a deep dive. The dive planes were still in that position on the bottom.

Considering all of the improbable, unrelated occurrences that eventually came together to help find his father, Abele, a man of hard facts and science, said “Something wanted us to find that boat. They wanted to be found. A higher power.”

And the perpetual love of three sons for their father.

Note: This column was based on the book “Fatal Dive,” by Peter F. Stevens.

John Steward lives in Waterford. He can be reached at tossinglines@gmail.com.