Sunken submarine with two N.O. natives aboard found off Japan nearly 80 years later

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One had been a star high school athlete who enlisted in the Navy. The other was a recent Tulane graduate in mechanical engineering.

Both were New Orleans natives who found themselves aboard the same doomed submarine along with 83 other sailors in the Pacific during World War II, the exact location of their final resting place unclear.

Until now. Nearly 80 years later, a retired Japanese scientist using an unmanned underwater vehicle has located the remains of the USS Albacore — the submarine that Nicholas John Cado and John Francis Fortier Jr. were aboard when it was sunk by a mine.

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The U.S. Navy confirmed the discovery in February and notified the sailors' survivors, bringing to a close a mystery that began on Nov. 7, 1944. That was when the Albacore was off the coast of Japan, looking for shipping targets.

Both New Orleans sailors were on their first cruise aboard the submarine when it went down in nearly 800 feet of water a few miles east of the Cape Esan lighthouse on the southeastern peninsula of Hokkaido.

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Seaman First Class Nicholas John Cado was only 20 when the submarine was sunk. He had graduated in May 1943 from L.H. Marrero High School, where he was a football and basketball star.

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John Francis Fortier Jr., who went by the nickname Buddy, had graduated from Tulane University in May 1943 with a degree in mechanical engineering and immediately went to Annapolis for training, being commissioned in August as an ensign.

He graduated from submarine school at New London, Conn., in April 1944 and ended up on the Albacore for his first assignment in October of that year as an assistant engineering and commissary officer.

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Navy records show that the Albacore was among the most successful U.S. submarines during the war, conducting 11 patrols and credited with 10 confirmed and three possible enemy vessel sinkings. Six of the 10 confirmed sinkings were combat ships.

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On its last mission, the Albacore left Pearl Harbor on Oct. 24, 1944 with instructions to lay off the coast of Japan to look for shipping targets, but with a warning that mines were likely sown in the Tsugaru Strait between Honshu – the main island of Japan – and Hokkaido to its north.

According to Japanese records, a submarine assumed to be the Albacore struck a mine off the Hokkaido coast, near the strait, on Nov. 7.

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