Background
Million Dollar Point isn’t a shipwreck in the traditional sense — it’s something unique: an entire junkyard of WWII military equipment, deliberately driven and dumped into the ocean by the U.S. military.
Espiritu Santo served as one of the largest American bases in the Pacific during WWII, second only to Hawaii, with over 40,000 troops stationed there at its peak. When the war ended, the U.S. found itself with a mountain of surplus equipment it no longer needed — trucks, bulldozers, jeeps, forklifts, tractors, clothing, even cases of Coca-Cola. Rather than ship it all home, the U.S. offered to sell the lot to the French and British colonial administrators who jointly ruled the New Hebrides (as Vanuatu was then known) at a steep discount, reportedly as low as six cents on the dollar.
The colonial administrators refused, apparently betting that the Americans would simply abandon the equipment for free rather than ship it home. That bet was wrong. Over several days, American troops built a ramp down to the water and drove truck after truck, jeep after jeep, bulldozer after bulldozer into the channel — locking the wheels and jumping clear at the last second. Some of the Seabees doing the driving reportedly wept as they did it. Local Ni-Vanuatu — the indigenous people of Vanuatu — watched in disbelief as a fortune’s worth of usable equipment disappeared beneath the waves, out of reach for good.
Decades later, it’s become one of Vanuatu’s most distinctive dive sites — a strange, sprawling underwater junkyard that one diving website has called “a monument to the futility of war.”
The Dive
We did this dive a little differently than most visitors — rather than a straightforward shore dive at Million Dollar Point itself, we started at the Pacific Dive shop and finned the whole way there, roughly an hour at around 100 feet, working our way around the point before finally reaching the debris field. A typical swim speed for a technical diver carrying extra tanks and camera gear is around 50 feet per minute, which works out to roughly 3,000 feet — a bit over half a mile — for an hour-long swim. When I measured the straight-line distance on Google Maps afterward, it came out to almost exactly that: 0.6 miles.
Once we arrived it was quite obvious due to all of the heavy equipment. We spent about 30 minutes exploring — tractors, jeeps, and other equipment scattered across the seabed, all of it encrusted by decades of coral growth. It’s a genuinely strange sight: not a wreck telling a story of disaster, but a deliberate act of defiance, still sitting there exactly as it landed. Max couldn’t resist climbing into the driver’s seat of one of the bulldozers for a photo — hard to blame him.
After exploring, we had about 15 minutes of decompression and finished with a shore exit right at Million Dollar Point — a long, interesting dive, and a great way to see a site with such an unusual story behind it.
Photos
Below are a few photos to give the reader an idea of the site. It is hard to provide a true sense of the scale of the equipment that was dumped.
Thanks for the article and photos. There are similar sites in the Pacific islands. Majuro, in the Marshalls, has its Parking Lot with WWII Jeeps and trucks. There’s also a similar site off Tinian in the Northern Marianas.
Cool, thanks for the information! I’ve dove the “airplane graveyard” in the Marshall Islands but not the “Parking Lot.”