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Japanese Aircraft-Carrying Super Submarine From WWII Located Off Hawaii

Posted by Soulskill on from the sunken-history dept.

Freshly Exhumed sends this story from Reuters: "Scientists plumbing the Pacific Ocean off the Hawaii coast have discovered a Second World War era Japanese submarine, a technological marvel that had been preparing to attack the Panama Canal before being scuttled by U.S. forces. The 122-meter 'Sen-Toku' class vessel — among the largest pre-nuclear submarines ever built — was found in August off the southwest coast of Oahu and had been missing since 1946, scientists at the University of Hawaii at Manoa said. The I-400 and its sister ship, the I-401, which was found off Oahu in 2005, were able to travel one and a half times around the world without refueling and could hold up to three folding-wing bombers that could be launched minutes after resurfacing, the scientists said."

11 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Captured at the end of the War by EMG+at+MU · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Because it isn't clear from TFA: The US was in control of the sub when it was scuttled by Hawaii. It had been captured when Japan surrendered.

    This is really cool because it's a piece of history and an engineering accomplishment but the only reason it was 'lost' was because the US sank it and then pretended that they forgot where they sank it so that they didn't have to give it back and have the Soviets study it.

    1. Re:Captured at the end of the War by Austrian+Anarchy · · Score: 1, Interesting

      the US sank it and then pretended that they forgot where they sank it so that they didn't have to give it back and have the Soviets study it.

      Had nothing to do with "giving it back".

      The USA and USSR had an agreement during the War that they would share in the spoils of war (like this submarine), and the USA didn't want to turn two of them over to the USSR (because the USSR didn't enter the war against Japan until after the Nagasaki bombing, but more importantly because we didn't want the USSR to get any "free" technology transfers). The USSR was a land power and not a sea power, we wanted to keep things that way....

      Which is all a bunch of diplomatic nonsense on top of diplomatic nonsense. The Soviets were suppose to do all sorts of things that they never followed through on, that is how Poland ended up enslaved by them and North Korea too.

      --
      Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
    2. Re:Captured at the end of the War by xevioso · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There's a very interesting take on the Soviets entering the war against Japan. They did it very very late, and were actually still fighting the Japanese for a few days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The details on these engagements, from the Soviet perspective, can be found here.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAAb8Plf20I

      That whole series on the Soviet perspective is amazing.

    3. Re:Captured at the end of the War by DerekLyons · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The USA and USSR had an agreement during the War that they would share in the spoils of war (like this submarine), and the USA didn't want to turn two of them over to the USSR (because the USSR didn't enter the war against Japan until after the Nagasaki bombing, but more importantly because we didn't want the USSR to get any "free" technology transfers). The USSR was a land power and not a sea power, we wanted to keep things that way....

      Which has more to do with postwar paranoia than anything else. Even the USN had given up on these boats after less than a year of studying them, as they were complete turkeys.* Despite their huge size, they weren't particularly advanced technologically and the aircraft carried were fairly short ranged with unimpressive payloads. They were extraordinarily vulnerable due to their poor handling characteristics and the need for extended periods on the surface to launch or recover their aircraft. Even minor flooding in the hangar could lead to a severe list and loss-of-control.
       
      I got to spend an afternoon once with one of the guys who brought the I-400 to Hawaii from Japan. According to him, they were scared for their lives the entire trip due to it's poor performance and handling characteristics.
       
      Though aircraft carrying submarines have been briefly examined from time to time since WWII, nobody has tried to build one. The submarine simply imposes too many restrictions on the aircraft and vice versa. Cruise missiles and soon drones are the exception that proves the rule - they're encapsulated and fit into standard torpedo tubes and thus do not impose notable restrictions on the boat.
       
      *By comparison, some of the German boats taken over at the end of the war were in service for trials well into the 1950's.

    4. Re:Captured at the end of the War by nojayuk · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It took the Soviets months to position over a million troops around Manchuria, moving them from the Western front after V-E Day along the Trans-Siberian railroad along with tens of thousands of artillery pieces, tanks etc. Marshal Vasilevsky who planned and organised the operation is regarded by some as the greatest general in history for just this achievement. The attack took place exactly 90 days after Germany surrendered as Stalin had promised at Potsdam, the timing was in no way related to the US using its first nuclear bombs.

      The Japanese and Manchurian troops the Russians faced had never actually been in combat, they were quite well supplied with equipment from local factories and fuel was abundant and they were well dug-in having had months to prepare for an attack they knew was coming. Unfortunately for them they were up against the soldiers who had taken Berlin, the toughest bastards in uniform that walked the earth at that time.

      As for MacArthur neither he nor the Japanese forces positioned there could stop the Russians taking the Kuril and Sakhalin islands, the only opposed landing of foreign troops on Japanese soil apart from Okinawa. They also grabbed off a large chunk of Korea into the bargain and many historians claim that only running out of supplies stopped them taking the rest of the peninsula.

    5. Re:Captured at the end of the War by CCTalbert · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (Richard Rhodes) has a lot of interesting information, and different perspectives, on the atomic bombings. There's the traditional "we would have so many causalities" argument that's always made. But there were some other possible motivations that are very interesting, and the cynic in me tends to give them a lot of credence.

      (Oh, and the book is fascinating, I think, a very good "geek" read. Things like the Nagasaki bomb having never been tested- there was so little Plutonium available they didn't want to waste any on a test, and they were *that* confident in the design they didn't feel a test was necessary. They just did the math.)

      First, the development of "The Bomb" had been horrendously expensive, and mostly a "black" project. It was all going to come to light after the war. People involved in it needed a win- you couldn't have spent all that money for no reason and not expect to be crucified when it became known. So- "Bomb something, do it quick, we have to use it to justify having developed it!" Political CYA.

      Also, there was a huge amount of concern about the Soviets. They had developed this huge army, and we didn't like how they thought- they were becoming the enemy. We needed to demonstrate that we had the ultimate big-stick so there wouldn't be any mistaking who the toughest kid on the block really was. Chest-thumping on a massive scale.

      And also, there was concern about having to share the control of Japan after they surrendered. Things weren't going so well in Germany and we simply didn't want to have to include the Soviets in the process. If the war went on the Soviets involvement would necessitate including them... if we ended it quickly though, before they were really involved, we could leave them out. Like not sharing these subs :)

      Personally I suspect all of these issues (and more) played into it. I think the "too many american lives would be lost" argument isn't really sufficient on it's own. But second-guessing secrets from 60-some years ago... who knows?

    6. Re:Captured at the end of the War by nojayuk · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Whole lot of wrong there but "American chest-beating" after the war fed into the history books which took a very parochial view of the entire affair -- for example the Germans took 90% of their casualties in the East, the Allied landings at Normandy and liberation of Western Europe were a sideshow as far as they were concerned. So it is with the Japanese theatre of the war and latterly the use of nukes there. BTW the Nagasaki plutonium implosion bomb design was the one actually tested at Trinity, it was the Hiroshima uranium bomb that was considered simple enough it didn't need a test shot.

      The nukes were a new wonder-weapon in a war filled with wonder-weapons, they were ready for use and they were used, that's all. The Allies already had city-killers, they were thousand-bomber raids causing firestorms that killed more people in a night in places like Tokyo than the Hiroshima bomb ever did. Sure the nukes were super-effective at the hypocentre, melting concrete and glass with the heat flash but the effects died away with distance whereas mattress-bombing with ten thousand tonnes of conventional explosives and 4lb incendiaries destroyed a much wider area. Here's an interesting thought -- bomber losses over Japan were tiny compared to the German campaign and in September the Boeing plant in Seattle built 300 B-29s and that's after the Japanese surrendered. It took them months to stop the production lines. All those bombers would have been available to continue conventional attacks on Japan even without the nukes.

      As for scaring the Soviets, they had been fucked over by experts and in the end it was the hammer-and-sickle that flew over what was left of the Reichstag, not the swastika over Red Square. Nukes didn't scare them; if you want to play that game try getting a map of the Soviet Union at the end of 1945 and draw a few dozen two-mile-diameter circles, the effective damage area of a 20 kilotonne nuke on it and then look at what's left. That's assuming the US could actually make that number of nukes and deliver them to target -- Moscow was out of range from western Europe using B-29s and the greater-range B-36 was still getting debugged by the time 1946 rolled around.

  2. Re: Japanese, your Lord ! by Stormy+Dragon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Clearly buying from companies like Ford, the huge multinational corporation with a vaguely English sounding name primarily owned by international banks that makes cars in the US from mostly foreign parts is far more patriotic than buying from companies like Honda, the huge multinational corporation with a vaguely Japanese sounding name primarily owned by international banks that makes cars in the US from mostly foreign parts.

  3. Re:Toyota and Honda are NOT owned by banks ! by Stormy+Dragon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The clan owned zbaitsu did not last past WWII, having failed to survive the twin blows of Japanese nationalization and the US occupation. Like most big Japanese enterprises, the Toyota Group is a keiretsu, a group of interlocking business built around a bank and a trading company. In the case of the Toyota Group, the bank controlling everything is the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group.

    Which in turned is owned by companies like Mellon Bank, State Street Bank, Chase Manhattan Bank, etc.

  4. True story re: these subs ... by timothy · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Several years ago, my dad saw one of the would-have-been (not exactly "would be") pilots of one of those folding wing planes (on a different mission that never got started, as I understand it) speak at the Air & Space Museum Annex at Dulles. The pilot, he said, expressed great gratitude for the nuclear bombs that ended the war, saying that they probably also saved his life in so doing. You can see one of the folding wing bombers there, as well as a space shuttle and many, many other things.

    Tim

    --
    jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
  5. Re:I for one by real+gumby · · Score: 5, Interesting

    welcome our new Japanese over...oh, wait...

    Actually I thank you guys in the USA (well your grandparents) since if you had not fought that war I would not have been born. My mother had the "pleasure" of actually having Japanese overlords, and while my dad didn't it was only because the US occupied the country before the Japanese could do more than lob a few shells at it.

    For that matter my inlaws were in a country run by the Nazis and would likely not have met either...and the US really didn't have to enter that war at all. Nor did they need to spend the money rebuilding the place.

    So every time I see some boneheaded american thing (and it's a big place so there's no shortage of stupidity, shitheads and whatever) I remember that they are capable of greatness.

    (apologies for the serious response to the flippant remark)