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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."

9 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 CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 5, Informative

      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....

      --

      "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
    2. Re:Captured at the end of the War by Ralph+Wiggam · · Score: 5, Informative

      Kim Jong Il was born in the Soviet Union, where Kim Il Sung commanded a Soviet military unit. Those two countries had a very strong relationship for many decades.

    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 ArbitraryName · · Score: 5, Informative

      North Korea was enslabed by ... a north korean dictator, or by China, but certainly not by Russia!

      Are you serious? Are you familiar with the history of Korea post WW2 and leading up to the Korean War? Japan occupied Korea until the end of WW2. After their surrender, the US and Soviets split occupation at the 38th parallel (much like how Germany, whose history I hope you are familiar with, was divided). In brief, the Soviet Union installed the Communist system and Kim Il-sung in power.

      North Korea could not have been more directly enslaved by the Soviet Union.

    5. 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: Toyota and Honda are NOT owned by banks ! by Jeeeb · · Score: 5, Informative

    Close. Toyota is part of the Mitsui group with Mitsui Sumitomo at the center. Although Mitsui's stake in Toyota is relatively small and they are not the only bank. The remainder is cross holdings from other Mitsui Keiretsu members or publicly traded stocks. SMFG is in turn publicly traded on several stock exchanges in Japan and the NYSE. That said the head of Toyota is still from the Toyoda family. MUFJ is head of the Mitsubishi group which includes Mitsubishi motors. They also are publicly listed in several Japanese exchanges and the NYSE. Japan has huge amounts of capital and foreign exchange, so foreign holdings of Japanese corporations is low. It mostly goes the other way.

  3. 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)

  4. Re:I for one by quenda · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well, Hitler actually declared war on the United States first, not the other way round,

    The US was well involved in the war against Germany already. They just don't like _declaring_ war. At least not on countries, just abstract nouns.