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Submersible Photographs WW2 Japanese Sub's Long-Lost Airplane Hangar

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the flight-was-delayed-and-then-cancelled dept.

Zothecula writes: Until the 1960s, Japan's three I-400-class subs were the largest submarines ever built. They were so large, in fact, that they could each carry and launch three Aichi M6A Seiran amphibious aircraft. The idea was that the submarines could stealthily bring the planes to within striking distance of US coastal cities, where they could then take off and conduct bombing runs. Now, for the first time since it was scuttled at the end of World War II, one of the sunken subs' aircraft hangars has been photographed. The M6A on display at the Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center is worth seeing, if you get a chance.

22 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. just an ad... by magarity · · Score: 3, Informative

    the link to gizmag pulls up a giant best buy ad whose (x) to close button doesn't work.

    1. Re:just an ad... by Spy+Handler · · Score: 4, Informative

      it must suck to be you. I on the other hand use Firefox with Adblock, and reading the article right now with no ads bothering me.

    2. Re:just an ad... by simplypeachy · · Score: 2

      Their pop-up advertising their own damn newsletter, or something, still managed to get in my way after about 20 seconds. I then closed the tab as I don't like being accosted while browsing.

  2. Subs as aircraft carriers by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The Japanese strategy of using their subs as highly ineffective aircraft carriers is one of the reasons they lost the war. While they were wasting their efforts on that, the American's were using their subs as commerce raiders, devastating the Japanese economy ... and the Japanese failed to stop that because they never developed effective anti-sub warfare. They should have consulted with their German allies, who could have told them a lot about the effective anti-sub tactics used against them in the Atlantic.

     

    1. Re:Subs as aircraft carriers by Nidi62 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The germans had great engineering, but between this, the Bismarck, and the Tiger tanks (with engines/transmissions that broke down frequently and couldn't handle the load), they had major failings too in the economy department of bang for your buck [reichsmark]. Leadership was mostly to blame.

      As the war dragged on, Hitler became increasingly convinced that technology would turn the tide for the Germans. The V-series rockets, the ME-262, the Tiger/King Tiger, all were intended to make up for the fact that they were increasingly sending young boys and old men onto the front lines. Numerous advisors and ranking members of teh military (at least claimed to have) attempted to persuade Hitler that these programs were a waste of resources but he was adamant in his support of them. I wonder if a lot of it was due to he increasingly deteriorated mental state as the combination of stress, drugs, and mental diseases (Parkinsons and possibly syphyllis if I am not mistaken ) took their toll.

      --
      The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
    2. Re:Subs as aircraft carriers by drnb · · Score: 2

      The Japanese strategy of using their subs as highly ineffective aircraft carriers is one of the reasons they lost the war.

      Ineffective depends on the mission. One mission contemplated for these subs was to deliver plague infected fleas to coastal cities. The technology and techniques were ready to go. Testing had been done on rural Chinese villages.

    3. Re:Subs as aircraft carriers by Registered+Coward+v2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The Japanese strategy of using their subs as highly ineffective aircraft carriers is one of the reasons they lost the war. While they were wasting their efforts on that, the American's were using their subs as commerce raiders, devastating the Japanese economy ... and the Japanese failed to stop that because they never developed effective anti-sub warfare. They should have consulted with their German allies, who could have told them a lot about the effective anti-sub tactics used against them in the Atlantic.

      True, but one tactic that the Germans didn't realize was we were reading their codes and thus able to better intercept U-Boots and wolf packs. I'm not sure if Japan had developed sonar to the point it could detect submerged submarines; although radar could detect them while surfaced, which was their normal mode of operation, but then that also warns the submarine you are there before you detect them. Finally, the Allies pretty much controlled the seas in the Atlantic and thus could conduct ASW without much concern that they would get into surface battles; Japan did not have that luxury and was trying to fight naval battles that took ships that could be used for ASW away from that role. Not disagreeing with you but the two theaters were different enough that many of the things that work din one might not in the other.

      --
      I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
    4. Re:Subs as aircraft carriers by Registered+Coward+v2 · · Score: 2

      The Bismarck was not a bad ida, it just had the bad luck to take a hit in the rudder and thus become a sitting duck. Had she escaped to become a commerce raider in the Atlantic she would have sunk a lot of tonnage and tie up a lot of ships in an effort to sink her.

      --
      I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
    5. Re:Subs as aircraft carriers by smellsofbikes · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The germans had great engineering, but between this, the Bismarck, and the Tiger tanks (with engines/transmissions that broke down frequently and couldn't handle the load), they had major failings too in the economy department of bang for your buck [reichsmark]. Leadership was mostly to blame.

      As the war dragged on, Hitler became increasingly convinced that technology would turn the tide for the Germans. The V-series rockets, the ME-262, the Tiger/King Tiger, all were intended to make up for the fact that they were increasingly sending young boys and old men onto the front lines. Numerous advisors and ranking members of teh military (at least claimed to have) attempted to persuade Hitler that these programs were a waste of resources but he was adamant in his support of them. I wonder if a lot of it was due to he increasingly deteriorated mental state as the combination of stress, drugs, and mental diseases (Parkinsons and possibly syphyllis if I am not mistaken ) took their toll.

      I think part of it was that winning by tech was their only option: any rational analysis said they were outgunned and outproduced, so tech was their Hail Mary. They simply had to believe in it. Conveniently, it aligned with their sense of superiority.

      --
      Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
    6. Re:Subs as aircraft carriers by HBI · · Score: 5, Informative

      In the beginning, Barbarossa was launched with the assumption that the Soviet Union would collapse quickly. This did not happen, for various military, economic and political reasons. On this basis, the Germans attempted to convince the Japanese to strike at Great Britain at places like Singapore and Hong Kong late in 1941 and facilitate their war against Britain. They kept the Japanese in the dark about Barbarossa.

      Amidst the signs of obvious failure just short of victory in Russia, the Germans tried to convince the Japanese in October and November of 1941 to attack the Soviets from Manchuria. This failed, as the Japanese already had plans to invade the Philippines, Singapore, Borneo, and all associated islands to secure oil supplies. Moreover, they had concluded a non-aggression pact with the Soviets they preferred to keep in place. So the Soviets ended up at war with just Germany and Italy. The Japanese ended up at war with just Britain and the US. The Germans, however, ended up at war with all three major Allied powers, by foolishly declaring war on the US just after Pearl Harbor.

      The German DoW was predicated on a weak American response to Europe based on the Japanese threat. The agreement to focus on Germany between the Anglo-American powers confounded this idea. Even Mussolini believed that the focus would be on the Pacific after the Japanese attack, hence his declaration of war on the US, which seems insane considering the results just over a year later.

      At that point, Hitler's (and Goebbels', judging by his diaries) only hope was for a cleavage between the Soviets and the Anglo-American powers. There was about zero chance of this happening with Roosevelt championing the alliance, but that was what he hoped for. When Roosevelt died and nothing changed, this is the point where he gave up hope and we can then segue to the events of "Downfall".

      I don't think Hitler hoped for actual military victory post-Stalingrad. He hoped for delay in the war's end game to present a political situation he could take advantage of. His thoughts were rational, I believe, but unlikely from this vantage point to ever bear fruit.

      --
      HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
    7. Re:Subs as aircraft carriers by Nidi62 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      In the beginning, Barbarossa was launched with the assumption that the Soviet Union would collapse quickly. This did not happen, for various military, economic and political reasons.

      Its easy to tell why it happened: HItler got distracted. Hitler pulled resources from the drive on Moscow and diverted them to the attack in the Caucasus for the oil fields. Had he continued the drive on Moscow they would have more than likely made it before winter, Stalin would have had to abandon the city, and most Soviet resistance would have collapsed. HIs insistance on personally controlling the war cost him the war and eventually his life.

      I always found it interesting that, in the waning months of the war, many in the German high command clung to the hope that they would ally with the Americans and fight the Russians. Reading histories with 1st hand accounts and personal war diaries of the Wehrmacht can really change how you look at the war and really humanizes them.

      --
      The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
    8. Re:Subs as aircraft carriers by CohibaVancouver · · Score: 2

      The purpose of a submarine like this is be able to deliver their aircraft close to the enemy without being seen, launch the attack (which will appear to have come out of nowhere, with little or no warning) and then leave again without being seen

      This is exactly what is done today - Just with submarine-launched cruise missiles. Cruise missiles also have the advantage over human-piloted bombers of not needing to be recovered once the mission is complete.

    9. Re:Subs as aircraft carriers by Fire_Wraith · · Score: 2

      Consider that Bismarck's sister ship, the Tirpitz, kept a large chunk of the Royal Navy tied down simply by the threat that it might sail out from its base in a fjord in Norway. It was considered to be a serious threat, and treated as such, by the British. Bismarck would have been the same had it not been sunk after multiple engagements (first with the Battlecruiser Hood, and then with the torpedo bombers from Ark Royal).

    10. Re:Subs as aircraft carriers by DerekLyons · · Score: 2

      True, but one tactic that the Germans didn't realize was we were reading their codes and thus able to better intercept U-Boots and wolf packs.

      There's more (a lot more) to the story than just the soundbite "the Allies could read the German codes", but that's a different topic.
       

      I'm not sure if Japan had developed sonar to the point it could detect submerged submarines; although radar could detect them while surfaced

      The Japanese had decent enough sonars and useful radars - what they never really built was an effective ASW vessel. Their destroyers were focused on surface warfare, particularly large coordinated torpedo attacks and night fighting. Nor did they have any ASW advocates in the Imperial Navy, in a large part due the concentration on large scale fleet engagements - offense over defense. The result was they lacked the equipment, organization, doctrine, tactics, and training to conduct strategic ASW.

      By the time they awakened to the size and severity of the threat in late 1943... it was too late. The limited military manpower and industrial capacity they could spare from other equally pressing threats was vastly overmatched by the increasing capability, lethality and raw numbers of Allied submarines they faced.
       

      Finally, the Allies pretty much controlled the seas in the Atlantic and thus could conduct ASW without much concern that they would get into surface battles; Japan did not have that luxury

      That's not quite the whole picture, Allied submarine warfare in the Pacific was largely conducted deep within what was colloquially known as "Empire waters" - where the Japanese unquestioningly ruled both the sea and the air. If they'd had the vessels, they'd have been able to fight with no fear of Allied interference. The luxury the Japanese didn't have was industrial capacity - we could produce a vast war fleet (for the Pacific, mostly) as well as a vast merchant and ASW fleet (for the Atlantic, mostly). They couldn't.

      (Though on reflection, we're probably saying much the same thing, just from different points of view.)

      It's industrial capacity that was the real "secret weapon" that the Allies had in WWII - in both theatres.

    11. Re:Subs as aircraft carriers by Nidi62 · · Score: 2

      The book Enemy at the Gates was written from a collection of first-hand interviews the author did with survivors of the Battle of Stalingrad, both German and Russian, soldiers and civilians. But my favorite is Eastern Inferno, which is the war diary of a man who served as a Panzerjager on the Eastern Front from 41-43.

      --
      The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
    12. Re:Subs as aircraft carriers by smellsofbikes · · Score: 2

      You look at things like the Heinkel 162 and think "yeah, if they had 10,000 of those, they could really have made a difference" -- and they did have a lot of really amazing tech.
      But the thing is, so did the Allies. The Vampire and the Shooting Star would have been comparable to any of the German jet fighters, and were actively being developed and tested.
      I'm no expert, but it looks to me like the only way you can say "oh, man, German tech COULD have won the war" is if everything they tried worked and nothing the Allies tried worked. Even at equal development success, the Allies could still out-tech the Axis because they had more people working on it and more resources -- the final proof of which was Hiroshima/Nagasaki. No matter how good your tech, once the other side has nukes and you don't, and there doesn't seem to be any credible information that the Axis nuclear weapons program was within even five years of developing that tech, one successful high-flying night bomber and everything's over.
      That's why I think the German fetishization of tech saving them was borne of necessity, not of realism.

      --
      Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
  3. Product of the military culture of Japan by Nidi62 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you do any significant amount of reading regard the Japanese in WW2, you notice that there was often an over reliance on trickery, subterfuge, and a focus on the means rather than the end goal. Part of it was desperation borne out of being completely outmatched technologically, but part of it was also a deeply entrenched belief that the fighting spirit of the Japanese soldier would allow him to overcome any hardship, any adversary. Examples such as Guadalcanal, where they landed the 900-man Ichiki Detachment with orders to destroy the 10,000-strong Marine landing force; the countless instances of forsaking strong, pre-prepared defensive positions for banzai charges that killed hundreds or thousands of Japanese at the cost of a handful of Americans; to untrained high school boys with just enough flight training to be able to take off and fly level piloting aircraft with nothing more than an airspeed indicator and a compass trying to sink aircraft carriers. Necessity really is the mother of inventions, but when it is combined with desperation it can spawn some of the craziest ideas, which more often as not result in disaster.

    --
    The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
    1. Re:Product of the military culture of Japan by paiute · · Score: 2

      a deeply entrenched belief that the fighting spirit of the Japanese soldier would allow him to overcome any hardship, any adversary.

      Similar to the belief in the South ca. 1861 that the Confederate forces would win because they were gentlemen.

      --
      If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
    2. Re:Product of the military culture of Japan by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 3, Informative

      "To the Japanese, machines of war--from the heavy machine guns to the tank--are only incidentals in warfare. We Americans realize that the infantry must perform the tasks of actually taking over the ground and holding it, but we use every available machine of war to prevent unnecessary losses. In contrast, the Japanese do not conceive of substituting the shock action of war machines for the shock action of infantry, and they merely strengthen the shock action of troops by the assistance of the machines. The Japanese Army is an army of men, supported by machines of war; ours is an army using machines of war. This is a fine distinction and perhaps not readily understood, but every statement of Japanese military policy bears this out.

      A Japanese who has not tasted defeat will attack with a dash and a magnificent disregard for himself. When he has been set back on his heels, just once, he loses that zip and comes back without confidence and impelled by a morbid feeling toward death that might be worded as "Come on, let's get it over with."

      He has found himself up against things he can't understand: For example, the way we use artillery (the Chinese never used it against him like that, and he doesn't know what to do about it); the fact that we prefer to sit back and stop him with well aimed rifle and machine-gun fire, and not fight it out with the bayonet; the fact that when we meet him with a bayonet we don't break and run; and, above all, the fact that his basic idea--that skill, bravery, and cold steel alone will win the war--is wrong."

      -- "Japanese Warfare as Seen by U.S. Observers" from Intelligence Bulletin, May 1943

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    3. Re:Product of the military culture of Japan by sysrammer · · Score: 2

      Interesting tidbits. On one hand...

      The Japanese bayonet assaults have been reported as a terrifying attack--but all our units on Guadalcanal loved them. The Jap practice of singing his Banzai song for about 5 minutes prior to his assault has simply been a signal for our troops to load a fresh belt of ammunition in the machine guns, put new clips in rifles and BAR's, and to call for the Tommy gunners to get in position.

      On the other hand...

      It would be impossible to overstress the tenacity with which the Japanese clung to their prepared positions (in the Buna area). Ordinary grenades, gun, and mortar fire were completely ineffective. There were many instances where dugouts were grenaded inside, covered with gasoline and burned, and then sealed with dirt and sand, only to yield--two or three days later—Japanese, who came out fighting. One souvenir hunter, entering a dugout that had been sealed for 4 days, was chased out by a Japanese officer armed with a sword.

      --
      His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
    4. Re:Product of the military culture of Japan by Nidi62 · · Score: 2

      On the other hand...

      It would be impossible to overstress the tenacity with which the Japanese clung to their prepared positions (in the Buna area). Ordinary grenades, gun, and mortar fire were completely ineffective. There were many instances where dugouts were grenaded inside, covered with gasoline and burned, and then sealed with dirt and sand, only to yield--two or three days later—Japanese, who came out fighting. One souvenir hunter, entering a dugout that had been sealed for 4 days, was chased out by a Japanese officer armed with a sword.

      There were also numerous cases (I believe they were first encountered starting around Tarawa) where Japanese soldiers would kill themselves almost at the first sight of an American, blowing themselves up with grenades with a loaded rifle sitting next to them, not even trying to engage them. And don't forget, especially in the early days of the war, the officers usually got the soldiers drunk before banzai attacks too.

      --
      The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
  4. The Focke-Achgelis FA 330 by dtmos · · Score: 4, Informative

    I always thought the most practical combination of aircraft and submarine was the FA 330, a rotary-wing kite used by Nazi submariners to get their lookout higher to see farther. It was tethered and unpowered, but it was quick to set up, simple to use, and provided a great benefit to the sub in the last few days before radar.