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Searchers fail
to locate Japanese
midget sub

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By Burl Burlingame
Star-Bulletin

The whereabouts of the submarine that began the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 will remain unsolved for a while longer.

A search by the University of Hawaii's Undersea Research Laboratory for an Imperial Japanese "midget" submarine sunk off the mouth of Pearl Harbor has run out of time.

The last search window available during this diving season was Sunday, when the UH's Pisces deep-diving submarines and their Ka'imikai-O-Kanaloa mother vessel were chartered by National Geographic for one last look around.

Nothing turned up.

"The assumption that the submarine sank straight down after being depth-charged may be flawed," said Alexander Malahoff, director of the Undersea Research Laboratory.

"It could have glided underwater for some distance, or it might have broken up and the pieces are scattered among the rocks down there."

Over the last couple of weeks, UH scientists crisscrossed the channel leading into the harbor and found piles of wreckage, explosive shells, coffee cups and other military debris. They had hoped to find the historically significant sub. Instead, they found the center section of a midget submarine captured on Okinawa and apparently dumped by the Navy after the war.

The deep-diving submarines and Ka'imikai-O-Kanaloa left yesterday for geophysical research north of Hawaii.