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Down scope! A mile or so off Pearl Harbor, and straight down, is a prized and still-mysterious artifact, a Japanese "midget" submarine sunk in the first American firefight of the Second World War.
University of Hawaii researchers
Subs began Pearl attack
begin a high-tech search near
Oahu for a missing World
War II submarineBy Burl Burlingame
Star-BulletinThis week, a team from the University of Hawaii began searching for it.
The waters outside Pearl Harbor were, for a long time, a dumping ground for the military. That truck or airplane hit the end of its usefulness? Roll it over the side of a barge. Those artillery shells leaking high explosive? Pitch 'em into the water. Muck from the bottom of Pearl Harbor? Dump it. Too many coffee cups? Lost at sea, sir.
It's a museum down there, a thousand feet down, a sunless, muddy deep-freeze for artifacts, covered by the vast, glittering ocean.There are U.S. Navy flying boats from the 1920s, the national insignia still faintly visible on shiny aluminum fuselages. Amphibious landing craft, with fish playing hide-and-seek in the corroding hulls. A pile of gigantic artillery shells, so big they could only have been dumped from a battleship.
Even snub-nosed Mack and Ford trucks, the wooden beds long gone but the engines, radiators, spoked wheels and chassis still identifiable. A mountain of porcelain military-issue coffee cups, thousands of them, spilling out of a muddy mound dredged up from Pearl Harbor, the evidence of a long-ago procurement snafu, perhaps.
Pisces submarine pilot Terry Kerby and other members of the University of Hawaii's Undersea Research Lab -- known as HURL -- like the Pearl Harbor channel dump sites for training submarine crews precisely because of the hazards and surprises down there.
HURL, along with Woods Hole in Massachusetts, is the primary oceanographic research center in the United States. Its primary mission is investigating the biology and geology of the ocean floor.Their craft are the yellow and orange Pisces IV and Pisces V deep-diving submarines, carried by support vessel Ka'imikai-o-Kanaloa. Like a big Tonka Toy, the support ship picks up the submarines with a crane and deposits them in the ocean, and snags them later when the mission is completed.
In the ship's Mission Control room, the relative positions of both underwater craft are monitored by a computer linked to GPS satellites. A five-second sonar transponder -- sounding like a Pong game -- "interrogates" the submarines' positions, giving direction, bearing and depth.
Kirby and HURL project leader Alexander Malahoff have pored over historical records and decided that the likeliest spot for the missing midget is about a mile and a half south of the airport's reef runway.
They're anxious to try out an improved sonar array on the Pisces V that gives them increased resolution.
"We can spot a Folger's coffee can out there with this thing," said Kerby.
It's also the beginning of HURL's undersea season, as the oceans are relatively quiet until December. Even a training mission like this costs $18,000 a day.
After two days of searching this week, however, the midget submarine they were looking for remains missing. Conditions at the bottom don't help. It's black -- no light filters this far down. The bottom is silty and whirls muddily at slight disturbances, obscuring vision.
Carbonite, gigantic coral blocks remaining from a drowned reef, litter the bottom like hulking elephants, with dunes of sand and mud etched around them like the raked sand in a Japanese rock garden. The carbonite has flattened sides, giving sonar signatures very much like large metallic objects.
"If the midget submarine were nestled against one of those carbonite towers, you'd never see it on sonar," explained Kerby. So they have to rely on their eyes."The sonar gives us a 50-meter swath, so we travel along it, and dash over to look at likely targets," explained Malahoff. Like mowing a lawn, the explored swaths will eventually add up to a composite picture of what's on the bottom, and the crew carefully notes the position of each artifact and carbonite cluster.
Imagine you're crawling along in a pitch-black gymnasium, trying to find a ping-pong ball with a penlight that can only be pointed straight down, creating a narrow picture. All you can really confirm is that the target is not where you are.
"The literal needle in a haystack," said Chief Engineer Dan Greeson.
"But the submarine's out there somewhere," said Malahoff. "It's just a matter of time before we find it. Systematically and scientifically."
What did turn up this week were the coffee cups. And a Cessna 150, abandoned during a night ditching in the early '80s. And the abandoned artillery shells.
And also -- perversely -- half of a Japanese midget submarine for which there is no record.
Ever since the pristine tail section of a midget submarine was discovered in the area in 1992, historians have suspected that the Navy dumped examples of Japanese booty after the war and neglected to keep records. Tuesday the HURL team discovered the mid-section of a midget submarine, including the conning tower and periscope. It is the same kind of midget submarine used in the Pearl Harbor attack.
However, the rear section of the hull is blown open like a ripped paper bag, evidence that the Japanese used a scuttling charge to render the craft useless.
The front end has a hole jack-hammered into it, and a length of thick hawser tied through it. It has the look of a piece of scrap metal that was yanked off a barge, war booty that became war trash after VJ-Day.
It would have come from Okinawa, the Philippines ... even from the Pearl Harbor attack but was kept secret? The midget is photographed and the Pisces moves on.
Despite the efforts of one of the world's best deep-sea exploration teams, the mystery of the missing midget submarine has not been solved -- it has grown deeper.
The "consecrated ground" sites where the first shots were fired on American battlefields have a special resonance. Attack on Pearl Harbor
began from the deepAn early-morning attack by
Japanese midget subs
preceded the air assaultBy Burl Burlingame
Star-BuletinFor the American Revolution, it's the running battle at Lexington and Concord. For the Civil War, it's the shelling of Fort Sumter.
For World War II, it's a patch of deep, blue ocean just southeast of the entrance to Pearl Harbor.
In the early morning hours of Dec. 7, 1941, an hour prior to the Imperial Japanese air assault on the U.S. fleet, the destroyer USS Ward, a Navy patrol aircraft and a top-secret Japanese submarine tangled. The Americans won.
Largely overlooked in the hurricane of destruction that morning is the underwater element of the Japanese attack -- an effort to ring Oahu with a fleet of submarines and pick off American warships. Included in this "Advance Force" were five test-model submarines, 80 feet long and capable of 20-knot bursts of speed underwater. They were designed to race toward warships in the open ocean and fire weapons, like underwater torpedo bombers.
But at Pearl Harbor, the subs were asked to stealthily enter the harbor and lie quietly until the attack began, a task for which they were poorly designed.
The Americans dubbed these craft "midget" submarines, although they were relatively large. Each carried two crew members and two torpedoes. They were carried close to the harbor entrance on the backs of larger submarines and cut loose on the night of Dec. 6.
At dawn on Dec. 7, a midget submarine was observed attempting to follow the cargo ship Antares past the anti-torpedo nets that closed off the harbor entrance.
Adm. Husband Kimmel, who predicted that hostilities between Japan and the U.S. would begin with submarine attacks, had drilled his crew relentlessly on the skills of anti-submarine warfare. A Navy PBY patrol bomber and the Ward -- the destroyer assigned that day to patrol the harbor entrance -- immediately bore down on the tiny periscope.
The PBY dropped smoke pots to mark the location, and, at the controls, pilot Ens. William Tanner wondered if they were seeing some new sort of secret weapon. The forward gun of the Ward fired once at the submarine and missed, and as it swept by the target, the gun on the starboard side of the ship fired another round, knocking a hole in the submarine's conning tower.
The Ward rolled four depth charges off its stern and the submarine drifted into them. The explosions lifted the craft out of the water and it disappeared in the shredded water.
The Ward's skipper, Lt. William Outerbridge, radioed ashore that they had fired upon and sunk a hostile submarine in the exclusion zone. While Adm. Kimmel was seeking confirmation of this startling news, airplanes came screaming down on Pearl Harbor.
In addition to the five midget submarines, the Japanese employed 27 full-sized ocean-going submarines. These lurked in Hawaiian waters for another month, shooting up the neighbor islands, sinking shipping vessels and knocking the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga out of commission during the most critical period of the war.
Some of the submarines went on to the West Coast and terrorized shipping there for several weeks and shelled targets ashore.
Most of the Ward's crew were naval reservists from St. Paul, Minn., and the gun that sank the midget submarine off Pearl Harbor is today a "First Shot" memorial in that city.
At Pearl Harbor, where the battle actually occurred, there is no public commemorative marker to tell the story of how quick-thinking Navy destroyermen battled the best submarine weapons in the Imperial Navy's arsenal.
