Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.

Lost Japanese
Pearl Harbor ‘midget’
sub remains elusive

---

By Burl Burlingame
Star-Bulletin

Even Titanic discoverer Robert Ballard and National Geographic can't find the missing Japanese "midget" submarine supposedly sunk near Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

Ballard, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, quietly left Honolulu last weekend after spending two weeks searching for the long-lost Imperial Navy submarine.

"They found nothing, nothing except what we had already 'discovered' ourselves," said Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory Director Alexander Malahoff.

The submarine was attacked by the destroyer USS Ward in the first shots fired in the Pacific war.

Preparing for a prime-time documentary, Ballard and crew kept the search quiet, using their own robotic remote-operated vehicles. The devices were launched from a 100-foot work boat rented from American Marine. These utility craft have A-frame and knuckle cranes capable of lifting machinery weighing several tons. The charter ran Nov. 2-16.

The National Geographic crew was well organized and knew exactly where to go, said an American Marine spokesman. They just didn't find what they were looking for.

Late last week, Ballard chartered Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory's deep-diving Pisces submarine to film footage of the Japanese submarine section the University of Hawaii lab discovered a couple of months ago.

"They didn't ask for any local help or expertise, and they didn't get any," said Malahoff. "Otherwise, we would have told them that area had already been searched, and by sonar systems better than they had with them."

The Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory will return to the area for future test dives, likely next summer.