WWII PLAGUE SUB FOUND

St. Patrick’s Day was just sup­posed to be another day of rou­tine train­ing for under­sea researchers at the University of Hawaii. But then, they found some­thing extra­or­di­nary 870 meters down, off of Barbers Point, Oahu: a mam­moth, World War II-​​era Japanese sub, meant for bio­log­i­cal com­bat.

The sub­ma­rine is from the I-​​400 Sensuikan Toku class of subs, the largest built before the nuclear-​​ballistic-​​missile sub­marines of the 1960s. They were 400 feet long and nearly 40 feet high and could carry a crew of 144. The sub­marines were designed to carry three “fold-​​up” bombers that could quickly be assem­bled…
An I-​​400 and I-​​401 were cap­tured at sea a week after the Japanese sur­ren­dered in 1945. Their mis­sion, which was never com­pleted, report­edly was to use the air­craft to drop rats and insects infected with bubonic plague, cholera, typhus and other dis­eases on U.S. cities.
When the bac­te­ri­o­log­i­cal bombs could not be pre­pared in time, the mis­sion report­edly was changed to bomb the Panama Canal. Both sub­marines were ordered to sail to Pearl Harbor and were delib­er­ately sunk later, partly because Russian sci­en­tists were demand­ing access to them. 

“It is not the first World War II-​​era ‘mon­ster’ that the HURL [Hawaii Undersea Research Lab] sci­en­tists have found,” notes the Honolulu Star-​​Bulletin. “Last year, off Pearl Harbor, they located the wreck of the gigan­tic sea­plane Marshall Mars, one of the largest air­craft built and used as a trans­port plane by the U.S. Navy. Two years ear­lier in the same area, the HURL crew also found the wreck­age of a Japanese midget sub that was sunk on Dec. 7, 1941.” (via Boing Boing)

March 26th, 2005 | Retro-Futuro, Ships and Subs | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.