Researchers said they found a Japanese midget submarine sunk more than an hour before the attack on Pearl Harbour.
The two-man submarine was discovered a few miles from Pearl Harbour by research craft making test dives, said John Wiltshire, associate director of the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory, which found the submarine under about 366 metres of water.
The sub was sunk by a Navy destroyer on December 7, 1941.
”It’s the shot that started World War II between the Americans and the Japanese,” Wiltshire said on Wednesday.
The sub is one of five that attempted to attack Pearl Harbour. Three have been previously accounted for; one is still missing.
Wiltshire said the crew is certain that this sub is the one sunk by the destroyer USS Ward because of a bullet hole in the conning tower and because it still has both torpedoes. The sub still missing had fired both of its weapons.
The submarines’ entry into the harbour was followed by the Sunday morning attack by Japanese planes that lasted two hours and left 21 US ships heavily damaged, 323 aircraft damaged or destroyed, 2 390 people dead and 1 178 other wounded.
The Japanese sub was discovered by two University of Hawaii research submersibles on a test and training dive in an area Wiltshire described as an underwater military junkyard.
”The thing is quite difficult to find because of all the massive amounts of junk out in the area, and we were simply fortunate because we’ve run our test and training dives through here and know where a lot of the junk is,” Wiltshire said.
The submarine was the focus of a National Geographic expedition in 2000. A team of deep-water researchers led by undersea explorer Robert Ballard spent 10 days searching for the Japanese sub, using remotely operated imaging vehicles.
Ballard is best known for finding the remains of the Titanic, Bismarck and Yorktown, along with the recent discovery of PT-109, the torpedo boat commanded by John F. Kennedy during World War II and sunk near the Solomon Islands. – Sapa-AP