The Submarines
Type A Ko-hyoteki
By SAMIR S. PATEL
Monday, December 12, 2016
Pearl Harbor Midget Submarine
(U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command)
A Japanese midget submarine washes up on the east side of Oahu the morning after the attack. Five were used in the offensive.
The first shot of the Pacific War was not fired from a Japanese fighter, but from an American destroyer, more than an hour before the attack began. At 5:45 a.m., the cargo ship USS Antares spotted an object that might have been a submarine in the Defensive Sea Area outside Pearl Harbor. The destroyer USS Ward fired on it twice around 6:37 a.m. The second shot found its mark, and the object sank beneath Ward. On board this secret Japanese submarine, two young operators became the first casualties of the Pacific War.
Sub sightings continued throughout the attack, on both sides of the harbor entrance and even within it, where at around 8:30 a.m. the destroyer USS Monaghan rammed and sank another. Early the next morning, a small sub and a surviving crewman, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, washed ashore on the east side of Oahu. Sakamaki became America’s first prisoner of war, and the Navy got a close look at what they had been firing at.
http://www.archaeology.org/issues/240-1701/features/5128-the-submarines
