As the sun came up over the placid waters of the Pacific Ocean, the languid tropical morning seemed like any other Sunday in paradise. Unsuspecting servicemen stationed in Hawaii started to stir, never dreaming that hundreds of Japanese attack planes were streaking toward them for a surprise assault that would change history.

When the first enemy bombs rained down on Wheeler Airfield, virtually no one realized that the first shots of the battle had already been fired, more than an hour earlier, when the patrolling USS Ward attacked a Japanese midget submarine stealing in toward Pearl Harbor.

The role played by the Japanese submarines is a little-known chapter in a story that is still being written. National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence, underwater explorer Dr Robert Ballard and historian Dr Stephen Ambrose, offer contemporary views on the submarines from both the US and Japanese perspectives.

Dr Ballard, best known for his underwater discoveries of the Titanic and the Bismarck, leads a two-week National Geographic expedition to search for the remains of the fateful midget submarine that could have changed the course of history. Using cutting-edge underwater technology, Ballard sets off with a crew that includes two sailors who were aboard the USS Ward when it fired on the midget sub, and Kichiji Dewa, who was part of the Japanese submarine task force during the attack. The veterans offer eyewitness accounts of the incident from both the American and Japanese viewpoints.

The mission of the five midget submarines was to sneak into the harbor and wait for the air raid. Using their two torpedoes, they would to fire at any large US ship left afloat. The midgets would then try to escape the harbor and rendezvous with their "mother" submarines back out at sea.

"There was no sense of impending tragedy," says Dewa in the film. "Everyone felt we were simply carrying out our duty…though I felt [the submariners] might never make it back."

Indeed, not one of the midget submarines returned to the Japanese fleet. Over the years, three have been found in the waters off of Oahu, but despite repeated attempts, no trace of the remaining two has ever been discovered -- including the sub that was fired upon by the USS Ward. "I find it incredibly ironic that the attack and sinking of this Japanese submarine an hour before the planes arrived did not alert us," says Ballard in the film. The fate of that submarine remains one of the lingering mysteries of the Pearl Harbor attack.

"There were people in the Japanese high command who objected strongly to [using the midget submarines]," notes historian Ambrose. "That it’s going to tip off the Americans that an attack is coming, and it’s going to put the Americans up in general quarters all across Pearl Harbor."

In fact, the action of the USS Ward was the second event outlined in the film that might have sounded the alarm. The first incident also involved a possible midget submarine sighting by the Americans. About four hours before the Japanese planes reached Oahu, a US officer spotted a periscope poking out of the water, 50 yards from the bow of a minesweeper, the USS Condor. The USS Ward raced to investigate, but found nothing. The suspicious contact slipped away, and so did the first American opportunity to detect the Japanese attackers.

Even though they nearly ruined the surprise attack, the role played by the midget submarines might have remained a mystery had it not been for a curious object that washed ashore on Oahu on the morning of December 8,1941. It was the midget submarine I-24tou. Its disoriented young skipper was captured before he could kill himself, becoming America’s first prisoner of war.

Although historians have traditionally minimized the impact of the midget submarines on the surprise raid, the program reveals recent photo analysis that contradicts the conventional view. The photo, taken from a Japanese airplane just as the battle began, shows what appears to be a small submarine surfaced in the harbor and the wakes of its torpedoes hurtling toward Battleship Row.

Dewa remembers a lone radio message crackling through the night back to the Japanese fleet, 12 hours after the attack began: "Successful surprise attack." The message was from one of the midget submarines, and it was the last contact from any of them. "The commander told me ‘if I come back, I’ll come with a wolf,’ as they say in Japan, ‘and put the mother sub in danger,’" remembers Dewa. "So I don’t think they planned to return even if they had succeeded."

 

Copyrights: Naval Historical Centre | Tria Thalman | National Archives