Thursday, January 7, 2010

Killer Subs in Pearl Harbor on Nova, January 5, 2010

I watched with great interest the PBS Nova series broadcast on January 5, 2010 titled "Killer Subs in Pearl Harbor". I sent these comments in via the feedback link on the PBS Web site:
Near the end of the broadcast the narrator comments that the 1944 West Loch disaster in Pearl Harbor had been shrouded in secrecy until recently. This is incorrect as a 1989 (2nd ed., 1990) publication from the U.S. National Park Service titled Submerged Cultural Resources Study: USS Arizona Memorial and Pearl Harbor National Historic Landmark describe this event (p. 70-73).

I also found it odd that no one commented on the fact that it the odds of striking the Arizona with a torpedo from a midget submarine firing broadside were next to impossible since there was another vessel moored in front of her.

I also wondered what year the fifth midget submarine had been located since that fact was never stated during the program.

I discovered the answer to my last comment myself. According to this Los Angeles Times story, "Pearl Harbor mini-submarine mystery solved?",

The three pieces of the sub were found during routine test dives between 1994 and 2001 by Terry Kerby, chief pilot of the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory's submersibles Pisces IV and Pisces V. ... Stephenson got involved in 2007 because he was looking for the fifth Japanese mini-sub.


While the Nova program laid out a convincing case that a midget submarine fired its torpedoes and may have sunk one or two battleships, this is far from the overly dramatic claim that the midget submarines played a major role in the attack. Four of them were either sunk or captured and the fifth was scuttled in the West Loch of Pearl Harbor, which was subsequently dredged after the 1944 landing craft explosion disaster, and the sub's remains redeposited along with the wrecks of what was being transported on the destroyed landing crafts outside Pearl Harbor.

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