Rodney

I'd read about them in the past. They also were known to carry one-man suicide subs to launch against Allied ships. One of them nailed the U.S.S. Indianapolis, the heavy cruiser that carried the a-bombs out to the Pacific, on its way _back_ from the Marianas.

Tacticially, it was probably sounder to have a lot of small submarines, like the Germans, than to have a few big ones. The Japanese subs did have the aerial capability and could carry minisubs, but in the end were less effective against shipping than the German or American subs -- because there were relatively few of them.

And yes, the Japanese did have a yen (as it were) for weird weapons, like the "Baka" suicide rocket plane, the balloon bombs, and more. The Japanese were also very interested in developing death rays during WWII, and spent more time on that than on atomic research. Very Ming-the-Merciless-ish. On the other hand, what they were really doing was early research on EM anti-personnel weapons, which only now are coming into use. So in some ways they weren't as much weird as early.

On the other hand, the U.S. had a program to try to use hordess of trained bats to carry incendiary bombs to Japanese cities -- I'm not kidding. Apparently the idea worked, but the program was scuttled some time after the bats essentially burned an air force base to the ground. And I'm not kidding about any of this.

And the British experimented with this weird device called the Grand Panjandrum, a giant two-wheeled device powered by rockets in the wheel rims. It was supposed to roll up enemy beaches into barbed wire or other barriers and then explode. That one didn't work out either, and if you imagine British soldiers fleeing in panick from a large, explosive, flaming wheeled device running out of control at 40 mph, you can see why.