WW2 Secret Japanese Underwater Aircraftcarrier!
 

I hope weapons is the best place for this post. I found this just amazing!

On Thursday March 17th during a training exercise on a new navigation system, the Hawai‘i Undersea Research Lab (HURL) discovered the wreck of the Japanese World War II submarine I-401 sunk during target practice in 1946. The wreck of the I-401 was found using the new track Link 5000 HA navigation system provided by NOAA's Ocean Exploration Program. The wreck was found in 870m of water off Barbers Point, Oahu. The I-401 was one of 3 aircraft carrying submarine built in 1944. These were the largest diesel electric submarines ever built comparable in size to the largest present day nuclear submarines. They were 20 years ahead of their time.

http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/HURL/I-401.html

and more at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-400_class_submarine

and

http://www.pacerfarm.org/i-400/


Evidentally they where using one plane versions in the beginning of the war with great success.

I consider myself a bit of a WW2 buff and this info comes as a complete surprise!

I'd swear I saw mention of them on History channel some 10yrs ago. ?? Very interesting in any case.

They did have something of a Rube Goldberg secret weapons program, didn't they? The balloon bombing of the Pacific NW always reminds me of a disturbed uncle with too much time on his hands. :)

Actually, there was a fair craze for lumbering subs before, during, & immediately after the war. Tactically though they were failures.

French Surcouf

Soviet Project 621 & 622

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.

Actually, they were intended to be used to attack and disable the locks of the Panama Canal.


And, the U.S. bat project was ended by another project that was being developed at the same time. The Atom Bomb.

How did the planes return to the submarine, where did they land?

nothing to say

It said in the article that the pilots were not expected to survive.

It looked as though the planes had pontoons however, which would allow them to land and taxi back into the submarine.