Ninety minutes before Japanese warplanes set America’s Pacific stronghold ablaze, a Navy destroyer at Pearl Harbor opened fire on an early arriving attacker.
The USS Ward sank one of the five mini-submarines that were part of the attack force on Dec. 7, 1941.
Members of that gun crew “fired the first shot of the Pacific war,” maritime archaeologist James Delgado said.
Today, on the 75th anniversary of the attack, the former Vancouver resident will join a webcast exploration of that chapter of World War II history.
Delgado, the federal director of maritime heritage, is part of a team that will live-stream dives to two mini-submarine wreck sites on the ocean floor.
Delgado and the other scientists will be aboard the research vessel Okeanos Explorer as a remotely operated underwater vehicle visits the two wreck sites. The submersible’s morning dive will be 1,100 feet down to the wreck of the submarine sunk by the USS Ward as it tried to follow a U.S. ship into the harbor.
“I’ll be seeing the site again,” said Delgado — although not as up-close as his previous view. “I was there with the University of Hawaii in one of their research subs.”
This time, however, Delgado and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration team can share the view with a global audience in real time.
Rare opportunity
“For the first time, using a robotic system, we share it with a telepresence,” Delgado said. “I have dived and seen many wrecks. If you’re using scuba, you can nudge a colleague, write on a slate, or use sign language.”
“On a telepresence-enabled vessel, like Okeanos Explorer, we not only interact with other scientists, but with the public,” Delgado said. “It’s the first opportunity for the public to see these subs live.”
After recovering the submersible, the NOAA research ship will head for the second wreck site, where they will live-stream the afternoon dive.
That submarine was unaccounted for on Dec. 7, 1941. It was discovered in shallow water off the entrance to Pearl Harbor in 1951 — apparently scuttled by its two-man crew. It was raised by the U.S. Navy, taken out to sea and dumped in 1,500 feet of water. The University of Hawaii’s Undersea Research Laboratory rediscovered the sub, which is in three pieces, in 1992.
Only one of the Japanese mini-submarines made it into the harbor, and it was quickly sunk during the attack. The Navy raised it a couple of weeks later.
“They sent in a slightly built intelligence officer. He pushed the bodies of the crew out of the way, got their papers and got their map,” Delgado said.
Another mini-sub washed ashore on Dec. 8; its surviving crew member was captured and the vessel actually wound up helping the U.S. war effort.
Sub sold bonds
“It toured the country on war bond drive,” Delgado said. “It went to 2,000 cities. It sold a lot of war bonds.”
The mini-sub is on display at the National Museum of the Pacific War in Texas.
The fifth submarine, which also went missing during the attack, was found near the entrance to Pearl Harbor in 1960. The Navy removed its bow, still armed with its two 18-foot-long torpedoes, and dumped that section at sea.
The rest of the submarine was returned to Japan and is on display at a former naval academy.
Although they were small enough to be piggybacked to Pearl Harbor on full-sized Japanese submarines, the mini-subs weren’t exactly tiny. They were about 78 feet long, with a maximum height of almost 10 feet from the keel to the top of the conning tower.
They were not suicide weapons, Delgado said, although the Japanese used that tactic later in the war. The crewmen were highly trained, and Japanese naval officials were not about to send them on one-way missions.
And they were not stealth weapons, either, even though Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack.
Some Japanese military planners feared the mini-subs “would give away the surprise if they tried to get into the harbor,” Delgado said. “And they did.”
But even though U.S. naval vessels and patrol aircraft sounded the alarm, “given the communications of the time and having to check and counter check, the hour warning in advance was insufficient,” Delgado said.
