Star Bulletin: UH team locates huge Japanese sub
During test dives Thursday, the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory's Pisces submarines found the remains of the Imperial Japanese Navy's I-401 submarine, a gigantic underwater aircraft carrier built to bomb the Panama Canal. "We thought it was rocks at first, it was so huge," said Pisces pilot Terry Kerby. "But the sides of it kept going up and up and up, three and four stories tall. It's a leviathan down there, a monster."...I-400, I-401 and I-14 were ordered to sail to Pearl Harbor in late 1945 with an American prize crew, who smuggled Japanese war souvenirs in the aircraft hangars. Also along to be evaluated were I-201 and I-203, two top-secret Imperial Navy submarines that were twice as fast as American designs. The submarines were greeted with ceremonial brass bands in early 1946, but within a few months it was decided to scuttle the Japanese designs, partly because Russians scientists were demanding access to them. On May 31, 1946, I-401 and the other four top-secret Japanese submarines were sunk by torpedoes from the American submarine USS Cabezon. I-401 was last seen sinking by the stern, vanishing until last week.
