Authors: John Geoghegan
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #History
Four days later nine more Japanese subs were scuttled, leaving only a handful of Sixth Fleet subs at Pearl Harbor. The
I-14
was next. On May 28, 1946, she was taken eight miles off shore and used to test the newly developed Mark 10-3 exploder. The USS
Bugara
(SS 331) did the honors. Three days later the
I-401
followed. At 10:51 on the morning of May 31, the USS
Cabezon
(SS 334) fired two torpedoes. Seven minutes later Nambu’s sub was gone.
27
On June 4 it was the
I-400
’s turn. The newly commissioned USS
Trumpetfish
(SS 425) hosted distinguished guests for the fireworks, including Lockwood’s replacement and a medal of honor winner. As a PBY Catalina Flying Boat filmed the destruction, the
Trumpetfish
fired three Mark 18-2 torpedoes. One torpedo prematured, the other two struck in a sensational eruption of metal, foam, and fury. The
I-400
, the last of the great underwater aircraft carriers and the final Japanese submarine sunk by the United States during World War II, went down by the stern.
28
The Russians filed a protest, but it was too late. The
Sen-toku
subs were already on the bottom. A headline in
The New York Times
read, “U.S. Said to Sink Four Japanese Subs to Balk Booty Bid.” A U.S. naval official was quoted as saying, “Russia strongly disapproved the sinkings and lodged a protest.”
29
The United States wasn’t listening though—the cold war had begun.
T
HE OPERATIONS CENTER FOR THE
H
AWAII
U
NDERSEA
R
ESEARCH
Laboratory is located on Makai Pier, on the southeast end of Oahu. The pier is off the beaten track for most tourists. Wedged between the Pacific Ocean, Route 72, and a steep set of cliffs, its entrance is blocked by a chain-link fence. A shed in its middle, three stories high, is where the lab’s two deep-diving submersibles,
Pisces IV
and
V
, can be found.
Once you get past the hilarious acronym, HURL is a place where serious science is conducted. Funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Underwater Research Program and overseen by the University of Hawaii, HURL has a reputation in the world of submersibles as being the scrappy underdog. It doesn’t have the budget or staff of a Woods Hole, but what it lacks in funding, HURL makes up for in ingenuity and moxie.
The world of deep-diving submersibles is an elite and expensive club. France has the
Nautile;
Russia has the
Mir 1
and
2;
Japan has the
Shinkai;
China has the
Jiaolong;
and the United States has
Alvin
. Though the
Pisces IV
and
V
are the “shallowest” members of the club, with an operating depth of only 6,500 feet, they still accomplish a lot.
Because of budgetary constraints, HURL can’t spend millions training its submersible pilots on an expensive simulator. Instead, they use the
Pisces
manipulator arms to practice picking up coffee cups off the ocean bottom. The U.S. Navy dumped them there by the thousands at the end of World War II and every desk at HURL’s operation center boasts at least one of these ceramic mugs as a pencil holder. The cup on the desk of Terry Kerby, HURL’s operations director, is stamped January 1943.
Since HURL was founded in 1981, it has made a name for itself not only by exploring the hydrothermal vents near underwater volcanoes but by finding important historical artifacts, like two of Ariizumi’s previously unaccounted for midget subs. Kerby has been involved with HURL operations since their beginning. Blond, blue-eyed, and remarkably fit, he looks at least ten years younger than his age, which is what you’d expect for a man who swims two miles in the ocean every day. Wearing a dark T-shirt and khaki shorts, he is both tan and casual as he explains some of HURL’s outsize discoveries.
Kerby was prompted to look for Ariizumi’s midget subs by the fiftieth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Up until 1991, only three of Ariizumi’s five type-A midgets had been accounted for. One washed ashore shortly after the attack and was captured; one penetrated the harbor, was sunk, then raised weeks later, only to be used for landfill with its crew still inside; one was discovered off Oahu in the 1960s; and one was presumed sunk by the USS
Ward
(DD-139) but never found. The location of the fifth and final midget sub was a mystery.
Kerby couldn’t use science assets to go “treasure hunting” though. It cost upward of $40,000 a day to operate the submersibles, so any search for Ariizumi’s midget subs had to come as a by-product of a preexisting operation. Maritime artifacts were a secondary consideration.
Fortunately, HURL conducts test dives off Oahu at the beginning of each season to review safety protocols and ensure that each submersible is functioning properly. In August 2002 Kerby bested Dr. Robert Ballard, discoverer of the
Titanic
, when he found Ariizumi’s fourth midget sub. Ballard had conducted his own search for the midget in 2000 but came up empty-handed. After ten years of looking, Kerby found the midget right where the
Ward
had sunk her, four miles south of Pearl Harbor, in 1,200 feet of water. The sub was remarkably well preserved despite the hole in her sail. Since her crew had the dubious distinction of becoming the Pacific War’s first casualties, Kerby left the sub undisturbed.
Kerby and Ballard are more colleagues than competitors. The
two men have worked together, so it’s hardly a rivalry. Still, HURL’s find generated so much positive publicity that the National Park Service and NOAA’s National Marine Sanctuaries encouraged them to explore further. As a result, Kerby set his sights on finding the fifth and final midget. He’d discovered her tail section in 1992. Subsequently he found two more sections, including the midget’s bow.
It wasn’t clear how the midget came to its final resting place or how it ended up in three neatly sundered pieces. Working with experts hired for a
NOVA
documentary, Kerby deduced that the sub had gotten lost either entering Pearl Harbor or trying to escape. When she ended up in the West Loch, her crew probably settled on the bottom, detonated the sub’s self-destruct charge, and disappeared into history.
The U.S. Navy accidentally rediscovered the midget while cleaning up after an explosion in May 1944. The midget was dredged up along with other debris, cut into sections, and dumped at sea without anyone realizing what they’d found. It was only when Kerby discovered all three sections that the puzzle came together.
There’s a lot of adventure in Kerby’s background. He spent four and a half years in the Coast Guard, where he served on a cutter in Alaska and trained as a navigator. “It was an exciting time,” Kerby says, “Alaska has the worst the sea has to offer.”
After leaving the Coast Guard, he attended the Coastal School of Deep Sea Diving in Oakland, California, eventually becoming a salvage diver. After working in the San Francisco Bay Area, he journeyed to Hawaii in 1976.
“I drove by the Makai pier one day and saw them offloading a submersible,” Kerby recalls. “I’d always been fascinated by ocean exploration. I had the qualifications that the company, Deep Water Exploration, were looking for, so they hired me. That’s when I started working with the
Star II
.”
Kerby was eager to learn about submersibles. In 1980, he was hired to pilot one for the James Bond movie
For Your Eyes Only
. The next year he was contacted by HURL.
HURL’s two submersibles were built by International Hydrodynamics in Vancouver; the
Pisces IV
in 1972 and the
Pisces V
in
1973. The core of
Pisces V
is a command sphere made of high-end steel, seven feet in diameter, with room for a pilot and two observers. The pilot kneels in the middle of the floor while operating its propulsion, ballast, and other systems. The two observers lie on vinyl-covered benches on either side of the pilot. The sphere is attached to a steel frame that contains batteries, hydraulics, ballast, and propulsion systems. There are also three forward-looking viewports made of acrylic. The centermost viewport is for the pilot; each observer gets his own 14-inch-wide window as well.
Kerby describes both
Pisces
, which are nearly identical, as workhorses—utility players that can adapt to a variety of needs. It might be challenging to fly them, but Kerby appreciates their flexibility. “They can spin like a top,” he says enthusiastically—something most people are happy to take his word for.
Each submersible weighs 13 tons and is 20 feet long, its most fascinating feature being its manipulator arms. Configured with parallel jaws, the manipulators collect samples off the bottom, which are then deposited in a steel basket attached to the sub’s undercarriage. Both submersibles carry a battery of lights to illuminate the darkness underwater and two high-definition cameras to record what they see. Both subs are also self-propelled, meaning there is no umbilical cord tethering them to their mother ship. The
Pisces IV
was bought from the Canadian Navy in 1999 for $500,000, even though it cost $4 million to build. It’s a bargain Kerby is proud of.
Except for a brief leave of absence to teach Ed Harris underwater dive technique for James Cameron’s
The Abyss
, Kerby has spent 30 years at HURL. He’s not only its director of operations but its chief submersible pilot as well. Part of HURL’s research program is to study the susceptibility of coastal zones to pollution, but in March 2005 Kerby set their sights on another discovery: finding the
I-400
subs.
There’d been one previous attempt to find a
Sen-toku
sub. In April 2004 William Bryant, an oceanography professor at Texas A&M, launched an unsuccessful search for the
I-402
in collaboration with The Discovery Channel. Though he found 12 of the 24
submarines sunk off Japan during Operation Road’s End, he did not find the
I-402
.
Once again cost was a concern. Kerby and his team hoped to find at least one of Ariizumi’s subs while breaking in a new NOAA-funded navigation system. But three days of test dives is not a lot of time. A submarine can plane a good distance after being torpedoed, and U.S. Navy coordinates don’t necessarily reflect where the
Sen-toku
subs came to rest. There was no guarantee Kerby would find anything.
The ocean bottom around Pearl Harbor has historically been a dumping ground for the U.S. military. Tanks, amphibious assault vehicles, trucks, ships, piers, landing craft, airplanes, and aircraft parts have been piling up for decades, making it hard for sonar to identify specific targets. The sea floor is also littered with unexploded ordnance, including Hedgehog depth charges and chemical explosives dumped by the army. You have to be careful what you approach.
The first two days of dive operations did not go well, with sonar giving many false positives.
“We used up a lot of our test dives chasing down rock formations,” Kerby recalls. “A limestone reef with an outcropping on top can look a lot like a giant submarine on sonar.”
On March 17, the last day of test dives, Kerby and pilot-in-training Colin Wollerman conducted emergency tracking exercises in the
Pisces IV
. Tracking exercises are a safety protocol done to test a pilot’s ability to find her hypothetically stranded sister sub, in this case, the
Pisces V
. When the
Pisces V
settled on the ocean floor, pilot Max Cremer turned off her lights while pilot-in-training Steve Price activated the 27 kHz pinger that Kerby would use to locate them. The pinging sounds a lot like a cardio monitor, only faster. If the danger of dying at 6,000 feet doesn’t focus your attention, the sound of a heart monitor will. At maximum dive depth, the
Pisces
experience 3,000 pounds of pressure per square inch—a fact that’s enough to concentrate even the most distracted passenger.
Once tracking exercises were finished, Kerby worked his way along the ocean floor. The bottom off Barber’s Point has occasional
rock formations but otherwise is featureless. At 2,600 feet, the water is also silty with plankton. The submersibles’ headlights make it look like you’re driving through a snowstorm.
Depending on dive conditions, Kerby can see up to 20 feet underwater with the lights on. Sonar can see farther, in some cases as much as several hundred feet. Still, the
I-400
subs are such large targets, Kerby believed sonar would pick them up at 300.
Looking for wrecks is a dangerous business. Kerby knows it and is especially careful. The biggest danger is coming in too low and getting snagged on something. The current can also be a problem, especially if it changes on you. Kerby insists on approaching wrecks from downstream. That way if anything goes wrong, the current pushes you away from the wreck.
You can almost feel your brain struggling to make sense of the images on the monitor as Kerby searches for the
I-400
. The underwater hues of gray, dark blue, and green are so limited, they don’t help much. It’s not until Kerby says “We have it in sight!” that you even know he’s found something.
Once pattern recognition kicks in, the distinctive shape of a submarine lying on its side begins to emerge. But it’s not clear which sub he’s found. Getting situated on a wreck in what appears to be the dead of night, especially when you don’t know what shape it’s in, is intimidating. Any number of objects, including floating cables, bent piping, and twisted hull plating, are waiting to grab you. Once a wreck is located, the lead submersible comes in, sits on the bottom, and conducts a sonar survey to outline the perimeter. Meanwhile the second submersible waits as backup in case anything goes wrong.
It’s important to get a sense of a wreck’s size and dispersement before taking a closer look. A preliminary survey helps. Though Kerby always plans for safety, accidents can happen. Backing away from the wreck, Kerby calls Cremer in
Pisces V
to announce he’s found the bow section. Once he has a decent sonar signature, he’ll make an initial tour to determine if there are any entanglements. The cleanest way is to fly over the wreck, but for now Kerby studies the sonar data.