When you hear people oppose expenditures for advanced weapons systems such as the anti missile system, stealth fighter aircraft and laser weapons ( see Star Wars ), ask them what kind of world we would have today if the Germans had won the race for an atomic bomb. The following web site sent to me by a friend tells about Japanese development of a super submarine that had it been operational at the beginning of WWII might have significantly altered the length if not outcome of the war.
abcnews.go.com _mdash; Researchers found 2 sunken Japanese super-submarines that could have changed WWII. Some subs were designed to launch bombers on kamikaze missions; others were possibly twice as fast as other subs used in the war. The U.S. Navy seized & surveyed the subs after WWII, then each sub was sent to the ocean floor off the coast of Hawaii in 1946. Nov 17, 2009 View in Crawl 4
THIRTEEN’s Secrets of the Dead: Japanese SuperSub recounts Japan’s superior submarine technology and reveals how close the Japanese came to using the subs to blow up the Panama Canal, terrorize the U.S. and possibly enact a deadly biological attack. The film premieres nationally Wednesday, May 5, 2010 at 8 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Actor Liev Schreiber (Taking Woodstock and X-Men Origins: Wolverine) narrates.
Japanese SuperSub brings viewers first-hand veteran accounts from sailors and pilots who manned the Japanese subs, and from the American sailors who captured them. The engineering logistics and battle plans, explored by military historians, highlight just how innovative the submarines really were. The documentary examines two nations engaged in a war, and in a secret, experimental arms race. In the U.S., it was the Manhattan Project, with top scientists racing to create the atomic bomb. In Japan, it was the I-400 project, to build a submarine that could wrestle the advantage from a far superior American force. Once shrouded in secrecy and still with classified components, the powerful supersubs are finally being acknowledged as the precursor to modern attack submarines, and perhaps the greatest weapons that never did battle.
