MANOA, HAWAII—A recent survey of I-400, a World War II-era Imperial Japanese Navy mega-submarine, has located and mapped the submarine’s hangar and conning tower, and found the submarine’s bell. The vessel was sunk outside of Pearl Harbor after the war to keep its technology from the Soviet Union, and in 2013, was rediscovered by a team from the University of Hawaii and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “We made a lucky guess where to start when we approached the main hull of the I-400 from the northwest,” Terry Kerby, operations director and chief submarine pilot of the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory (HURL,) said of the recent expedition in a press release. “Our guess started to pay off when the giant hangar door came into view, followed by the conning tower and hangar. Many items were amazingly intact for something that had ripped out of the hull of a sinking 400-foot-long submarine,” he said. The aircraft hangar had been large enough to launch three float-plane bombers. The bell was found close to the conning tower on the seafloor. To read more, see "Archaeology of World War II."
