Submarine Aircraft Carrier the I-400 Of IJN

Kunal Biswas

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The Sen Toku I-400-class (伊四〇〇型潜水艦, I-yonhyaku-gata Sensuikan?) Imperial Japanese Navy submarines were the largest submarines of World War II and remained the largest ever built until the construction of nuclear ballistic missile submarines in the 1960s. They were submarine aircraft carriers able to carry three Aichi M6A Seiran aircraft underwater to their destinations. They were designed to surface, launch their planes, then quickly dive again before they were discovered. They also carried torpedoes for close-range combat.

The I-400-class was designed with the range to travel anywhere in the world and return. A fleet of 18 boats was planned in 1942, and work started on the first in January 1943 at the Kure, Hiroshima arsenal. Within a year the plan was scaled back to five, of which only three (I-400 at Kure, and I-401 and I-402 at Sasebo) were completed.


 
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LalTopi

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I remember seeing a documentary on these a few years back. I think one of them managed to bomb the US mainland, although pretty interactively. I think it was more for propaganda purposes, to show that the mainland could be attacked, rather than as an effective weapon.
 

HeinzGud

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Japanese had operational subs with midget sub capability and I think it was a good engineering achievement of those days....
 

W.G.Ewald

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I remember seeing a documentary on these a few years back. I think one of them managed to bomb the US mainland, although pretty interactively. I think it was more for propaganda purposes, to show that the mainland could be attacked, rather than as an effective weapon.
American Theater (1939–1945) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Submarine Operations


In what became the only attack on a mainland American military installation during World War II, the Japanese submarine I-25, under the command of Tagami Meiji,[20] surfaced near the mouth of the Columbia River, Oregon on the night of June 21 and June 22, 1942, and fired shells toward Fort Stevens. The only damage officially recorded was to a baseball field's backstop. [:)]Probably the most significant damage was a shell that damaged some large phone cables. The Fort Stevens gunners were refused permission to return fire, since it would have helped the Japanese locate their target more accurately. American aircraft on training flights spotted the submarine, which was subsequently attacked by a US bomber, but escaped.
 

nirranj

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this is a ingenius weapon..

Nazis and the Japanese used submarines for stealth transport. Nazi's used submarines for trading valuable cargo during the WWI and also during the WWII. Japs used to transport the aircraft...

Imagine Japs with Nukes in WWii.. They would have wreaked havoc in the Allies morale...

Soviets even planned a cargo submarine with a modified Typhoon platform...

Nevertheless democracies prevailed in the end...
 

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