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I-400: Japan's Secret Aircraft-Carrying Submarine - The Panama Canal Strike Plan, Seiran Bombers, and the Super-Sub Scuttled Beneath Hawaii
Paperback
Series: Submarine Legends, Book 7
Japanese HistoryNaval HistoryWorld War II
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Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 100
Weight: 0.32
Height: 0.21 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Some warships are remembered for the battles they fought. Others endure because they reveal how far engineering, strategy, and imagination can be pushed when a nation searches for a weapon its enemy will never expect.
I-400: Japan's Secret Aircraft-Carrying Submarine - The Panama Canal Strike Plan, Seiran Bombers, and the Super-Sub Scuttled Beneath Hawaii takes you inside one of the most extraordinary naval projects of the Second World War: a submarine designed to cross immense distances, surface near a distant objective, launch its own attack aircraft, and vanish beneath the Pacific.
Built around an enormous watertight aircraft hangar and three purpose-designed Aichi M6A1 Seiran strike aircraft, I-400 challenged conventional ideas about what a submarine could accomplish. Douglas Whitham reconstructs the boat's development, engineering, crew experience, operational planning, surrender, American examination, secret destruction, and eventual rediscovery beneath Hawaiian waters.
Inside, you will discover:
- How Japan engineered a submarine capable of carrying and launching aircraft, from its unusual pressure-hull arrangement and offset conning tower to its catapult, hangar, fuel systems, and remarkable range.
- The secret Panama Canal strike plan, including training, target selection, Seiran preparations, and the extraordinary operational problems involved in attacking across an ocean.
- The final shift toward Ulithi, the changing strategic situation of 1945, and how I-400 came extraordinarily close to carrying its unconventional weapon into combat.
- What happened after surrender, as American naval specialists examined the submarine, moved it to Hawaii, deliberately sank it, and left behind a wreck that would remain hidden for decades.
Along the way, the reader encounters the lesser-known engineering compromises, training procedures, aircraft-handling methods, operational decisions, and human realities that transformed an ambitious concept into a functioning warship.
Compact, evidence-led, richly detailed, and written for both naval enthusiasts and intelligent general readers, I-400 offers the experience of understanding the machine from the inside-how it was conceived, how it was meant to fight, what its crews were asked to accomplish, and what its extraordinary existence reveals about the final years of the Pacific War.
A distinctive volume in the Submarine Legends series by Douglas Whitham.
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