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Japanese Sub Found at Pearl Harbor
Thursday, August 29, 2002
(5:38 AM ET)
By Jaymes Song
Associated Press Writer

A model of a Japanese midget submarine that sank on Dec. 7, 1941 outside of Pearl Harbor is shown Wednesday Aug. 28, 2002, in Honolulu. Two University of Hawaii underwater research craft on routine training dives Wednesday found a Japanese midget submarine sunk more than an hour before the 1941 aerial attack on Pearl Harbor, researchers said.
Image Credit: Ronen Zilberman -- AP.

The sub led four other Japanese midget submarines to Pearl Harbor before the Sunday morning attack by Japanese planes that lasted two hours and left 21 U.S. ships heavily damaged, 323 aircraft damaged or destroyed, 2,390 people dead and 1,178 wounded.

HONOLULU -- AP
Nearly 61 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, researchers say they have found evidence that the U.S. military fired the first shot against Japan with the discovery of a sunken Japanese submarine.

Wreckage from a Japanese midget submarine sunk before the attack on Pearl Harbor is shown in an image from video after it was found Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2002, by researchers from the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory, who stumbled across the vessel while doing training dives a few miles from Pearl Harbor. Discovery of the 78-foot submarine could provide the first physical evidence to back U.S. military assertions that it fired first against Japan in World War II and inflicted the first casualties.
Image Credit: AP.

The 78-foot sub was found Wednesday by two research craft on routine training dives about three miles from Pearl Harbor, in an area described as a "military junkyard" about 1,200 feet below the surface.

"To actually come across it was a sobering moment, realizing that was the shot that started the Pacific war," said Terry Kerby, chief pilot of the Pisces IV deep-diving submersible.

Although the surprise Japanese aerial attack is most widely associated with Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military has long asserted that an underwater skirmish occurred first.
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2002 © The Associated Press.

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