Sub settles in her new home

HEAVY: The Japanese midget sub is lifted onto the loading dock of the Navy Heritage Museum .

Photo: ABPH David McMahon

By Michael Brooke

The RAN’s Maritime Heritage Centre at Garden Island continues to grow in the countdown to the grand opening next month.

The collection boasts many more items of historical significance including the conning tower of a Japanese midget submarine.

The conning tower of I-22 midget sub, one of three Type A subs that attacked Sydney Harbour in mid 1942, was put on display on September 2, triggering a new round of debate about I-24 that disappeared during the raid.

The whereabouts of I-24 midget submarine, along with that of HMAS Sydney, are among the great maritime mysteries of WWII. But hope that I-24 will one day be located received a boost recently, when an A Type Japanese midget submarine was found at the entrance to Pearl Harbour, where it had rested undetected on the sea floor for more than 60-years.

The Director of the institution that found the Type A midget submarine, told Navy News last week that in his expert opinion “I-24 could still be in Sydney Harbour waiting to be discovered.”

John Wiltshire, PhD, the director of the Hawaii Undersea Research Lab, said the midget submarine would have had enough battery power for 90-minutes submerged at full speed and that many crews were overcome by lethal battery-gas fumes.

“All these factors tell me that the submarine is still somewhere in Sydney Harbour, lost to gassing of the crew or perhaps blown up by the 300 pound scuttling charge,” he said. Historians Peggy Warner and Sadao Seno, co-authors of The Coffin Boats: Midget Submarine Operations in WWII, state that the crews involved in the Sydney operation were “on a mission to meet death bravely.”

They cite the fact that the crews of two of the submarines recovered by the RAN had committed suicide during the raid.

Both historians said the crews had made a pact to scuttle their boats rather than put the mother submarines at danger through a risky rendezvous outside Sydney Heads after the raid.

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