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 Author  Topic: First Blood Pearl Harbor
Roy Forbes

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Post a Reply To This Topic    Reply With Quotes     Edit Message     View Profile of Roy Forbes  Posted on: Aug 26, 2013 - 11:32am
Glad you enjoyed the show JB and welcome aboard.


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Will Day

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Post a Reply To This Topic    Reply With Quotes     Edit Message     View Profile of Will Day   Send Email To Will Day Posted on: Aug 26, 2013 - 12:42pm
Maybe that is the West Loch Ness Monster....

Will

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David Buck

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Post a Reply To This Topic    Reply With Quotes     Edit Message     View Profile of David Buck   Send Email To David Buck Posted on: Aug 26, 2013 - 2:45pm
OK On Jap mini Subs,

Sydney harbour was attacked by a number of mini Subs launched off a mother sub.

All but one of these Subs were found at or after the attack however one was lost and thought to have made it back to the mother Sub.

Records after the War proved that she did not.

There have been a large number of theories of were she may be also there have been a number of TV shows that have DISCOVERED her, even to the stage of having parts of the supposed Sub sent to Japan to prove that they have come from the her.

Interesting enough a small group of divers from the Central Coast quietly announced that while diving in a particularly deep area off our coast they had found her.(I have met and talked to them, interesting)

Sitting slightly at an angle to the sea flour and largely intact this Sub and its two man team has taken 68 years to find.

There is no question this is her as she is sitting proud of the sea flour and unlike the TV shows that had her covered over with tons of silt with only small parts visible she is there for all to see.

She is now a maritime no go area so the two inside her can rest in peace.

Theories are great but until someone can produce photos or records to show that the Hull was moved or at least found then she remains lost, TV shows not withstanding.



Yours

D.buck

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Tracy White

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Post a Reply To This Topic    Reply With Quotes     Edit Message   Posted on: Aug 30, 2013 - 10:43pm
Hey David - I do believe that they have found Midget E. However, the rest of it is a load of supposition sold as fact.

Sorry for the delay everyone - I had watched the show and taken notes, but a busy work week got in the way. Funny how real life can rudely take precedence over hobbies!

After a week, I think I'm actually going to largely ignore the show and focus on the underlying problems with the theories it tries to sell.

The core of the problem is that they build results on "perhaps." "Perhaps this happened. Because this happened, then that must have happened." A midget is found near some LVTs, so that means it must have been in West loch, because a bunch of LVTs were lost there and dumped. We have no proof that ANY of those LVTs were from the west loch disaster, or that the midget was dumped at the same time, but obviously it MUST have come from there!

Yes, circumstantially there were a high number of LVTs dropped off from the West Loch, but does that PROVE anything?

The only piece of evidence that is held up for shots on battleship row is one photo. No offense to Arnold Bauer and Don Stratton, but Arizona was not hit by a torpedo. Their eye-witness reports aren't credible in the face of the evidence against it. But that photo itself is an awful piece of evidence.

With *ALL* of the eyes around the harbor that day, not one sailor reported seeing a submarine on the surface at least twice, for at least thirty seconds each time? How about the whaler that's visible near whatever artifact is purported to be a midget. Let's not forget the Kate pilots, who had to pay close attention to the water in order to drop right, NONE of which reported a midget directly in their drop zone.

When this is brought up, the contrary response is "they were watching the ships," Horse puckey. People watching from the Navy Yard would have had to have looked OVER and THROUGH that area to see the ships, and they certainly would have seen a submarine. Additionally, two buoys were taken under fire as midget sub conning towers during the attack, so we know that sailors were looking around on the water.

Parks Stephenson (one of the heavy-hitters in the midget theory group and showed quite a bit in the show) did bring up some excellent points, don't get me wrong. He cast good, credible doubt on St. Louis' midget sighting. But all that does is leave us with a messy aspect to the attack, one of thousands of messy facts and unknowns. History is like that though, and there are many things that we don't KNOW. Americans like to know things, we work hard at it. But we shouldn't pervert history by claiming to KNOW things that are merely theories.

Tracy White
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David Buck

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Post a Reply To This Topic    Reply With Quotes     Edit Message     View Profile of David Buck   Send Email To David Buck Posted on: Aug 31, 2013 - 5:56am
Well done Tracy, until someone can I.D. something that looks like a sub, has a known location and the item shows the age that this sub would it is still one more mystery of the sea.

I know the board does not like to mention a certain PT Boat so I will just say finding a certain part of a PT boat lying on top of a pile of silt does not mean that you have the rest of the PT Boat under the silt.

Same problem, 'I (BB) have found a piece of wreckage on the sea floor, ergo I (BB) can declare that I (BB) have found the whole Boat ".

Sorry I still do not think he has proved that he has found the final resting place of that PT Boat !!!!

Someone tried the same reasoning here with our sub but that was proved wrong so a pile of silt is just that a pile of silt.

Sorry I'll get off my soap box now that's just my personal beef.

Go for it Tracy, out of interest the main problem with finding the sub from Sydney was they were just looking in the wrong place, and the main reason for this was that there were so many ideas and stories floating around it became impossible to sort them all out !

Good luck,

D.buck

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David Buck

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Post a Reply To This Topic    Reply With Quotes     Edit Message     View Profile of David Buck   Send Email To David Buck Posted on: Aug 31, 2013 - 6:04am
Oh sorry I forgot to add the guys that found the Sydney sub were just out doing a deep dive that day and she popped out of the murk, I won't put down what they said but at first she scared the sh** out of them as they thought she was a modern sub on her way out of Sydney and they wondered if they would be pulled into the props, but that soon changed and they then realised what they had stumbled onto.

That's the way it happens sometimes.

D.buck

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Tracy White

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Post a Reply To This Topic    Reply With Quotes     Edit Message   Posted on: Aug 31, 2013 - 11:16pm
I've spent a *little* time looking for mention of Midget E at NARA San Bruno, where Pearl Harbor Navy Yard's records are located. I've spent a lot more time just looking through PHNY's records in general, but not nearly as much as Kathleen O'Connor, who was responsible for those records as a NARA employee for many years. Neither of us was able to find anything in "obvious" places. If any primary records are going to be uncovered, it's most likely going to be like the Sydney Midget - an accident. I just hope that whomever stumbles across such documentation recognizes it for what it is instead of flipping past it while keeping focused on their original goal.

Tracy White
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David Buck

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Post a Reply To This Topic    Reply With Quotes     Edit Message     View Profile of David Buck   Send Email To David Buck Posted on: Sep 1, 2013 - 2:05am
Hi Tracy

I don't know how much or what type of information is held in the records that you have mentioned so I will ask, also how much if any records from the Japanese side are there or have you been able to access.

It may be interesting to note that three Mother Subs released one Midget Sub each to the north of Sydney, and the final resting place of the lost Midget Sub would put it on course to return to its Mother Sub before for whatever reason it sank with its two crew.

So It may help to know were the Midget Sub was released and if it was planning to return to that location or another to be picked up.

D.buck

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Tracy White

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Post a Reply To This Topic    Reply With Quotes     Edit Message   Posted on: Sep 1, 2013 - 10:24pm
I live near the Seattle regional branch of the National Archives and research there regularly. It contains records for local commands, mostly. so no midget sub data there (yet that I've found). That's given me nearly a decade to hang out (part time, I'm not a full-time researcher) and learn a bit about how the Navy structured things and wrote correspondence, etc.

I have specifically looked for information on midgets in the San Bruno / San Francisco regional branch<.A> as well as the main branch in College Park, Maryland (AKA NARA II). Different locations contain different records, but these are essentially records of the US government. Not a lot from the Japanese Navy, which is just as well as my two years of high-school japanese is long behind me and I'm about as rusty as the midget in question!

I've gone through records of the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard at San Bruno, but not the 14th Naval district yet. I've gone through the war damage reports for the various battleships at NARA II. I haven't hit any of the Chief of Naval Operations files from Record Group 38. There are still many areas to look.

With regards to rendezvous location; there's a lot of deep ocean to look through, and I don't think it would have much bearing on where the sub turned up - it would have had to have been someplace relatively shallow and close to Pearl Harbor.

Tracy White
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David Buck

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Post a Reply To This Topic    Reply With Quotes     Edit Message     View Profile of David Buck   Send Email To David Buck Posted on: Sep 2, 2013 - 5:38am
Tracy,

Well you are certainly working your way through a pile of paperwork and that as they say can lead in many directions.

As I had no personal idea on the Midget Subs at Peal Harbour I did a little searching to see what I could find re. these Subs

I won't go into the Peal harbour phase as that is pretty well covered on the net but I wanted to "Find" the subs after the fact and so to speak site or put my hand on one identifiable part of each Sub that could not be misidentified as possibly from another Sub.

This can only be the Sail or Conning Tower of the Sub "only one per Sub"

Also as the numbering system seems to be all over the shop I will only list the Subs 1-5

So here goes;

Sub 1. Returned to Japan and is on display.

Sub 2. At Pacific War Museum on display.

Sub 3. Found and still lying intact at 1,312 feet a few miles off Pearl Harbour.

Sub 4.Forward section removed then remainder used as land fill at Ford Island.

Sub5.This Sub appears to have been raised ( from somewhere) cut into sections taken out to sea and then dumped bar a small section of around 15 ft. which may or may not be in the same area but not found yet, according to the web sites that I have found. I would say that the evidence used to identify this Sub is pretty conclusive and that this is the fifth Midget Sub.

Subs 1-4 have plenty of traceable history so one can easily follow them from Pearl to were they are today.

No. 5 seems to have left the mother Sub in 1941 and then in 2001 turned up on the bottom of the sea off Pearl Harbour having been cut into a number of sections and with large cable used to lift each section still attached to each section, with no apparent traceable history which with the story of each of the other Subs is rather odd.

It would appear that at this time there has been no openly known raising of a Midget Sub in or around Pearl Harbour during the last 70 od years, this event would have been quite well broadcast if it had happened as just as in Australia there has been great interest in finding the missing Sub.

So that leaves us with two options,

1. A very private well funded effort set out to find and raise the Sub in secret which it did and when finished with it cut it up and dumped it at sea. (not really that possible given that many Military areas would have to be searched and such a search would surely attract a lot of attention from the public, one would think, more to be found in a Clive Cussler adventure novel !! )

2. A Military option, they have the time, manpower, equipment and other resources needed to find and raise the Sub and they also have the ability to stop ANY information about such an operation getting out to the general public be it War time or Peace time. However such an operation would have to be reported on in the Militaries own way as they have to account for such an operation, as such these reports may have been classified to a high level and therefore information for this operation would have to be concentrated in declassified material or even material that is still classified.

As such searching through the General Archives would prove fruitless.

Ok that's my two cents worth I'm not going to go over what happened in 1944 as no one has come forward with any concrete evidence so it holds no interest until proved otherwise, the rest though is rather interesting and to myself does lead me to believe that at some stage there was some form of cover up, unless I want to go along with the adventure novel idea !!!

For what its worth,

Yours,



D.buck

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