National Geographic: Untold Stories of World War II Page #3

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and the ferry rapidly rose,

and the cargo on the ferry-there

were railway wagons, you see

so they rushed down and

tilted the ferry still more.

Within moments, the mortally damaged

ferry had sunk beneath the surface,

carrying with it innocent passengers

and Nazi Germany's atomic ambitions.

And the heavy water being

on board went down with the ship

and it's still on the bottom

of the Tinnsjo Lake.

Later, the Allies would learn that

the Nazis were never close

to an atomic breakthrough.

The U.S. won the A-bomb race.

Within months of the German defeat,

America dropped the first atomic bomb.

But in the Allies hands,

the bomb helped to win a war,

not perpetuate one.

If Hitler had the bomb, he might

have used it to devastate the world.

The Norwegian resistance fighters

did their part to stop him.

Their mission was one of the greatest

feats of sabotage in military history

something that had to be done,

at all costs, and was.

You have to fight for your freedom

and for peace.

It's not something that

you have every day.

You have to fight for it every day,

to keep it.

It's like a glass bowl;

it's very easy to break.

It's easy to lose.

Half a world away, on December 7, 1941

American learned the cost of freedom,

when Japan devastated Pearl Harbor.

That sneak attack included

the stealth weapons of their day

midget submarines

They were sleek, deadly, and,

until now, consigned to history.

The National Park Service

and the U.S. Navy

have searched for the wreck

of a Japanese midget submarine.

An hour before the

Japanese savaged Pearl Harbor,

a U.S. destroyer sank the tiny vessel.

The encounter could have

warned American forces

that bombs and torpedoes were

about to rain on Battleship Row.

But it did not.

Marine archeologist Dan Lenihan

directed the hunt for the midget sub.

Jim Delgado was the project's historian

Their collaboration grew out

of earlier research

below the surface of Pearl Harbor.

They searched for evidence

of a bygone conflict

a battle waged underwater

by five midget submarines.

One sub played a special role.

It was particularly exciting about the

midget sub that's outside the entrance

It would have represented the

first exchange of hostilities

between the United States

and Japan in World War II.

And, because, remember,

that this sub was sunk

an hour before

the planes attacked Pearl Harbor.

An incredibly important,

significant find if we could do it.

The search for the midget sub

focused on a square mile

of debris-laden bottom.

The area is a graveyard of war relics,

like this old Navy plane.

A thousand feet down, in the darkness,

everything begins to resemble a sub.

But what they're looking for is

eighty feet long and six feet across.

It carried two torpedoes and was

manned by an officer and a navigator.

They were going to come on in,

sit, and wait.

And then, when the attack occurred,

when the planes came in,

when all hell broke loose

in Pearl Harbor, they would surface,

fire their torpedoes,

and wreak as much havoc as they could,

swing around Ford Island,

head back on out, and rendezvous

with their mother subs to be

taken back to Japan.

The mother ships moved into position

off Diamond Head before midnight,

December 6, 1941.

They arrived ahead of

the Imperial Navy task force.

Each mother ship had a

midget sub strapped to its hull.

The larger craft would release

the midgets before dawn

and retrieve them after the attack.

But the tiny vessels would

never return from the battle

a clash of giants that

had been brewing for years.

From Manchuria to French Indochina

in less than a decade,

Japan had rolled up a long list

of conquests across Asia.

Despite an Allied embargo on war

materials, she was growing stronger.

By late 1941,

the vast resources of Southeast Asia

lay before the "Rising Sun".

Their only protection:

a scattering of British

and Dutch outposts

and the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

I think there was a general sense

that war would break out.

I don't think anybody expected that it

would take place here at Pearl Harbor.

Successfully surprising an island

fortress four thousand miles away

also seemed impossible

to Japanese leaders.

But admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

convinced them this daring raid

was the only way to disarm

the "sleeping giant".

Japan had to

smash American's Pacific Fleet,

even if that meant attacking its

home base in Oahu's natural harbor.

Japanese pilots trained hard through

the fall of 1941.

So did the crews handpicked

to pilot the midget subs,

the fastest boats of their kind.

Soon they would have their chance

for glory.

In Washington,

Japanese diplomats continued

to seek peace through negotiation

until the final hour.

Not even Japan's ambassador knew

of the coming attack.

December 7, 1941.

As Oahu slept, the Japanese task

force brought 350 attack planes

into striking distance of Pearl Harbor

just two hundred miles away.

In Washington,

military intelligence teams had

broken Japan's diplomatic code.

They knew an armada was somewhere

in the Pacific.

But they did not know its destination.

Near diamond Head,

dawn was approaching.

The Japanese mother subs surfaced

to release the midget submarines.

But something went wrong.

At 6:
30 a.m., a seaplane pilot

and a freighter crew

reported a strange sub

approaching Pearl Harbor

The captain of a nearby destroyer,

the U.S.S. Ward,

realized intruders were trying to

penetrate the fleet's defenses.

His gunners opened fire.

The midget sub began sinking

in a thousand feet of water.

Depth charges finished her off.

The Ward reported the sinking twice.

But before notifying Pacific Fleet

commander Husband E. Kimmel,

district headquarters waited

thirty minutes.

The delay was all the attackers needed

News of the sub might have prevented

what happened next.

Well, the message was radioed in

that they fired

on and depth-charged this sub.

It didn't reach Admiral Kimmel.

It wasn't until just a few minutes

before the attack commenced in earnest

with the planes coming in, that the

admiral was finally phoned and told,

look, we got this message in

from the commander

of the Ward saying that

he's fired upon a sub

operating in the defensive zone.

Kimmel says,

Why wasn't I told about this?

He's putting his uniform on,

he's heading out,

and that moment the planes come

screaming in overhead,

the bombs start dropping.

At five minutes to eight, forty

torpedo planes roared over Ford Island

bearing the mark of the Rising Sun.

Accompanying them were

fifty-one dive bombers,

forty-nine high-level bombers,

and forty-three fighters.

American sailors thought they

were seeing a practice drill.

Bombs and bullets found them

eating breakfast, ironing uniforms,

or staring into the fatal sky.

Arizon... Oklahoma... California.

One by one, great ships sank.

The West Virginia alone took

six torpedoes and countless bombs.

Pearl Harbor's air defense

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