Daily Archives: July 10, 2010

channel.nationalgeographic

HUNT FOR THE SAMURAI SUBS

Just before the atomic bomb forced Japan into submission, the Imperial Navy sent a fleet of incredibly advanced combat subs to attack a major U.S. naval base in the Pacific. But when Japan surrendered, the U.S. Navy confiscated them, only to later have them scuttled near Hawaii when Soviet scientists demanded access. The war machines’ precise location would remain a mystery for decades.

Now a team of explorers thinks they can find some of these lost subs in the Pacific’s dark waters. From the Hawaiian island of Oahu, deep submergence vehicle pilots Terry Kerby and Max Cremer, along with a team of devoted explorers, prepare to dive to depths of nearly 3,000 feet to hunt for some of WWII’s largest and fastest submarines — in a Japanese super-submarine graveyard ― and solve one of the war’s great mysteries.

• The I-400 class Japanese submarines built during WWII were the largest submarines ever built, at 400 feet long (or longer than a football field), until the introduction of nuclear-powered submarines in the 1950s and ‘60s.
• With a range of 37,500 miles at 14 knots, the I-400 class submarines were able to go one and a half times around the globe without refueling, a capability that has never been matched by any other diesel-electric submarine.
• Special aircraft-carrying submarines with powerful torpedoes were built to attack the U.S. mainland.  Their target later changed to the Panama Canal, but they never carried out either mission.
• At the end of WWII, the U.S. Navy captured the subs and sailed five of them for evaluation:  three aircraft-carrying submarines (I-400, I-401, I-14) and two fast attack subs (I-201, I-203).
• The United States was the only country that performed inspections on this technology.  When the Soviet Union demanded access in 1946, the U.S. Navy scuttled the subs off the coast of Oahu.
• Japan’s aircraft-carrying submarines carried up to three bombers, which could be launched off the deck of the submarine by catapult ― some in as few as seven minutes.
• The Aichi M6A1 Seiran plane built for the subs could carry one aerial torpedo or a bomb weighing nearly 1,800 pounds, along with a crew of two — a pilot and an observer.
• Japanese subs used the powerful Type 95 torpedo, which utilized pure oxygen to burn kerosene, giving it three times the range of the Allies’ torpedoes. They were also harder to detect and avoid because of their reduced wake.
• The I-400 sub had radar so it could detect the enemy.  Its exterior had a sonar-absorbing coating, making it less detectible.
• Crew aboard the aircraft-carrying submarine were limited to drinking half a cup of liquid with every meal, and were prohibited from taking showers or washing their clothes.  There was only one toilet aboard, and waste tanks were often not emptied for fear of the enemy detecting them.

Wide shot of the Sen-Toku class “special attack” sub emphasizing the stern section (computer generated image).

A deck gun located on the I-401 submarine wreck, with the Hawaii Undersea Research Lab’s Pisces submersible in the background.

A close up shot of conning tower at the scene of the I-401 underwater submarine wreck. The I-401 is one of 5 Japanese submarines sunk by the US Navy in 1946.

At the scene of a I-14 underwater submarine wreck, the Pisces looking at the deck gun of I-14. The I-14 is one of 5 Japanese submarines sunk by the US Navy in 1946.

A close up shot of triple deck gun at the scene of the I-401 underwater submarine wreck. The I-401 is one of 5 Japanese submarines sunk by the US Navy in 1946.

The conning tower and machine gun on a Sen-Taka class “fast attack” submarine (computer generated image).

Hanger with two Seiran planes on a AM-Class submarine (computer generated image).

Three Seirans sitting inside the hanger of a Sen-Toku class “special attack” submarine (computer generated image).

Machine gun on the deck of Sen-Taka class “fast attack” submarine (computer generated image).

Seiran plane being catapulted from the deck of a Sen-Toku class “special attack” submarine (computer generated image).

Two Seiran planes sitting inside the hanger of a Sen-Toku class ”special attack” sub (computer generated image).

Wide shot of the Sen-Toku class “special attack” submarine (computer generated image).

channel.nationalgeographic.com

Hitler’s Hidden City

Take a look at Hitler as he embarks upon the ‘Battle for Berlin’

• There were three giant Flak towers built to protect the capital and one of them provided shelter for 33,000 Berliners at the end of the war.
• After the incidents that occurred in Russia by the Nazi’s, Berliners were so afraid of Soviet retribution that some 100,000 killed themselves instead of face capture.
• The Allied 24 hour ‘Carpet Bombing’- designed to break Berliners’ morale- hit the city as a whole.
• From 1940 – 1944, Hitler ordered over 1000 bunkers to be built in Berlin.
• Some of the main public bunkers were almost self-sufficient, with hospitals, electricity generators and water wells inside them.
• By the end of the war, the conditions in the bunkers were appalling. With three times the planned capacity of people cowering inside, there was barely enough room to stand.
• Thousands of slave workers were employed to build the giant Flak Towers.
• The Flak towers were all blown up after the war; those that remained were filled with the rubble from the ones that were destroyed.
• For the final ‘Battle for Berlin,’ over a million Russian troops faced a ragtag ‘army’ of 70,000 Germans.
• The Nazis secretly constructed their Focke Wulf fighter jets at Berlin’s premier airport.
• Hitler planned to transform Berlin into a giant city to be called ‘Germania.’
• The main feature of Germania would be the Great Hall – planned to be so big that 17 replicas of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome could fit inside the dome.
• Hitler, entombed in his Führerbunker, had lost all grasp on reality. Even with the government quarter surrounded by Russians, he felt he could still win the war.
• Hitler committed suicide along with his doggedly loyal wife Eva Braun once he realized that he could not win the war. His right hand man Goebbels also killed himself, after first giving cyanide to his six young children.
• With attacks from the Allies in the air, and the Russians on the streets, by the end of the war Berlin was unrecognizable. Nearly everything was destroyed.

A member of the Berlin Underworld Association is dwarfed by the 60 foot high chamber of this test metro station, one of the few remaining remnants of Hitler’s Germania.

Interior shot from the partially destroyed Flak tower at Humboldthain, North Berlin.

Historian Antony Beevor standing inside the gas lock of a civilian wartime shelter

Under this manhole cover in central Berlin lies a 60 room bunker untouched since World War Two.

livescience

“Rider from the Ice Age” at Foppe di Nadro in Valcarmonica, Lombardy, Italy. Credit: Hamish Park, Prehistoric Picture Project 2009

A Copper Age tribe may have enjoyed a primitive cinematic experience by making stone engravings in an echo-filled Alpine valley, researchers say.

Torchlight and flickering shadows would have made the engravings on stone walls seem to come alive at night. And spoken words that became magnified in a natural outdoor theater could have awakened the storytelling imaginations of observers.

“The past was not just full of bones and broken shards, but it was a sensorial place,” said Frederick Baker, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge in the U.K.

Baker studies the work of the Camuni people, who lived in the central Alps in what is now northern Italy, in a valley known as Val Camonica. They created engravings between 2,500 and 14 B.C., until Roman legionaries under Caesar Augustus swept through and conquered them.

“Deer from the Ice Age” at Foppe di Nadro in Valcarmonica, Lombardy, Italy. Credit: Hamish Park, Prehistoric Picture Project 2009

The Camuni engravings stand apart from famous prehistoric cave paintings because they could have been accompanied by the movement of natural light and enhanced sound. The drawings seem to fade out as the midday sun climbs high and then reappear with the setting sun and shadows – an experience that Baker compared to a film dissolve sequence.

The Alpine valley engravings also differ from cave paintings because they sit out in the open for anyone to enjoy the spectacles, according to the researchers.

Sound and vision

To prove that the valley people could have created a soundtrack, Baker and his colleagues tested the echo effect in the valley last September. The researchers invited musicians to play both high and low notes, and the test included Christopher Wells, a well-known Bavarian alphorn and trumpet player.

“If you think of needing the whole valley as an instrument, then it’s the alphorn that does it the most in the Alps,” Baker told LiveScience. “So we came down, and lo and behold we got amazing echoes at all these locations.”

In the experiment, two microphones faced the musician, and two others faced the rock art. One location required special noise filters to screen out the sounds of cars on a nearby highway.

“For our first field recordings, we used a surround-configuration,” said Astrid Drechsler, a sound engineer at the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences in Austria. “During these first recordings the main focal point was on catching the atmosphere and spirit at these places.”

Drechsler’s sound team plans to record both loud and very short sounds next September, and try to discover more about the delay time, sound intensity and acoustic spectrum of the echoes.

Pictures not yet rated

The Camuni’s stone engravings include everything from shaman-like mystical figures to purely geometric forms such as mazes. Other scenes show dueling, hunting, houses and dancing people.

But some subjects remained taboo or marginalized. Women rarely appear, even if a few transgendered figures appear. The engravings also stay away from the subject of death.

“You see weapons, you see dueling, and you see people on horses with weapons,” Baker noted. “But you never see a deer with an arrow through it, or a person being stabbed.”

That suggests the Camuni did not want to show the moment of death or killing, despite having and using weapons, Baker said.

Each generation of engravers also seems to have respected the pictures that came before, because rarely do any images overlap.

Respect for past storytellers

Baker wants to give these pictures a wider audience.

“The first thing I thought was we can animate these,” Baker said. “We could make these [engravings] move.”

His epiphany about primitive cinema struck him when he first saw the engravings with Christopher Chippindale, a rock art specialist at the University of Cambridge.

That led to the creation of the Prehistoric Picture Project, a collaboration between St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences, the University of Cambridge and the Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar in Germany.

In his work on the project, Baker draws upon not only his archaeological training, but also his filmmaking experience that includes making films for the Cannes Film festival and the BBC. He has already begun putting together an animated film that brings some of the engravings to life, so to speak.

“I’m not saying these rocks are exactly cinema-like or in that form, because obviously the images don’t move,” Baker explained. “I’m saying these images in these locations are the closest the people would have had to a visual-acoustic experience, i.e. acinematic experience.”