Leviathan

I had every intention of writing about a gigantic submarine this morning. It is a cool story, embedded in my life, one of the seminal stories of wonder that my Uncle used spin around the dining table. He dared me to think of an aircraft carrier that sailed below the sea. I was a kid, and all sorts of images flashed through my mind.

There were three of them built by the Japanese, he said, late in the war against the Americans.

My Uncle drew a picture of them, because the technology had been lost, thrown away at sea. He said they were designed to carry aircraft to distant waters, and they were gigantic things, the biggest ever that sailed beneath the waves, until the Cold War required the invention of the ballistic missile submarine. He drew an outline of one on a paper napkin, with the hangar clearly visible in the profile.

”It was a technical masterpiece,” he said. ”The hangar was watertight, and when on the surface, the Japanese unsealed the doors, and rolled out a seaplane with folding wings and tail, and then craned it overboard.”

It was a wonder, and I carried the image in a far corner of my mind ever after.

Years later, I stood in the aircraft refurbishment shop at the Smithsonian in Silver Hill with him, on one of his last visits. The patient craftsmen were slowly reconstructing the only one of the seaplanes to have survived. My Uncle was an old man then, but his eyes were merry as he pointed to the unique features of an airplane designed to be carried underwater.

It is now one of the jewels in the collection in the new Air and Space Museum near Dulles International. The seaplane had been intended to carry a payload of biological contaminants, plague and the like, to be dumped on the US West Coast.

The weapons were developed by the infamous Japanese Army Unit 731, which conducted biological tests and operational missions against thousands of Chinese, and even Allied POWs. But the infected rats and insects were not available in time, and the Main Navy Staff settled on the idea of a simultaneous strike on the locks of the Panama Canal, to drain Gatun Lake on the highland and close the waterway for months.

The University of Hawaii just found one of the leviathans last week just off the old Naval Air Station at Barbers Point, on the island of Ohau. It was news because the University has been finding all sorts of left-overs lately, including one of the mini-subs that attacked Pearl on December 7th, 1941 to start the war.

The I-401 is sitting upright beneath almost nine hundred feet of salt water. Her anti-aircraft guns are still in good shape, pointed at the sky far above.

How she came to be there, without a crew and under the US flag, is an interesting story. There was not enough fuel to execute the Canal mission, and she and her sisters deployed near the end of the war to conduct a bold attack on the enemy’s rear at Ulithi Atoll.

News of the Bomb, and the Emperor’s surrender, came as the giant submarines prepared to attack.

There was discussion about continuing the fight, since the Skipper contended that the Emperor, whose voice had never before been heard, could never have surrendered.

In the end, the crew decided to comply. The Captain committed suicide, and the I-401 was turned over to the Americans. A prize crew brought her to Pearl Harbor, along with some other advanced machines, and there was great excitement about adapting the technology into the next generation of submarines.

Then Russians began to make demands for their share of the war booty. It had been a mistake to ask Stalin to join the Pacific War, and rather than turn over the double-hulled giants, the Americans used them for weapons testing. I-401 was sunk in 1946.

I was researching the history of the submarine when I heard the news from Minnesota. It was depressingly familiar. The lone gunman, the weeping in the school corridors.

It is too soon to know if Congress will be called back for another emergency session. They could address all manner of things that may or may not have contributed to the rampage that left ten people dead, including the young shooter, who is reported to have been a loner, and wore black.

Perhaps some grand-sounding legislation would help. After all, Senate Majority Leader Frist is in favor of a ”Culture of Life,” and so is House Majority Leader DeLay. Maybe Congress could address the factors that contributed to the slaughter in Bemidji.

Or maybe not. The state of Minnesota, or the Congress, has no jurisdiction at Red Lake.  The Reservation is home to around 5,000 Indians who live on a half-million sovereign acres in northwest Minnesota, not far from Lake Woebegone. They have ceded the right of defense and foreign affairs to the Government of the United States by treaty, but in all other affairs they remain autonomous. They operate three casinos, which provide some local jobs.

The FBI was called in, but the special agents appear to have stopped at the border, where the State Patrol sealed the roads. Tribal police conducted the investigation overnight. Not much information is available. Tribal officials are appalled, one of them saying that this normally happened at schools run by whites. It is the worst thing that has happened to the Ojibwas in modern times.

This is not a good morning in the wide-world, or at least we have chosen to characterize the motion of this orb in the heavens with a dark palate. The Terry Schiavo matter is still under consideration by a Federal Judge, whose name was picked at random by a computer.

I’ll produce some wild assertions, and then move on, which is what we all will have to do. The Tribe will likely consider this a private family matter, and unlike other families, they have the authority to make it stick.

The rampage probably had something to do with despair, since the young man’s father killed himself four years ago, and the mother is hospitalized due to injuries suffered in a car crash. I suspect there will be a alcohol or drugs in the mix, and of course underemployment. There will be something about violent computer games, and some deep sense of disenfranchisement.

With all that, I still don’t understand how the fabric of life, stretched taut, abruptly rips, and the assisted suicide begins. I think I understand the big events, like the Pacific War, since they take a little longer to orchestrate.

At the individual level, though, I just don’t have much of a clue.

But this morning I blink at that. I would rather be diving on the I-401, the great black ship under the deep blue sea. I’d like to see the hangar bay that my Uncle drew on the napkin, the one that the Japanese wanted to load the biological weapons in, and bring to California.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

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