Japanese Submariners Honored Near Sydney
On the night of May 31, six Japanese submariners staged a bold raid on Sydney Harbour in Australia. Two of the midget submarines that slipped into the harbor that night to attack allied warships were destroyed before they saw action. The third sub intended to go after the USS Chicago but wound up putting a torpedo into the HMAS Kuttabul, a converted ferry, which sank. Twenty-one of the sailors sleeping onboard were killed.
That third sub disappeared only to be rediscovered by amateur divers in 2006. On August 6, relatives of Sub-Lieutenant Katsuhisa Ban and Petty Officer Memoru Ashibe cast flowers from the deck of an Australian warship and poured sake into the water in tribute to the men and the wreckage below.
The submarine is largely intact although filled with sand. It is believed that the remains of the crew lie inside the vessel, which will be left undisturbed as a protected monument. The younger brother of Lieutenant Ban, speaking through an interpreter, said, “We were all feeling uneasy about where it was so we are very happy the Australian divers found it.”
That “little” brother is now 74-years-old. Their story, like many in recent years, is being concluded after long years of wondering. During my childhood the news would occasionally report on an isolated Japanese soldier pulled off some nameless island after years of solitary waiting for the war to be over. I was fascinated by these men who remained at their post years beyond the official end of the conflict.
I won’t lie. In our household the Germans and the Japanese were referred to in derogatory terms replete with racial slurs. I don’t blame my father. These were the people who were trying to kill him when he was just 21-years-old. I’m not sure he lived long enough to see them as anything but the enemy. But part of the act of reconciliation is to remember that 21-year-old boys were dying on both sides, some, like these two men, entombed at the bottom of the ocean. Now their relatives know where they lie, in a sense, still at their post beneath the waters in the vessel they so daringly piloted. Two more boys who have finally come home.
(Click here for the International Herald Tribune story.)
WWII, Sydney, Australia, Japanese midget submarine
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