A traumatic experience for both sides: the infamous midget sub attack on Sydney is considered retrospectively by expatriate historian Associate Professor Kojihiro Matsuda*.  

  On the night of May 31 1942 six brave young Japanese Naval Officers in three Type A Kouhyouteki midget submersibles made a mess of their mission to sneak into Sydney Harbour in a surprise attack and sink enemy shipping. 
  Poorly-navigated, the first midget to enter ran into the kelp and musselencrusted piles of the Georges Head Wedding Cake and on backing-up became snagged in the unfinished boom net. Caught by the stern, the instability of the largely untested Type A midgets became obvious when the bow shot to the surface, and wouldn’t come down. 
  Had they not kept a firm grip, the crew would have slid down to the motor room, and been soaked with corrosive hydrochloric acid spilling from the batteries. Strangely, the scuttling charge was detonated and, after recovery, many features of the sleek, torpedo-shaped secret-weapon were revealed when the partial remains of the exploded sub were paraded around the country on the back of a truck. 
  The second midget steered around the unfinished boom net and was depth-charged by pleasure cruisers. With the net-cutting gear on the bow bent and obstructing the muzzle-loaded torpedoes, the submersible was totally useless. This was the sub recovered from the bottom of Taylors Bay with her lights on and electric motor running. 
  The third midget fared a little better, but not much. Like all Type A Midget submersible crews, including the six which precipitated the attack on Pearl Harbour, they were plagued by problems. They were submersibles, not true submarines. They were designed along the lines of a torpedo and were fast, but had been designed in a hurry, built cheaply from scarce materials, were untested, and sadly had many flaws. 
  Of their two-torpedo ration, the first dipped frustratingly below its target, the US Cruiser Chicago, before surfacing and famously sinking the moored ferry Kuttabul, killing nineteen young sailors. The second torpedo hit a rock. Unfortunately, the efficient and powerful new-design Type 98, 45 centimetre, oxygen-powered fast torpedo, with a range of 3,200 metres, failed to detonate. 
  Almost nothing went right that night. The mission was a disaster and an embarrassment. 
  On completion of the mission the plan was for the Midgets to exit the harbour and rendezvous with the mother subs off Broken Bay. Once the victorious crews were safely aboard the mother subs, the midgets were to be scuttled and the crews were to enjoy an off-duty ride back to Japan. 
  Escaping detection, the third midget was able to find its way back out of the harbour. After rounding North Head and setting a magnetic north course, she should have made it. 
  But of course she didn’t make it. Just an hour or so from recovery, the shell-damaged, seventy-eight foot long, forty-six ton, six foot diameter, black-painted, very-quick torpedolike experimental electric submersible, sank. No one knew where it went down, or the fate of its promising crew. 
  It was 64 years before Midget #3, by chance, turned up.

Official War Grave  

  It hasn’t moved since 1942. It sits upright on a sandy bottom, a kilometre east of Bungan Head, more or less. It’s rusted, and corroded, and thickly encrusted with weeds, barnacles and worms, yet the streamlined shape is unmistakeable. It is clearly intact, with no sign of a self-inflicted blast. 
  The remains of the crew are assumed to be inside, yet no one has checked: not a single bleached bone has been glimpsed through a corroded hole or hatch. 
  With due respect, the site has been made an Official War Grave, solemn and off-limits. Unless a sanctioned entry is made, or the site is desecrated, no one will know if the crew remained aboard, or jumped off and swam ashore. 
  They wouldn’t have killed themselves without a good reason, and there wasn’t one. 
  The hull had been damaged by shellfire, but most things still worked and at least they were moving. This wasn’t meant to be a kamikaze mission. They carried food and water for a week. They were on their way home to collect their pay, be promoted, and under normal circumstances take a short rest-and-recreation break before heading off on their next demanding assignment. 
  When the flat black paint was new and it still floated, this midget was known as M-24. Its terminal two-man crew was Sub-Lieutenant Katsuhira Ban and Petty-Officer First-Class Mamoru Ashibe, elite young Special Service officers who under gruelling training had consistently demonstrated superb skill levels and wonderful fighting spirit. 
  “In a manner of speaking, the vessel itself was a precision instrument, developed by the Imperial Fleet Main Torpedo Department, but the crew faced many safety problems due to hydrogen gas being generated from the secondary battery. There were many other problems, because its structure was less than what was hoped for,” historian Mr Shizuo Fukui said. “Underwater trim maintenance was difficult, so control wasn’t crisp at all. In addition, structural problems caused the vessel to rear upwards and to surface as far back as the conning tower when the torpedos were fired, a defect that could not be avoided.” 
  Inside, it was an austere, mechanical atmosphere. The heavy, high-carboncontent, cast-steel control wheels, levers, pipes, wires and glass-faced dials may once have seemed modern, but it’s hard now to imagine this atrocious, unfriendly environment in that way. 
  There was no diesel engine to power them on the surface and to recharge the batteries. When submerged, these streamlined secret-weapons could travel for short periods at an impressive 22 knots, but at that speed the range was only 16 nautical miles. At the much reduced speed of 6 knots, they could go up to 80 nautical miles, more than enough to drive twice around the harbour and up to Broken Bay. Once the batteries ran out … they’d stop. 
  The interior of the imported scrap, pig-iron, rolled-plate submersible was harsh, coated with a thin coat of drab light grey navy paint that barely hid the lunch-orders, fingerprints and graffiti left by shipyard construction workers. 
  According to a serviceman on the mother sub that carried M-24 bolted to the deck for the thousands of kilometres south, there was a civilizing touch added by either Ban or Ashibe: an immodest, Japanese girlie calendar taped to the bulkhead; and some very-small-format, box-camera photos of their numerous girlfriends. The remnants may still be there; but the actual girlfriends would be much older, married, or dead by now.

Navigating by streetlights  

  Having made a successful exit from the harbour, there was no need to stay submerged, so they were travelling on the surface. 
  With a lot of the earlier pressure of battle vanishing, lack of pursuit from any enemy vessels or aircraft, or any shore-fire from the many recently constructed concrete gun emplacements located along the cliffs and headlands, the M-24 cruised North past Queenscliffe. 
  The full moon, and a fresh southerly blowing in from behind adding a useful knot or two, made navigating easy. To the crew’s amazement, the greatest assistance came from the streetlights that had been left burning throughout the attack. The promenade lights along South and North Steyne beaches blazed, and in the distance, an isolated and cavalier Barrenjoey lighthouse beamed on regardless.  
  With the hatch open to clear the toxic battery fumes and let in some fresh air, Ban would have been at the helm, cold and wet from the salt spray thrown up by foaming waves running over the starboard side of the hull, his relatively big head protruding from the top of the conning tower and silhouetted in the moonlight. 
  Ashibe, busy down-below trying to keep the unstable, rolling sub trimmed and their fragile means of escape viable, may not have noticed at first an abnormal sloshing in the bilge but the deepening water would have soon become obvious as it rose above the steel grate floor panels and surged dangerously fore and aft. Ashibe would have jotted down some figures and calculated that they wouldn’t be making it to the rendezvous; they were surely going down. 
  Ban would have felt the handling of the vessel grow increasingly sluggish and unresponsive as it filled with seawater. By torchlight, Ashibe would have looked for the source of the leaks and, from the inside, tried unsuccessfully to caulk any loose rivets or repair other obvious damage to the hull. However, in due course Ashibe would have tugged on Ban’s trouser leg and informed him of their increasingly precarious position. 
  Ban’s professional and objective response as senior officer would be, without doubt, to look at practical options for saving themselves. 
  Knowing with certainty that the sub would sink, they could easily have taken it in close to shore, possibly in the lee behind Long Reef, jumped off and swum or waded a few easy metres to the sand. The cast-off sub, motor still running, would have duly drifted out a little until caught again by the southerly and carried further north, its whining electric motor faltering, as the now deep and rising seawater inside shorted out the fuming batteries. 
  It was still dark when, a kilometre or so off Bungan Head, M-24 quietly sank below the waves and settled on the sandy bottom leaving Ban-San and Ashibe-San safely on the beach at Collaroy, contemplating their next move. 
  No Bodies Part 2 next month.  

*Associate Professor Kojihiro Matsuda is an historian and an authority on this subject, and lives in Orange, NSW.