I-400 & A-4 Rocket - Speculative April Fools

[ArmchairSamurai]

EDIT: On second thought, it appears I was fooled! This was posted on April 1st! By golly, I was actually thinking this was real for a moment. I even had real documentation to suggest it could have been! Oh boy.


Hello all.

It's been a minute since I last posted. I found something particularly interesting that I would like to share. I am sure most of you have heard of the Sen-Toku I-400 class submarine built by the IJN, but besides some speculative Yokosuka MXY7 builds being carried by said submarine, the historical plane paired with the I-400 was the Aichi M6A1. However, it seems, there may have been a plan, although fantastical at best, to shove a modified A-4 rocket into the hangar of the I-400. I found the following on a Russian forum site, I will link the site too:

https://fonzeppelin.livejournal.com/74013.html



Now, it's entirely possible this is fake. The story attached to it certainly seems so. I mean, without any Japanese sources to corroborate, it's hard to verify. That being said, I did, some time ago, find declassified US intelligence that may merely suggest this project *could* have been a reality (from a purely paper perspective), but not necessarily proving its existence outright as a real paper project. In section 6 of the document "German Technical Aid to Japan", it's noted that an OSS report dated in Sept of 1944 indicated that Germany sold A-4 plans to Japan, with the conclusion in the foremost document being that was no supplementary evidence to the OSS report's claim and it was unlikely Japan built any A-4 rockets considering it had little to no strategic value, unlike in Europe. I will link said section for reference.

My only thought is this idea, if real, was much like the many wunderwaffe of Germany, being a fantastical project dreamed up in the dying days of the war. Could it have been plausible? Sure. But given the lack of resources and with defeat looming on the horizon, such a project was doomed to stay on paper. I only wish there was more documentation to go along with it.

EDIT: Since this is fake, what are your thoughts on the weapon system? I would imagine the sheer force of the rocket would list the submarine. That would be something to see!

 

[Tzoli]

Indeed fake as others proved and provided info of, Naval based V-2 rocket is very tedious and dangerous to store, refuel and launch. For Japan at this time a more realistic weapon for the Sen-Toku or I-400 class submarines was the V-1 Flying Bomb or it's Kamikaze variant which requires much simpler and safer method to launch and store.

But I'm afraid as more and more people learn the advanced usage of Photoshop or equivalent drawing software, together with special knowledge of a field say aircraft, tanks or ships, such fake but very real looking drawings will appear in the future. Making our lives much more difficult as we will question every such drawing's authenticity even if it's real...

 

[ArmchairSamurai]

Indeed fake as others proved and provided info of, Naval based V-2 rocket is very tedious and dangerous to store, refuel and launch. For Japan at this time a more realistic weapon for the Sen-Toku or I-400 class submarines was the V-1 Flying Bomb or it's Kamikaze variant which requires much simpler and safer method to launch and store.

But I'm afraid as more and more people learn the advanced usage of Photoshop or equivalent drawing software, together with special knowledge of a field say aircraft, tanks or ships, such fake but very real looking drawings will appear in the future. Making our lives much more difficult as we will question every such drawing's authenticity even if it's real...

You hit the head on that one! If not for the date of the post, I was a bit convinced I stumbled onto something! Some of my rarer finds come from those odd Russian forum sites, so that did not help my case. However, the PDF I included is real, just saying. That is what lent some authenticity to the story since the intelligence there suggests such fantasies like the one I found, could have been real.

Speaking of the V-1, that same report also said that plans for the Buzzbomb were sold to Japan.

 

[ArmchairSamurai]

That, and there is also the odd photo of the Maru KA-10 pulse jet floating around here: