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Swedberg correctly surmised, the four-inch shell fired by the Ward ’s number-three turret had not traveled far enough to arm. But even without exploding, the shell had done its damage. The round that hit the
conning tower killed the Japanese skipper and the sub took on water. After sinking the Japanese midget sub, the Ward ’s crew continued to salvo depth charges into the harbor, assuming correctly that there were probably other submarines in the waters.
    The PBY patrol plane that Ken Swedberg had seen from the deck of the USS Ward was being flown by Lieutenant (jg) Bill Tanner, a twenty-four-year-old pilot from San Pedro, California. He was a graduate of USC and had joined the Navy in 1938, had trained in Pensacola, Florida, and had been stationed in San Diego until his squadron had ferried their twelve PBYs to Kaneohe Bay, on the northeast coast of Oahu, earlier that year. Tanner had responded to the radio calls from the Antares and the Condor and was flying over the area where the sub was last sighted. In the gray dawn of the morning, Captain Tanner thought he saw something and banked his plane for another look. His stomach fluttered a little when he spotted the subs—at least two, maybe three of them, in waters below—scarily close to the ships anchored just beyond the anti-submarine net, inside Pearl Harbor. He dropped smoke signal flares into the water where he had spotted the midget subs and then radioed a message to the air base telling of his discovery.
    Tanner turned his PBY around and headed back to the spot where he had dropped the smoke containers. He readied his plane for dropping depth charges on the target to try to sink the enemy subs that he’d discovered in the Hawaiian waters.
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    A PBY plane like the one that detected the midget subs.

    CAPTAIN WILLIAM (BILL) TANNER, JR., USN
Navy Air Recon PBY
Pearl Harbor Patrol Area
7 December 1941
0630 Hours Local

    The PBY was a very slow, cumbersome airplane, but it had great range. It had a crew of eight and two engines, and was a seaplane used for long-range reconnaissance. They flew on patrol about 700 or 800 miles and returned. They were not fighter airplanes; it was strictly reconnaissance, but we had guns if we were attacked.
    On the morning of 7 December, it was our turn to fly patrol, and as a matter of fact, it was the first real patrol that I had flown as a command pilot. I had just been made a patrol commander the week previous. I took off before dawn, along with two other airplanes, one flown by Fred Meyers and another by Tommy Hillis. We flew out of Kaneohe Bay on the north side of the island of Oahu, around Barber’s Point, turned east, and flew south of Pearl Harbor, with the island about two miles offshore. Then we veered slightly to the southeast and followed the line of the islands of Maui and Lanai toward the big island—about a hundred miles—and then we’d turn, and return on a parallel course twenty miles further to sea. That’s what I was supposed to do. The other two airplanes had slightly different patrols, to the north and east of where I was.
    I saw it, and the copilot saw it too—what looked to be a buoy in the water, but a moving buoy. We had never seen anything quite like it. There was no question in our minds that it was an enemy submarine. It looked like it was on a course directly heading toward Pearl Harbor. We looked off to the left and saw the Ward steaming toward the object. We were too close to do anything about arming bombs, so we dropped two smoke signal flares on the object to help the Ward close in on it.
    We turned left to circle and come back and see what was happening, and as I turned the airplane, the Ward was firing at the submarine. From
what we could tell, it looked like the first shot went high, and the second shot I thought was high because I saw it splash in the water behind the submarine.
    There was no question that it was an enemy submarine because our subs were