Maru-Se rocket powered submarine

[World B4]

I first saw this on navypedia, and I had a hard time finding more. I thought it might have been fake.

"MARU-SE" submerging assault craft (1945)

I found these images

http://www.ww2technik.de/Bilderchen/japmarine/armeeschiffe/jap%20maru-se%20type%20army%20sub%202.jpg

http://www.ww2technik.de/Bilderchen/japmarine/armeeschiffe/jap%20maru-se%20type%20army%20sub.jpg

They don't really show the most interesting reported feature of the sub, it's liquid rocked motor

 

[World B4]

This was on the site, referred to as an army attack sub. It looks very similar http://www.ww2technik.de/Bilderchen/japmarine/armeeschiffe/jap typ 5 angriffs-mini-u-boot armee.jpg

 

[tom!]

Hi.

There is a short article series about IJA late-war developments in Ground Power Special Issue 2/2005"Less Known Army Ordnance of the Rising Sun". This is the source for the pics mentioned above.

Sadly I have to say that there are only few sources on these things and some projects are weird even for me. I´m about to rewrite a lot of older pages from my website due to new sources I found and a lot of the older things like these are full of mistakes of me trying to read japanese ...


All I could proof by now is that there where were several projects at wars end with more or less value including Maru-Se, submersible guns etc. but only few reached prototype stage.

Jentschura, Mikel, Jentsch: "Warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy 1869 - 1945" mentions Maru-Se being a project of a Walther-type jet engine powered speedboat by Kawasaki, not a (semi) submergeable boat, with a prototype finished in August 1945.

But the pictures definitely show a submarine-style vehicle and they definitely have the designation "Type 5 (something)"...

Yours

tom!