Gents,
I'm sure that its been debated before but has anyone come up with a good AH plan for the Japanese to sabotage the Panama Canal on Dec.7'41 ?
I know that years before the anti-Japanese economic embargo, the US had required that
all shipping approaching either coast of Panama stop for the receiving of a pilot and a military inspection/escort squad that stayed aboard each vessel (with live ammo in their rifles on each vessel's bridge) for it's entire canal transit.
This makes the placing/carrying of a big bomb into the locks by merchant vessel, a very unlikey event.
Study of the engineering problems (and a reference which indicates that the US kept 2 pre-built lock gates on hand in Panama, in stock as it were) convinced me that torpedoing a lock gate or scuttling a merchantship in a lock was only going to slow down canal traffic for about a month or two since it was/is a "2-lane" system. Blocking/destroying only one side of each pair of gates will NOT stop ship traffic thru the canal. Any single lock gate could be replaced in just 3 weeks, start-to-finish.
Removing a scuttled ship from a lock would take longer but not that much longer.
A better way to sabotage the entire canal for a lengthy period of time would be to destroy parts of the largely earthen Gatun Dam which was built to hold back Gatun Lake, the Panama Canal's water storage reservoir.
Some 14 steel gates, each 20' high by 45' wide topped the concrete spillway to control reservior water levels so as to ensure that captured rainwater would operate the canal at maximum capacity year in and year out. The US Army's engineers estimated that the destruction of one or more of these 14 gates would knock out the canal's operation for 2-3 years until Panama's tropical rainfall could refill the repaired reservoir.
My question is, in light of the heavy US Army security present (they recognized the gates' vulnerrability) how could such destruction be accomplished ?
I've searched for a photo of the spillway gates to see if they might be vulnerable to an aircraft dropped torpedo and found
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/653683 which seems to show that this might be the case for about 8 of the 14 gates ? Also see
http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Central_America/Panama/photo767328.htm and
http://www.pbase.com/icicle50/image/28941405
Does anyone have any other realistic ideas (not including a kamikaze airplane dive) on destroying same ?
Does anyone know if the US ever hung anti-torpedo netting in Gatun Lake ?