Introduction | K17 History | The People

The Quest for Truth
“The Mystery of the K17 Submarine”

Christopher Creighton made one of the most sensational claims. He suggests that the K 17 knew of the Japanese fleet going to attack Pearl Harbour but Churchill had suppressed the information to ensure that a successful Japanese attack would force America's entry into the war. To hush up this traitorous act, the submarine and its crew were eliminated.

There were varying views of how the submarine was lost. At first Dutch Navy thought that they had blunder into their own allied mines but later Japanese sources revealed that they had laid a string of mines unknown to the Allies and the K 17 had stumbled into it. H.C. Besancon, Jr., the son of the lost boat’s commander and himself a retired officer of the Royal Netherlands navy, carried out the wreck expedition. He solved the mystery of how the submarine went down.