On 26 February 1942, the Japanese submarine I-25, under the command of Captain Akiji Tagami, was off the northern tip of King Island in Bass Strait off the coast of Victoria, Australia, when an E14Y was launched on a reconnaissance flight over the Port of Melbourne.

[1] The pilot and observer/gunner were in the air for three hours, during which time they successfully flew over Port Phillip Bay and observed the ships at anchor off Melbourne before returning to land on its floats beside the submarine, where it was winched aboard and disassembled.

Just days later, in the same aircraft, Ito flew the reconnaissance flight preceding the sole Japanese attack on Sydney Harbour in which twenty-one seamen were killed when HMAS Kuttabul sank on 1 June 1942.

[3] The E14Y also has the distinction of being the only submarine-based aircraft to drop bombs on the United States during World War II, in an incident known as The Lookout Air Raid.

Aviation History magazine reported in the November 2008 issue[4] that divers had found airplane parts in the Akibasan Maru wreck, a Japanese cargo ship sunk in the Kwajalein Atoll on 20 January 1944 and rediscovered in 1965.