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Japan's Largest Carrier Died 10 Days After Commissioning
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00:00At 3.17 on the morning of 29 November 1944, the American submarine USS Archerfish lay 1,400 yards
00:10from a ship her commander could not name. Six torpedoes left her tubes, each set to run 10 feet
00:18below the surface. The torpedoes needed less than a minute to cross the water. The target was a large
00:25ship, steaming south out of Tokyo Bay, with three destroyers around her. The first explosion came
00:31before the minute was out. Four of the six torpedoes struck. Seven hours and forty minutes later, at 10.57,
00:39the ship rolled over and slid under stern first, in water nearly two and a half miles deep.
00:46The submarine never saw her in daylight. Her commander went home believing he had sunk a
00:51carrier of about 28,000 tons. He was wrong by more than half. The ship was Shinano, about 72,000
01:00tons
01:00fully loaded, the heaviest aircraft carrier ever built. She had left Yokosuka nine hours and 15
01:08minutes earlier, bound for the base at Kure, 300 miles away. No carrier on earth would outweigh her
01:16until the USS Forrestal was launched in 1954. The Imperial Japanese Navy had commissioned Shinano
01:24ten days earlier. Ten days, four torpedoes, 1435 men by the most widely sighted count, who did not come
01:35home. Japan had spent four and a half years building her. The Imperial Japanese Navy would never again
01:43launch a warship that large. That is the whole event, and most accounts stop there. A submarine
01:50found the biggest carrier in the world on her first voyage and sank her within the day. It is a
01:57clean
01:57sentence. Part of it holds. She remains the largest warship ever sunk by a submarine. It is also an
02:06incomplete sentence. The record says otherwise. Shinano was never a fleet carrier in the American
02:13sense. She was designed as a support ship, built to carry reserve aircraft, fuel, and ordnance for
02:22other carriers. One account lists 50 rocket-powered Oka aircraft and six suicide boats as her cargo that
02:31night. No account lists an air group. She never launched a strike. Her guns, her flight deck,
02:38and her hangar were complete on paper, and the paper was all that had been tested. That is the version
02:45most people know. It is also wrong in the places that matter. The Americans did not defeat a finished
02:52warship. They found a ship in a condition that no armor could cure, and they found her with a weapon
02:59that had been repaired barely a year earlier. So the question is not how a submarine sank the largest
03:06carrier on earth. The question is how many separate failures had to line up in a single night. There
03:14were four, and almost none of them began in the Pacific that winter. Three were made in Japanese dry
03:21docks and staff rooms. The fourth was made partly in an American torpedo shop, in repairs that had arrived
03:28only a year or so earlier. What this one night decided was narrow. It decided whether Japan could
03:35replace, in steel, what it had lost in a single day. It could not. The day in question lay twenty
03:43-nine
03:43months back, and it had nothing to do with submarines. But the sinking of Shinano did not begin at three
03:54months later. In the Pacific, on a day when four carriers burned. And it began again a month later,
04:03in Tokyo, with a decision nobody there recorded as the start of anything. At about 10.22 on 4 June
04:121942,
04:13American dive bombers from the carriers Enterprise and Yorktown rolled onto the Japanese fleet northwest
04:20of Midway Atoll. Within minutes, three of the four Japanese carriers were burning. The fourth,
04:27Hiryu, was found and crippled that same afternoon, and she sank the next morning. Akagi, Kaga, Soryu,
04:35and Hiryu were gone. Those four ships carried about 250 aircraft between them. Japan lost 3,057 men
04:44in the battle. Partial and Tully, in their standard modern history of the battle, count about 110
04:51veteran carrier aircrew among the dead. Just under a quarter of those embarked on the four ships.
04:58Six carriers had struck Pearl Harbor. Less than six months later, four of the six were gone.
05:05The defeat was kept from the Japanese public. The news was announced as a great victory,
05:10and only the Emperor and the top Navy staff knew the true extent of the losses. Wounded men were
05:17treated as secret patients and kept from their families. The carriers that came after were redesigned,
05:24with only two flight deck elevators and new firefighting equipment. A different kind of
05:30failure was already sitting in a dry dock. At the Yokosuka Naval Arsenal, in a dock hidden behind
05:37sandstone cliffs and screens, lay the hull of warship number 110. She had been laid down in the spring of
05:451940, as the third battleship of the Yamato class. Work had slowed in December 1941. The fourth hull,
05:54number 111, had been cancelled in March 1942, about 30% finished, and scrapped. By June 1942,
06:04the third hull stood roughly 45% complete, still hidden behind its screens. Her structure was
06:12finished up to the lower decks, and most of her machinery was in. The Navy had a battleship nobody
06:18now needed, and no carriers to replace the ones it had lost. The order came in the month after Midway.
06:26Vice Admiral Seichi Iwamura first proposed turning her into a floating airbase.
06:31The naval air staff pressed for a full carrier. The compromise was a support ship, armoured like a
06:39battleship, carrying reserve aircraft, fuel, and ordnance for the fleet carriers that no longer
06:46existed in sufficient numbers. Final plans were ready by September 1942, for a ship of about 68,000
06:54tons with 18 fighters, 18 attack aircraft, and six scouts. The hull was too far along to become a true
07:02fleet carrier, so the designers fitted a flight deck to a ship built for a different war. Around her,
07:09the Navy drew up a larger program of new carriers. It called for 16 ships of the Unryu class. Only
07:17three
07:17would ever be completed. Kitaro Matsumoto, an assistant designer of the Yamato, later called
07:24the result ill-conceived and too hastily rushed to completion. What nobody in Tokyo understood yet
07:31was how long the compromise would take to build. Four carriers lost, one half-built hull. It would take
07:3927 months to find out what that meant. In December 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy owned the strongest
07:48carrier force on earth. Six fleet carriers crossed the North Pacific to Hawaii. The task force around
07:55them also included two battleships, three cruisers, eleven destroyers, and eight oilers, by one count.
08:02They put 353 aircraft over Pearl Harbor, out of 414 available, and in about 90 minutes they killed
08:122,403 Americans. The numbers tell a plain story about that year. Japan had the carriers, the pilots,
08:21and the initiative. It also had the heaviest battleships ever built. Yamato was commissioned
08:28on 16 December 1941, nine days after Pearl Harbor. She carried nine 46-centimeter guns, each firing a
08:37shell of 1,460 kilograms, out to 42 kilometers. Her full-load displacement was about 72,800 tons.
08:49Musashi followed in August 1942. Five ships of the class had been planned in 1937,
08:55and three were eventually finished. The third of them was Shinano, and she was larger in the ways
09:02that mattered for a carrier. Her hull ran 265.8 meters, with a beam of 36.3 meters. Her flight
09:10deck
09:11measured 256 meters by 40, covered in 75 millimeters of armor plate, laid over 20 millimeters of steel.
09:18Her single hangar stretched 163 meters. Twelve campon boilers fed four geared turbine sets that produced
09:28150,000 shaft horsepower on four shafts. Two elevators served the hangar, and the larger could
09:36lift 7,500 kilograms. Designers rated her at 27 knots, and gave her 9,047 tons of fuel oil,
09:45enough for 10,000 nautical miles at 18 knots. Then came the armor. The waterline belt was 400
09:53millimeters thick beside the magazines, and 160 millimeters elsewhere. Around her aviation
10:00gasoline tanks, the builders poured about 2,400 tons of concrete. A 1953 account in the U.S. Naval
10:08Institute proceedings puts the weight of her armor at 17,694 tons, one-third of her trial displacement.
10:17She was a carrier, armored like a battleship. Her guns were meant for the sky. She mounted 16 12.7
10:26centimeter dual-purpose guns in eight twin mounts. She carried 105 of the 25 millimeter automatic cannon
10:34in 35 triple mounts, and accounts of her final fit-out list more. Twelve rocket launchers, each with 28
10:43barrels, were added to throw a curtain of fire over the fleet. Four Type 94 directors controlled the big
10:50guns. Her designed air group was modest, 47 aircraft, but she could also carry up to 120 replacement
10:59aircraft for other carriers for other carriers and for shore bases. Her gasoline stowage was 720,000 liters.
11:08Japan guarded her accordingly. Only three photographs of Shinano are known to exist.
11:14Yard workers were warned that talking about the ship could bring serious punishment, up to and
11:20including death. The dock where she was built sat behind cliffs and camouflage screens. Even the American
11:27forces that would sink her did not know her name. The best evidence of what this class could absorb
11:33came 36 days before Shinano sailed. On 24 October 1944, in the Sibuyan Sea, her sister Musashi was attacked
11:44by waves of carrier aircraft from the USS Intrepid, Essex, Lexington, Enterprise, Franklin, and Cabot. By the
11:53commonly cited American estimate, she took about 19 torpedoes and 17 bombs. Other estimates run lower,
12:02as few as 11 torpedoes by Japanese count, and no one has fixed the number. She sank at 736 that
12:10evening.
12:11Musashi carried 2,399 men. Of them, 1,376 were rescued, many by the destroyers Kiyoshimo and Hamakaze.
12:23Hamakaze would be on the surface beside Shinano five weeks later. Both of Shinano's sisters would die
12:30to aircraft, Musashi on 24 October 1944 and Yamato on 7 April 1945. Shinano alone would be sunk by a
12:40submarine. Set that against the weapon that would be used on Shinano. The American submarine torpedo of
12:47the period carried a warhead of between 500 and 650 pounds of explosive. Four of them delivered roughly
12:55a ton to a ton and a quarter of explosive against a ship of 72,000 tons. By every ordinary
13:03measure,
13:04a ship built like Shinano should have been able to absorb it. 17,694 tons of armor, 2,400 tons
13:15of
13:15concrete, 105 automatic cannon, 27 months from the conversion order to the launch. But the measure
13:23that mattered was not armor. It was the state of the ship when the torpedoes arrived. And on that count,
13:30the Japanese advantage had been spent long before Archerfish found her. By 1944, the United States
13:38no longer lacked ships. The first Essex-class carrier had joined the fleet at the end of 1942,
13:46and by the end of 1944 about a dozen more had followed. The first three had been ordered on 3
13:53July
13:531940. Essex herself was laid down in April 1941 and commissioned in December 1942, about 20 months
14:02later. In all, 24 ships of the class would be commissioned. The deficit that mattered to this
14:08story was smaller, and it was in a weapon that fit through a torpedo tube. The American submarine force
14:15made up less than 2% of the Navy's personnel. It would account for about 55% of Japan's merchant
14:22ship
14:22losses. It paid for that record with 52 boats and 3,505 men. For much of the first two years
14:31of the
14:31war, its main weapon did not work. The Mark 14 torpedo ran at 46 knots on high power, with a
14:40range of 4,500
14:41yards. It carried 507 pounds of TNT in its first version. It had three separate defects. It ran about 10
14:51feet
14:51deeper than the depth set on its controls, and tests at Fremantle in August 1942 found an average error
14:59of 11 feet. Its magnetic exploder often fired early. Some torpedoes circled back toward the boat that
15:07fired them, and the submarine USS Grunian was probably lost that way. Its contact exploder had
15:14a firing pin that bound on impact, and in drop tests, 70% of exploders failed when the torpedo struck
15:22at 90
15:23degrees. In practice, that meant this. A perfect shot, fired at the correct range at a stationary hull,
15:31could pass underneath the keel or strike the side and not explode. Submarine captains reported what they
15:39saw. Beginning on 31 August 1943, war shots were fired into the cliffs of Kahulawe, in Hawaii,
15:48to learn what the contact exploder was actually doing. The repairs came late. On 24 June 1943,
15:58Pacific Fleet Headquarters ordered the magnetic exploder deactivated. The submarines of the Southwest
16:05Pacific kept using it until Admiral Kincaid ordered it switched off at the end of 1943.
16:12The first torpedoes, with new contact pistols, went to war in September 1943. The depth sensor was moved
16:22to the mid-body of the torpedo in the last half of that year. From Pearl Harbor to the first
16:28of the
16:28repairs was 18 months, to the last of them it was more than two years. Archerfish, a Balau-class boat
16:37and
16:37one of 120 built, was commissioned on 4 September 1943, the same month the new pistols reached the fleet.
16:46Her first four patrols produced little. The first, from December 1943 to February 1944, attacked three ships
16:56and scored no kills. The second met no Japanese targets in 42 days at sea. The third was a lifeguard
17:06patrol off Iwo Jima. The fourth, in August and September 1944, patrolled off Honshu for more than a month and
17:16sank nothing. Her new commander took over on 29 September 1944. Commander Joseph Enright, a 1933 Naval
17:26Academy graduate from North Dakota, had commanded the submarine Dace on a 49-day patrol in late 1943,
17:34with no results. He asked to be relieved and was sent to shore duty at Midway. He later described
17:40the command of Archerfish as a rare second chance. The Navy did not know what waited at Yokosuka.
17:47On 1 November 1944, an Army Air Force's photographic aircraft flew over Tokyo for 35 minutes at 32,000
17:58feet. One of the three known photographs of Shinano dates from that flight. It did not tell anyone her
18:04name. Enright would later be credited with a carrier of 28,000 tons, and the identity of his victim was
18:12established only after the war. Eighteen months to the first repair. Fifty-two submarines lost. Four
18:20patrols with little to show. The first decision was American and small. As the B-29 bases in the
18:27Mariana Islands opened, the Army Air Forces needed a way to recover crews who ditched on the long over-water
18:35flight home. Submarines were assigned to stations along the route. They were called lifeguards.
18:42Archerfish had done the job before. In the summer of 1944, she had rescued a downed aviator, Ensign
18:50John B. Anderson, during the strikes on Iwo Jima. She left Pearl Harbor on 30 October 1944, reached Saipan
19:01on 9 November, and sailed again two days later, after quick repairs. Her assignment was lifeguard
19:09duty for the first B-29 strikes on Tokyo. The first big raid from the Marianas came on 24 November.
19:17A
19:17total of 111 B-29s took off, and only 24 bombed the primary target. A second raid struck on 27
19:27November.
19:27Nothing about the assignment was meant to produce a battle. A lifeguard submarine was told to stay on
19:34station and wait. But a station off the approaches to Tokyo Bay was exactly where a ship leaving Yokosuka
19:41would pass. On the evening of 28 November, Archerfish learned that no raids would be flown that day.
19:49She was free to move. The second decision was Japanese, and it was made on shore.
19:56Shinano was commissioned on 19 November 1944. According to the standard account, a B-29 passed
20:04over on that same day, and the Navy General Staff ordered her to leave Yokosuka for Kurei,
20:10no later than 28 November. At Kurei she would finish her fitting out, and take on her cargo.
20:16Yokosuka was within reach of the bombers. Her captain, Toshio Abe, knew what the ship lacked. He
20:24asked for a delay. Most of her watertight doors had not been installed. Air tests of her compartments
20:31had not been completed. Many openings in her bulkheads were unsealed. Her fire mains and bilge systems had no
20:39pumps and could not be used. Her crew had not been trained on the portable pumps that were meant to
20:45replace them. The request was refused. The account also records that Abe was due for promotion to rear
20:52admiral once his ship was fitted out. It states the fact without drawing a conclusion from it, and so will
20:59this one. The ship had never been tested at speed. Her launch on 18 October 1944 had gone wrong when
21:09a
21:09caisson lifted early and pushed her into the forward end of the dock, damaging her bow. Repairs were
21:16finished by 26 October. She was photographed on sea trials from a tug on 11 November. Full-speed trials
21:25were never conducted. Her damage control arrangements had flaws of design as well as of completion.
21:32Counter-flooding pipes, meant to correct a list by filling tanks on the opposite side, could not distribute
21:39the weight evenly. The deficiency was overlooked in the rush to finish her. Accounts differ on the crew. Some
21:47describe men who had never been to sea. Others say most had sea-going experience, but little training on
21:54the equipment aboard this ship. They agree on one point. The damage control parties were green.
22:01Nine days separated her commissioning from her departure, and 51 days separated her launch from
22:08the evening she sailed. At 6 p.m. on 28 November 1944, Shinano left Yokosuka. Aboard were 2,175 officers
22:21and
22:21men, about 300 shipyard workers, and about 40 civilian employees. Three destroyers, Isokaze,
22:30Yukikaze, and Hamakaze, escorted her, and a submarine chaser, Char 241, joined the screen. The plan was
22:39simple. 300 miles to Kure, at an average of 20 knots, took about 16 hours. At that rate, she would
22:47have tied up
22:48at about 10 the next morning. Instead, at 10.57 the next morning, she went under. Neither side understood
22:56yet that those two small decisions were on the same course. On the evening of 28 November, Archerfish was
23:05on the surface, off the approaches to Tokyo Bay. Her lookouts saw a large shape leaving the bay, and took
23:13it
23:13for a tanker. At about 8.48 her radar held the contact at more than 12 miles. One account says
23:21the Japanese group had picked up the submarine's own radar emissions more than an hour earlier. If that
23:28is right, the escorts knew something was out there before the submarine had a name for them. Visual contact
23:35followed at about 9.40. By 11 o'clock, Commander Enright had identified an aircraft carrier, escorted
23:42by three destroyers, and heading south at about 20 knots. He did not know her class. He did not need
23:49to.
23:50He ordered her tracked from ahead, which meant running parallel at surface speed, and waiting for the
23:57geometry to close. It would not close quickly, because the carrier was zigzagging. The three destroyers
24:04were all of the Kagero class. By one account, Yukikaze had been present at the Java Sea, Midway, Santa
24:12Cruz, the Philippine Sea, and Leyte Gulf, without ever being hit by a shell, a torpedo, or a bomb. The
24:21three
24:21ships had just returned from Leyte Gulf, and needed repair and rest. The submarine chaser, Char 241, had been
24:30commissioned on 22 October 1944. On paper it was a strong escort. Inside the screen, by one American
24:40account, the watertight doors Shinano needed were still on an installation list. She was a heavy ship
24:47in a hurry, escorted by tired ships in a hurry. At about 10.45, Shinano's lookouts spotted the submarine on
24:56the surface. Isokaze broke formation to investigate, and was recalled. It was the first moment the Japanese
25:03group saw what was following it. It was also the moment its commander set the course of the night.
25:10Captain Abe appears to have believed that the submarine was bait for a wolf pack. He did not
25:16order a hunt. He ordered the group to turn away, and counted on a margin of two knots in speed
25:22to carry
25:23it out of reach. Shinano had a designed speed of about 27 knots, but full-speed trials had never been
25:30run, and the plan for this passage called for an average of 20. Then, at about 11.22, a bearing
25:38on
25:39one of her propeller shafts overheated. Abe cut her speed to 18 knots. It was the same speed Archerfish
25:47could make. The two-knot margin was gone, and the problem of escape became a problem of geometry.
25:54She had been under way for five hours and 22 minutes. At her planned speed, that was roughly
26:00a hundred miles of a 300-mile passage. Two hundred miles remained, and the speed that would have
26:07shortened them was no longer there. The zigzag, which was meant to protect Shinano, now worked against
26:14her. At several changes, of course, it turned the group back across the submarine's path.
26:20The Japanese ships had seen Archerfish. They had not stopped her. By the Navy's own history,
26:26the chase lasted about six and a half hours in all. No one can say what Abe was thinking. He
26:33did not
26:33survive to give his own account. What the record preserves is the sequence—a sighting at 10.45,
26:41a turn away, a margin of two knots, and a shaft bearing that overheated 37 minutes later.
26:50At 2.56, on the morning of 29 November, Shinano turned to the southwest, straight toward the
26:58submarine. Archerfish had worked her way ahead of the carrier, exactly where Enright had wanted her.
27:04The first test of the night had gone to the Americans, and it had not cost them a torpedo.
27:10It had cost the Japanese the single margin of speed that a damaged ship would later need.
27:17It took eight hours to get every name and number in this segment right—the after-action reports,
27:24the loss tables, the squadron rosters. If that work is worth something to you,
27:29hit the like button. It's the only signal that tells us to keep doing it this way,
27:34instead of the fast way. And then the rule changed. For most of the war, a surfaced submarine had no
27:42way to catch a fast warship that knew it was there. The established method for an American commander was
27:47to find the target, run ahead of it, dive, and wait for it to come to him. It depended on
27:54the target
27:54holding its course. The torpedo had improved as well. The record describes Archerfish's weapons
28:01as steam torpedoes, the type most submarines carried—the Mark 14. The later Mark 14 carried
28:09six hundred and forty-three pounds of Torpex, about a quarter more explosive than the first version,
28:15and by the autumn of 1944 its worst faults had been repaired.
28:19There was a second change, and it had come that same day. Archerfish was a lifeguard. Her orders were
28:28to stay near the bomber route and recover airmen. On 28 November she learned that no raids would be
28:35flown—a submarine with nothing to rescue and a target in sight was free to do what submarines were
28:42built to do. The United States had ordered unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan on
28:487 December 1941, within hours of Pearl Harbor. Over the next three and a half years, its boats would
28:56account for about 55 percent of Japan's merchant ship losses. But carriers and battleships were a harder
29:03kind of target. They were fast, alert, and escorted by destroyers. Taiho had shown the exception five
29:11months earlier. In June 1944 USS Albacore found the new carrier during the Philippine
29:18Sea battle and put a single torpedo into her starboard side, ahead of the island. Taiho had
29:25been in commission 104 days. About six and a half hours later, gasoline vapour that had spread through her
29:32hangar decks exploded, and she sank with about 1,650 men. One torpedo started it. Fuel vapour finished it.
29:42Taiho was not alone. Two of the three Japanese carriers lost in that battle were sunk by submarines.
29:50USS Kavala put three of six torpedoes into Shokaku, and fuel vapour explosions destroyed her too, with
29:58about 1,263 men. Taiho had lived 104 days. Shinano would live ten. Enright's problem was different.
30:08He had to put torpedoes into a ship that would not wait. His answer was to set the depth shallow.
30:15Ten feet is about three meters. Shinano drew 10.3 meters, so the weapon would run through only the
30:23upper third of her draft. By the autumn of 1944 the depth-keeping fault in the Mark 14 had been
30:31corrected,
30:32so a setting of ten feet could be trusted to mean ten feet. He picked it, by the accounts,
30:38to improve the chance of a hit, and to hold the ship high enough on her hull to capsize her.
30:45The setting mattered because of where Shinano was weak. Post-war examiners of the U.S. Naval
30:51Technical Mission to Japan found that the joint between her upper armour belt and her underwater
30:57anti-torpedo bulge was poorly designed, a trait shared with the Yamato-class battleships. All of
31:04the torpedoes that struck her exploded along that joint, at an average depth of 4.3 meters,
31:11about 14 feet. The designers had built the bulge to absorb a torpedo's blast. They had built the belt
31:19to stop a shell. They had not made the seam between them strong. No record shows that an American planner
31:26knew of that seam. A shallow setting found it. The rule had changed in a second way. An armoured ship
31:34is built to survive damage. A ship with open watertight doors, unsealed penetrations, untested
31:41compartments, and untrained damage control parties is not an armoured ship. She is a tonnage figure.
31:48Her belt, her concrete, and her 17,694 tons of plate counted for little if water could move freely through
31:58the hull. Taiho had proved it in June. Musashi had proved the opposite in October, when a finished ship
32:05took roughly 19 torpedoes by the American count. Shinano belonged to neither. She was a ship in the
32:13middle of her own completion. Just after 3 o'clock, signs of an enemy submarine appeared to the escorts,
32:20and Isokaze signalled Yukikaze to defend the carrier. Yukikaze never received the message.
32:28At about 3.04, Archerfish turned east and submerged. A few minutes later, Shinano turned south, exposing her
32:38entire side to the submarine. By 3.04, that advantage no longer existed. What remained was a
32:46race between the water coming in and the men trying to keep it out. At 3.15, Archerfish fired six
32:53torpedoes. They covered the 1,400 yards in less than a minute. By one account, the first struck 47 seconds
33:01after the first torpedo left its tube, in the stern. Ten seconds later, a second explosion landed about
33:08fifty yards farther forward. Four of the six found the hull. Between them, the four carried roughly a
33:15ton and a quarter of explosive. The ship they struck weighed about 72,000 tons. That is one ton of
33:24explosive
33:24for every 60,000 tons of ship. The first struck the stern, in a refrigerated storage space and an empty
33:33gasoline tank. The second struck the starboard outboard propeller shaft compartment. The third
33:40struck the No. 3 boiler room, and by one account it killed every man on watch there. The fourth struck
33:47the starboard air compressor room, beside the anti-aircraft magazines and the No. 2 damage control
33:54station. Enright watched the first two hits from periscope depth, and then took Archerfish down to
34:00four hundred feet. He counted four more explosions afterward, enough to make six, and took it that
34:07every torpedo had found the target. The Japanese records show four. Above him the escorts attacked.
34:14By one account they dropped fourteen depth charges, the nearest about three hundred yards away. On the
34:21carrier the first judgment was that the damage could be controlled. The list reached ten degrees to
34:27starboard within minutes. Pumping water into the port bilges raised it to thirteen. At three thirty it
34:34stood at fifteen degrees. About fifty minutes later Abe ordered the empty port outboard tanks flooded,
34:41and the list came down to twelve for a short time. Post-war examiners later concluded that the blasts had
34:48dislodged an I-beam that punched a hole into another boiler room, and that structural failures flooded the
34:55boiler rooms on either side. Abe doubted that the torpedoes could do serious damage. After the last
35:02hit he kept the ship at maximum speed. Post-war accounts hold that this drove more water through
35:08the holes in her hull. By one account he could have grounded her in shallow water and kept her above
35:15the
35:15surface. He held on instead. Her speed later fell to ten knots. The executive officer recalled hearing
35:23air rushing through the gaps around the watertight doors minutes after the last hit, and he blamed the
35:29failure to air test the compartments. After five o'clock civilian workers were transferred to the escorts
35:36because they were impeding the crew. At about six the starboard boiler room flooded,
35:42and the list reached twenty degrees. At six ten, by one account, Archerfish came to the surface and saw
35:50nothing. Enright was certain the carrier had gone down where he had left her. His crew had heard loud
35:57breaking-up noises for forty-seven minutes. They were wrong about the timing. Shinano was still afloat.
36:05At about seven o'clock her engines stopped for lack of steam. Abe ordered the propulsion compartments
36:12evacuated, and the outboard port boiler rooms flooded, which did not help. He had turned the
36:18group toward Shiono Point, the southern tip of the Kii Peninsula, and he ordered Hamakaze and Isokaze to
36:26tow her toward shore in the hope of beaching her. Together the two destroyers displaced about five thousand
36:33tons, roughly one-fourteenth of Shinano's weight. The first cables snapped. A second attempt was
36:40abandoned, for fear of injuring the crews if the cables parted again. The accounts differ on the hour.
36:47One chronology puts the loss of all power at seven forty-five, and the order to tow at eight fifty,
36:54toward Cape Ushio. Another places the loss of power near nine, with the list beyond twenty degrees.
37:01In either version the tow failed. At ten eighteen, with the list near thirty degrees, Abe released the
37:08crew from the ship, though he never formally gave an order to abandon. At ten fifty-seven, Shinano rolled
37:15over and went down stern first, about sixty-five miles from the nearest land, in about four thousand
37:22metres of water. Water pouring into the flight-deck elevator well, and an exhaust vent drew many swimmers
37:29back toward the ship. Fifteen degrees at three thirty, twenty at six, thirty at ten eighteen. Ten days after
37:39her commissioning, four torpedoes fired from one thousand four hundred yards had needed seven hours
37:45and forty minutes to finish what the Japanese Navy had spent four and a half years building. Captain
37:52Ab and his two navigators went down with her. What happens in the next twelve minutes is the part most
37:59documentaries skip entirely. If you want the rest of this war told the same way, from the records,
38:06not the legends, subscribe before it starts. Survivors came out of the water over the following hours.
38:14Yuki Kaze picked up several, and Isokaze rescued others. One of them, the actor Shoki Fukae,
38:22drifted about twelve hours before he was found. In all, one thousand eighty people were rescued. Fifty-five
38:29officers, nine hundred ninety-three petty officers and enlisted men, and thirty-two civilians. Against that
38:36figure stands the toll of one thousand four hundred and thirty-five dead, the number repeated in most
38:42modern accounts. The arithmetic closes. Two thousand one hundred seventy-five crew, three hundred workers,
38:50and forty civilians make two thousand five hundred fifteen aboard, and one thousand eighty rescued
38:56leaves one thousand four hundred thirty-five. One American account puts the loss nearer five hundred,
39:03and the sources do not agree. The survivors were not allowed to talk. They were held on the island of
39:10Mitsuko-jima until January 1945, isolated so that news of the loss would not spread. The navy had done the
39:19same thing after Midway, when wounded men were treated as secret patients and kept from their families. The
39:26ship that had been built in secrecy was now lost in secrecy. What the navy lost that night was larger
39:33than a
39:33hull. Shinano had taken four and a half years of around-the-clock work in a single dry dock. Her
39:40reported cargo was fifty Ochre rocket-powered suicide aircraft and six Shinyo suicide boats. The Ochre
39:49carried a warhead of one thousand two hundred kilograms and had a range of only about thirty-seven
39:55kilometers. It had to be carried close to its target under a bomber. When the weapon was first used,
40:02on 21 March 1945, eighteen Betty bombers took off with Ochre. American fighters intercepted the force,
40:11and every one of the bombers was lost. Twenty days after Shinano sank, the navy tried again. The carrier
40:19Unryu, commissioned on 6 August 1944, took on thirty Ochre on 13 December, bound for Manila. On 19 December,
40:29USS Redfish torpedoed her in the East China Sea. A second hit at 4.50 in the afternoon ignited her
40:37forward gasoline tanks, and the explosion set off the Ochre warheads. Unryu sank in about seven minutes.
40:44Of her people, one thousand two hundred thirty-eight died, and one hundred forty-five survived. Sixteen ships of
40:52her class had been planned. Only three were ever finished. By then, whatever advantage the Japanese
40:59carrier force had held was gone. In June, at the Philippine Sea, Japan launched 373 carrier aircraft
41:08in four strikes. It lost 243 of them. The battle killed most of the navy's remaining trained pilots,
41:15and afterward, Japan had enough of them to form the air group of one light carrier. In October,
41:22at Leyte Gulf, Japan sent its carriers as bait. Zuikaku, Zuiho, Chitose, and Chiyoda were lost.
41:32Zuikaku had been the last survivor of the six carriers that struck Pearl Harbor. Akagi, Kaga, Soryu,
41:40and Hiryu, had been lost at Midway, Shokaku at the Philippine Sea, and now Zuikaku. Of the six that
41:49sailed to Hawaii in 1941, none was left. Admiral Ozawa's decoy force had about 108 aircraft among
41:59all of its ships. The numbers tell a different story from the one on the silhouette. Shinono had
42:04been designed to carry 47 aircraft, and as many as 120 spares. No account lists an air group embarked
42:12on her, and the pilots to fill one were already gone. She had been built to supply a fleet of
42:18carriers.
42:19The last of the Pearl Harbor carriers had been lost five weeks before she sailed.
42:24Just over four months later, the screen that guarded her met its own end.
42:30On 7 April 1945, the battleship Yamato sailed on a one-way mission toward Okinawa.
42:38Hamakaze and Isokaze were among her nine escorts. Nearly 400 carrier aircraft attacked.
42:45Hamakaze was sunk. Isokaze lost steering after a near miss, and was scuttled by gunfire after
42:53Yukikaze took off her crew. Yukikaze came through the day unharmed. She was the only ship of her
43:00class to survive the war. By 7 April 1945, the class that Shinono had been born into no longer existed,
43:08and two of the three destroyers that had failed to protect her had followed her down. The ledger
43:14of what Japan lost is complete. The ledger of what America paid is not as short as the tonnage suggests.
43:21It begins at Midway. On 4 June 1942, the United States lost the carrier Yorktown and the destroyer
43:29Hammond, about 150 aircraft and about 307 men. These were the costs of the battle that created the
43:37conditions for Shinano. They were smaller than Japan's, but they were not small.
43:43The next entry fell on 20 June 1944, at the Philippine Sea. American pilots flew their strike
43:51late in the day and recovered in darkness. By one count about 80 aircraft were lost, most of them
43:57ditching or crashing while landing at night. The battle cost the Americans no carrier. It continues
44:04beneath the surface. The United States lost 52 submarines in the Second World War, and 3,505 men,
44:13374 officers, and 3,131 enlisted. The submarine service suffered a casualty rate of about 20%,
44:23the highest of any American force. One of the 52 was Albacore, the boat that had put the torpedo into
44:31Taiho on 19 June 1944. She left Pearl Harbor on 24 October 1944, refuelled at Midway on 28 October,
44:42and was never heard from again. Japanese records indicate she struck a mine on 7 November 1944,
44:50off southern Hokkaido. Three weeks before Archerfish fired, the boat that had sunk Taiho was already gone.
44:57In May 2022, a Japanese team, led by Tamaki Ura, located a wreck about 7 km east of Hakodate,
45:07at a depth of about 250 m. The Naval History and Heritage Command confirmed on 16 February 2023
45:16that it was Albacore. Another cost was time. The Mark 14 torpedo failed in three separate ways,
45:24and the repairs arrived on 24 June 1943, in September 1943 and in the second half of that year.
45:32Eighteen months passed between Pearl Harbor and the first of them, and more than two years passed
45:38before the last. During those months, American submarines fired weapons that ran deep, exploded early,
45:46or did not explode at all. There was also the cost of not knowing. U.S. Naval Intelligence,
45:53at first, doubted Enright's claim, because nobody had detected Shinano's construction. He was credited
46:00with sinking a carrier of about 28,000 tons, less than half the size of the ship that went down.
46:07Shinano was identified only after the war. Once she was, he was credited with her sinking,
46:13and awarded the Navy Cross. Archerfish's fifth patrol ended at Guam on 15 December 1944. She had gone to sea
46:24as a lifeguard. She survived the war and entered Tokyo Bay on 31 August 1945 with 12 other submarines.
46:33She was decommissioned in 1946, recommissioned in 1952, and in 1959 played the part of USS Sea
46:42Tiger in the film Operation Petticoat. That October, she bottomed at 322 feet,
46:49and Commander George F. Bond and Chief Enginman Cyril Tuckfield, escaped through her forward escape
46:56trunk. She was struck from the Navy list on 1 May 1968, and towed to a target position off San
47:03Diego.
47:03In October 1968, she was sunk by a torpedo from the submarine USS Snook. Enright retired from the
47:12Navy in 1963, and died in 2000, at 89. In 1987, he co-wrote a book on the sinking, Shinano,
47:22with James W.
47:23Ryan, and in researching it, he found the design flaws, the inadequate watertight integrity,
47:29and the tactical errors of Captain Abe. Archerfish received the Presidential Unit citation. None of
47:37the accounts examined for this documentary records an American death in the action itself.
47:42In the spring of 1940, at Yokosuka, a keel was laid for warship No. 110. On 3 July 1940,
47:51the first three Essex-class carriers were ordered. On 7 December 1941, six Japanese carriers put
47:59353 aircraft over 353 aircraft over Pearl Harbor. Nine days later, Yamato was commissioned,
48:05and work on the third hull slowed. In March 1942, the sister hull, No. 111, was cancelled at about 30
48:15%
48:15complete. On 4 and 5 June 1942, four Japanese carriers were lost at Midway. The next month,
48:24the Navy ordered the third Yamato-class hull converted to a carrier. In August 1942, tests
48:31at Fremantle found the Mark 14 torpedo running an average of 11 feet too deep, and Musashi was
48:39commissioned. In September 1942, Shinano's final plans were ready. At the end of that year, the first
48:47Essex-class carrier joined the American fleet. On 24 June 1943, the magnetic exploder was deactivated.
48:57On 31 August, war shots were fired into the cliffs of Kahulawe. In September 1943, Archerfish was
49:05commissioned, and the first torpedoes with new contact pistols went to war. On 7 March 1944, Taiho was
49:14commissioned. On 19 June 1944, at the Philippine Sea, she was sunk after 104 days, and the Navy moved
49:23Shinano's completion from April 1945 to October. On 29 September 1944, Enright took command of Archerfish.
49:33On 8 October, Shinano was launched, and a caisson that lifted too early damaged her bow.
49:40On 24 October, Musashi sank in the Sibuyan Sea. Archerfish left Pearl Harbor on 30 October.
49:49On 1 November, an American aircraft photographed Tokyo from 32,000 feet. On 9 November, Archerfish reached
49:58Saipan, and she sailed again two days later. On 11 November, Shinano was photographed on trials from a tug.
50:05On 19 November, she was commissioned. On 24 November, the first big B-29 raid from the Marianas reached Tokyo.
50:16On 28 November, at 6 p.m., Shinano left Yokosuka. At about 8.48, Archerfish held her on radar. At
50:25about
50:2610.45, the carrier's lookouts saw the submarine. At 11.22, a bearing overheated. At 2.56 on 29 November,
50:36she turned toward Archerfish. At 3.15, six torpedoes were fired. At 10.18, the crew was released. At 10
50:45.57,
50:46Shinano went down. On 13 December, Unryu loaded 30 Oka, and on 19 December, she followed Shinano down.
50:55In January 1945, the survivors left Mitsuko-jima. On 21 March 1945, the first Oka attack was flown,
51:05and every Betty bomber in it was lost. On 7 April 1945, Yamato was sunk, and Hamakaze and Isokaze were
51:14lost with her. On 31 August 1945, Archerfish entered Tokyo Bay. In 1954, the USS Forrestal was launched,
51:24and Shinano finally lost her place as the heaviest carrier ever built. Four things sank Shinano,
51:31and the first was haste. The Navy had set her completion for April 1945. After the Philippine
51:39Sea in June 1944, with American long-range bombers expected from the Mariana Islands, the date moved to
51:47October 1944, and the builder, unable to add workers, missed even that. She was launched on 8 October,
51:55with a damaged bow, commissioned on 19 November, and ordered out of Yokosuka by 28 November, after a B-29
52:04passed over the base. Nine days separated commissioning from departure. She had never been run at full speed.
52:12Her captain asked for a delay, and was refused. The second was the condition of the ship. Most of her
52:20watertight doors had not been installed. Air tests of her compartments had not been completed, and many
52:27openings in her bulkheads were unsealed. Her fire mains and bilge systems had no working pumps, and her
52:34damage control parties had not been trained on the portable pumps meant to replace them. Her counter-flooding
52:40pipes could not spread the weight evenly. About 300 shipyard workers were still aboard. The executive
52:48officer heard air rushing through the gaps in the doors, minutes after the last hit.
52:53Armour cannot keep out water that moves through open doors, and 17,694 tonnes of plate did nothing
53:01about the doors. The third was the design. The joint between the upper armour belt and the underwater
53:09anti-torpedo bulge was poorly built, a fault she shared with the Yamato-class battleships. The belt was 400
53:17millimetres thick, beside the magazines, and 160 millimetres elsewhere, and the seam between belt and
53:24bulge was the weak point in all of it. All of the torpedoes that struck her exploded along it, at
53:31an
53:32average depth of about fourteen feet. The blasts dislodged an I-beam into a boiler room, and flooding
53:39spread to the compartments on either side. Musashi had taken about 19 torpedoes by the American count
53:46before she sank. Shinano, with four, was gone in seven hours and forty minutes, and the difference
53:54lay in the seam and in the state of the ship. The fourth was the encounter itself, and it belonged
54:01to
54:01both sides. On the American side were a torpedo repaired between June and the end of 1943, a ten-foot
54:10depth
54:10setting that could finally be trusted, and a lifeguard assignment that placed a submarine off Tokyo Bay.
54:17A day without bombers freed her, and her commander tracked a contact from ahead for about six and a
54:23half hours. On the Japanese side were a captain who read a single submarine as the bait for a pack,
54:30a zigzag that turned the formation back across her track, a shaft bearing that overheated at 11.22,
54:37and a decision to keep speed after the hits. None of these alone sank her. All of them together
54:44took seven hours and forty minutes. Strip away the maps, the tonnage, and the flag planting,
54:51and what remains is a single reversal. In June 1942, Japan lost four carriers in two days, and set out
55:01to
55:01replace them in steel. The largest piece of that answer was a battleship hull, converted in haste,
55:09finished in haste, and sent to sea in haste. It lasted ten days. She remains the largest warship
55:16ever sunk by a submarine, and she was sunk because she was not ready. She was 265.8 meters long,
55:24wrapped in 17,694 tons of armor, and she lasted seven hours and forty minutes, against four torpedoes.
55:34Ten days, four torpedoes, 1,400 yards, and 1,435 men, by the most widely sighted count. At 3.17
55:44on the
55:45morning of 29 November 1944, the answer to Midway ended, 29 months. Folded inside that reversal was a
55:54second one, quieter, that nobody noticed until it was already finished. In the first years of the war,
56:02the weapon that could not be trusted was American. Submarine captains fired torpedoes that ran deep,
56:09exploded early, exploded early, or did not explode at all. 52 boats would be lost before the war ended.
56:16By the autumn of 1944, the thing that could not be trusted was Japanese, a ship that looked finished
56:24and was not. The weapon that had failed in 1942, found in November 1944, a weakness that no one in
56:33Tokyo had tested. Of the three destroyers that escorted Shinano, only Yukikaze outlived the war.
56:40She was transferred to the Republic of China in 1947, and scrapped in Taiwan in 1970, and her rudder
56:50and an anchor were returned to the Japan Navy Academy Museum. The Yokosuka Yard's first dry dock,
56:57opened in 1871, opened in 1871, is still in operation. The dock where Shinano was built has been in
57:04continuous use for American ship repair since the Second World War. It has held the carriers USS Midway,
57:11USS Independence, and USS Kittyhawk, and from 2016 to 2018, the 7th Fleet flagship, USS Blue Ridge. The first
57:21of them, was named for the battle that started Shinano's story. She sat in the same dock where
57:28that story was built, Dry Dock No. 6, at Yokosuka. If you want to understand how America actually won its
57:36war, not the version in the highlight reels, subscribe. There's a new one every few days.