Japan Built a Carrier Too Big to Sink – The U.S. Sub That Sank It Was Doubted

At 3:17 in the morning on November 29th, 1944, an American submarine commander pressed his eye to a periscope and saw a shadow so large it blotted out the stars. He thought it might be a tanker. It was the largest aircraft carrier ever built. 72,000 tons of steel raised on the bones of a Yamato class battleship, a ship many believed no torpedo could kill.

American naval intelligence had no idea she was at sea. She had been in commission for just 10 days. She had never launched a single plane in combat, and she would never see the end of her very first voyage. The man at the periscope was not a hero of the submarine force. A year earlier, he had asked to be removed from his own command, writing that he had failed.

This patrol was his last chance. On the other side of the darkness stood a Japanese captain who had begged his superiors for more time. He had warned them his ship was not ready. They sent him to sea anyway. For six long hours, these two men hunted and ran from each other across the Black Pacific. Every decision each of them made was reasonable.

Every decision brought them closer together. This is the story of how a ship built to be unsinkable went down in less than 8 hours. and why the men who sank her were not believed. Before we begin, pour yourself a warm cup of coffee or tea. Take a quick look at the clock. What time is it where you are right now? In the spring of 1940, at the naval arsenal of Yakoska, just inside the mouth of Tokyo Bay, workers began laying the keel of a ship that officially did not exist.

On paper, she had no name. She was simply hull number 110. Like her sisters, she was built behind a wall of secrecy. Japan did not want the world to know what kind of ships it was building or how large they would be. The Keel was laid on May 4th, 1940, more than a year and a half before Pearl Harbor.

Hull 110 was meant to be the third ship of the Yamato class. Her older sisters were already taking shape elsewhere. Yamato was rising at Kur. Mousashi was rising at Nagasaki. Together, the three of them were supposed to be the answer to a problem that had haunted the Imperial Japanese Navy for 20 years. Japan could never build as many ships as the United States.

The Americans had more steel, more oil, more shipyards, and more money. So, Japanese planners made a different bet. If they could not build more ships, they would build bigger ones. battleships so large, so heavily armored, and so powerfully armed that no American battleship could stand against them. The Yamato class carried the largest guns ever mounted on a warship, 18 in across the boar.

Each shell weighed about as much as a small automobile. The armor belt along the waterline was more than a foot thick. Below it, a system of bulges and compartments was designed to absorb torpedo hits and keep the sea out of the heart of the ship. Fully loaded, a ship of this class would displace more than 70,000 tons.

For a while, the work at Yakoska went on. Steel ribs climbed out of the dock, and then in the summer of 1942, the world those workers were building for came to an end. In early June of 1942, near a small atole in the middle of the Pacific called Midway, American dive bombers found the heart of the Japanese carrier fleet.

In a matter of minutes, Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu were burning. Later that day, Hyu was hit as well. Four fleet carriers were lost. Along with them went hundreds of aircraft and many of the most experienced aviation crews the Navy had. The fleets never came within sight of each other. The battleship was no longer the queen of the ocean.

The aircraft carrier was. And Japan had just lost four of them in a single battle. At Yokoska, the future of Hull 110 was suddenly in question. The Navy now faced a hard question. What do you do with the unfinished hull of a super battleship when what you desperately need are flight decks? Building a new carrier from scratch would take years.

Japan did not have years, but the enormous hull already sitting in the dock at Yokoska might be converted. The decision was made that same summer. Hull 110 would become an aircraft carrier. She would carry the name of an old province in the mountains of central Japan, Shinano. But she would not be an ordinary carrier.

The heavy battleship Hull was too slow and too different to simply copy a purpose-built design. Instead, Shinano was planned as something new, a support carrier, a floating armored base that could stay behind the front lines, carrying spare aircraft, fuel, bombs, and torpedoes to resupply the other carriers of the fleet.

To protect that role, she was given an armored flight deck designed to survive the kind of heavy bombs that had torn apart the carriers at Midway. She kept much of the heavy armor and underwater protection of her battleship design. When finished, she would be the largest aircraft carrier in the world. About 870 ft long, around 72,000 tons fully loaded.

No carrier anywhere would match her size until the Americans built a new generation of carriers a decade after the war. But a ship like that takes time, and time was the one thing Japan was running out of. Far away on the other side of the Pacific, the story of the man who would one day find her was moving in a very different direction.

Joseph Francis Enright was born on September 18th, 1910 in Minot, North Dakota. It was prairie country, a long way from any ocean. He went to the Naval Academy at Annapapolis and graduated in 1933 in the lean years of the Great Depression. He served three years aboard the battleship Maryland. Then in 1936, he qualified in submarines.

The boats were cramped, hot, and smelled of diesel oil and sweat. A captain could not hide there. Every man aboard knew within days whether the officer in command had the nerve and the judgment to bring them home alive. By the summer of 1943, Enright had earned his chance. On July 23rd, 1943, he took command of a new submarine, the USS Dace.

It should have been the beginning of something. Instead, it became the wound he would carry for the rest of the war. Dace sailed on her first war patrol in the autumn of 1943. It lasted 49 days. During that patrol, Enight had the chance every submarine captain dreamed of. He made contact with a Japanese aircraft carrier.

His approach was cautious. Later, it would be described in the record as timid. The carrier got away. Later in the patrol, he found a tanker. But Dace was driven off by depth charges before she could score. 49 days at sea. No ship sunk, no damage confirmed. In the submarine force of 1943, admirals were ruthless about results.

Captains who did not attack were quietly moved aside. Enright did not wait to be moved aside. He did something unusual. He wrote the request himself. I was responsible for an unproductive patrol, he wrote, and request to be relieved by an officer who can perform more satisfactorily. A man does not write words like that about himself unless he believes them.

His request was granted. Joseph Enright left the DAC. He was sent to the submarine base at Midway, the same atal where the Japanese carrier fleet had been broken a year before. There he worked at a desk. For 6 months he watched other submarines come and go. Some came home flying small flags for the ships they had sunk.

Some did not come back at all. Somewhere in those months, the doubt was joined by something else. a refusal to let that letter be the last word on who he was. He asked for another command. In a Navy at war, second chances were rare, but the submarine force needed experienced officers, and Enight knew his trade. In September of 1944, he was given command of the USS Archerfish.

ArcherFish was a Balo class submarine built at the Portsouth Navyyard in Maine. She was about 311 ft long and carried a crew of roughly 80 men. On the surface, running on her diesel engines, she could make about 19 knots at her very best. Underwater on batteries, she was far slower. She carried torpedoes in tubes at her bow and her stern, and she carried a captain who knew exactly what it felt like to come home empty-handed.

While Enright was at his desk on Midway, the war had turned hard against Japan. In the summer of 1944, American forces landed in the Marana Islands. Saipan fell in July. Tinian and Guam followed. On those islands, American engineers began carving out long runways, longer than any fighter plane would ever need.

They were built for a new bomber, the Boeing B29 Superfortress. The B-29 could fly higher and farther than any bomber Japan had faced. From the Marianas, it could reach Tokyo in return. For the first time in the war, the Japanese home islands were within steady reach of American heavy bombers. Then in October of 1944 came the Battle of Lee Gulf in the Philippines.

It was the largest naval battle in history and for Japan it was a catastrophe. During that battle on October 24th, American carrier planes attacked Mousashi in the Cibuan Sea. Wave after wave came in. She was struck again and again by torpedoes and bombs. That evening, Shinano’s sister ship rolled over and sank. The lesson was the same one Midway had taught.

No amount of armor could keep a ship alive forever if the enemy kept hitting her. At Yakoska, the pressure to finish Shinano became almost unbearable. And then, before she had even left her dock, the ship suffered her first blow. On October 8th, 1944, Shinano was to be floated out of her building dock. Water was let in.

The great gate at the entrance of the dock, a floating structure called a quesan, was supposed to hold steady. It had been improperly ballasted. As the water rose, the quesanon lifted. The sea rushed into the dock and shoved the giant hull forward. Shinano’s bow struck the end of the dock and was damaged at the waterline.

The repairs were completed by October 26th, but for sailors raised on the old superstitions of the sea, it was a terrible way for a ship to begin her life. Less than a week later came the second blow. On November 1st, 1944, a single American aircraft appeared high over Tokyo. It was a photographic version of the B-29 known as an F-13. Its crew had named it Tokyo Rose.

It was the first American plane over the capital since the Dittle raid. It flew too high for the defenses to catch, and as it passed over the Tokyo area, its cameras recorded what lay below. That included the naval arsenal at Yokoska and the enormous carrier sitting there. For the admirals in Tokyo, this was the nightmare.

The largest carrier in the world was sitting still in a known location, now within range of American heavy bombers. One successful raid could turn years of work into a burnedout shell. The decision came quickly. Shinano would leave Yakoska and sail for Kuray, the great naval base on the inland sea. There, farther from the American bombers, she would be finished.

She would not travel empty. She was to carry 50 Oka rocket powered suicide aircraft and six Shinoyo suicide motorboats. They were weapons meant for the desperate battles to come in the Philippines and around Okinawa. weapons designed so that young men would fly or drive them straight into American ships. On November 19th, 1944, Shinano was formally commissioned into the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Her captain was Toshio Abbe. He was a seasoned officer, and he understood exactly what kind of ship he now commanded. He also understood exactly what was wrong with her. Shinano looked finished from the outside. Inside, she was not. And the crew was new. Men had been gathered from across a navy that had just lost much of its fleet. Many had never served together.

Most barely knew their way around a ship this large. Captain Abe put his concerns in front of his superiors. He asked for more time. He pointed to the doors, the untested compartments, the open cable holes, and the pumps. He also pointed to the destroyers assigned to escort him. Their crews had just come through Lee Gulf and they were exhausted.

His request was denied. The fear of bombs falling from the sky had outweighed the fear of torpedoes waiting in the sea. Shinano would sail on November 28th. Out at sea, the submarine that would meet her was already there. Archer Fish had left Hawaii on October 30th, 1944. Her orders sent her to the waters off Tokyo Bay.

Her job was lifeguard duty. When the B-29s began striking Tokyo, some of them would be damaged and fall into the sea. A submarine station nearby could surface, pick up the survivors, and bring them home. It was important work, but for a captain hungry to prove himself, it meant long days of waiting. And there was an irony in it that no one aboard could see.

The B-29 had driven Shinano out of her safe harbor, and the B-29 had placed Archerfish directly outside the door. On the evening of November 28th, as the sun went down over Japan, one of the largest warships on Earth prepared to slip her lines at Yokosuka. Out beyond the bay, in the gathering darkness, a small American submarine and a man with something to prove were waiting.

On the afternoon of November 28th, 1944, Shinano sat at Yokosuka like a mountain someone had painted gray. From the pier, she looked ready. The long flat flight deck stretched out over the water. The island rose on her starboard side. Anti-aircraft guns bristled along her edges. To a man standing on the dock, it was hard to imagine anything in the ocean that could hurt her.

But the men who walked her passageways knew better. Below the flight deck, the ship was a maze of half-finish work. Cables ran through holes in steel bulkheads that were supposed to be sealed and were not. Ventilation ducts passed from one compartment to the next with open gaps around them. Watertight doors and hatches had been left open so workers could move freely to the machinery spaces.

Even some manholes in the double and triple bottom of the hull had been left open. In a finished warship, every compartment is tested. Air is pumped in under pressure, and men listen and feel for leaks. On Shinano, those tests had not been completed. Nobody truly knew which compartments would hold water out and which would not.

The fire manes and the pumps that would be needed to fight flooding were not ready. The damage control system existed mostly on paper. Aboard were 2,175 officers and men. With them were 300 shipyard workers and 40 other civilians, more than 2,500 people in all. Many of the sailors had arrived only recently. They had come from ships that had been sunk, from shore stations, from training schools.

Some had survived battles that destroyed their old ships. Some had never been to sea in wartime at all. In a ship about 870 ft long with countless compartments, many of them could not yet find their way from their bunks to their battle stations without asking directions. Somewhere inside the ship was her cargo, 50 suicide aircraft, six Shinoyo suicide motorboats. They were bound for Cur.

and from there for the battles everyone knew were coming. Captain Toshio Abbe had done what he could. He had asked for more time and been refused. Now he would do his duty. Abe had wanted to make the trip in daylight. Daylight would have given him extra hours to train his crew and given the tired destroyer crews time to rest, but the Navy general staff could not provide air cover for the voyage.

Without planes overhead, a daylight run was too dangerous. So Shinanana would sail at night. She would run southwest through the darkness, averaging about 20 knots. The distance to Kur was about 300 m. At that speed, the voyage would take around 16 hours. By the next day, she would be safe inside the inland sea. Three destroyers would guard her.

Isukaz, Yukaz, and Hamakaz. These were not green ships. They had fought at Lee Gulf only a month earlier. On the way home, just one week before, they had been escorting a group of battleships when an American submarine attacked in the night. The battleship Congo and the destroyer Urakaz were sunk. Isocaz and Hamakaz had pulled Congo’s survivors from the sea.

The men aboard those destroyers knew exactly what American submarines could do. They were also exhausted. They had barely had time to rest before they were sent out again. At 6:00 in the evening, Shinano cast off. Slowly, the enormous hull moved away from the arsenal and out into Tokyo Bay.

The destroyers fell in around her. The lights of Yokosa faded behind them. Ahead lay the mouth of the bay, and beyond it, the open Pacific. The water of the bay was calm. The night air of late November was cold enough that men on the open decks turned up their collars and pushed their hands deep into their pockets. Behind the ship, the long white wake spread out and slowly vanished.

On the flight deck, there were no planes, only wind, steel, and the dark shapes of the destroyers keeping pace around her. For the young sailors who stood at the rails and watched the shoreline slip away, it must have been a strange feeling. Their homeland was right there, a few miles off, dark under wartime blackout. And yet they were already at sea, and the sea belonged to no one.

Many aboard believed they were sailing on the safest ship in the Empire. She was too big, too strong, too new to die. Captain Abe knew too much about the inside of his ship to be comforted by her size. But a captain does not share his doubts with his crew. He stood on his bridge and gave his orders in a steady voice.

Beyond the mouth of the bay, a small submarine was running on the surface in the dark. Archer fish rode low in the water. Her diesel engines rumbled steadily. On her bridge, lookout stood with binoculars, scanning a sea that was black in every direction. Below them, in the conning tower, a radar operator watched a glowing screen.

Lifeguard duty meant waiting. Long hours of watching empty sky and empty sea. Life aboard a submarine on a patrol like that settled into a rhythm. Watch, eat, sleep, watch again. The air below decks was stale and heavy. A mix of diesel fumes, cooking, damp clothing, and too many men in too small a space.

Condensation dripped from the pipes overhead. Men slept in narrow bunks. Some of them squeezed in among the torpedoes in the torpedo rooms. They played cards. They read letters from home that they had already read a dozen times. They talked about food, about wives and girlfriends, about what they would do when the war was over.

And they waited for something to happen. For Joseph Enright, every quiet day had weight. He was 34 years old. He had already written one letter saying he had failed. He did not intend to write another. At 8:48 in the evening, the radar operator saw something. A contact, large, moving. The report went up to the bridge, and Enright came to look.

The range was long, but the size of the return on the screen was striking. Whatever was out there was big, and it was not alone. There were smaller contacts near it. At first, the thought aboard ArcherFish was that this might be a tanker, a big one, heavily escorted. That alone would be a prize worth chasing.

A loaded Japanese tanker was worth more than its weight in steel because every barrel of oil it carried kept ships and planes in the fight. Enright gave the order to begin tracking. ArcherFish swung onto a course parallel to the contact. Her engines came up to full power. The chase had begun. Out on the bridge, the wind whipped across the men’s faces.

Spray came over the bow and ran cold down the backs of their necks. The lookouts pressed their binoculars to their eyes until their brows achd. Somewhere far across that black water was a shape no one could yet see clearly. Below the word passed quickly from compartment to compartment. Contact. Big one. The old man is going after it.

Men who had been half asleep swung out of their bunks. In the galley, the cook started more coffee. In the torpedo rooms, the torpedo men began checking their weapons one more time. Nobody had to be told that this could be the night the whole patrol was measured by. As the hours went on and the picture sharpened, the men of Archerfish began to realize the truth. This was no tanker.

The shape was long and flat. It had the silhouette of an aircraft carrier, an enormous one. For a submarine captain in 1944, there was no greater prize. And for Enright, there was no greater test. He had faced a Japanese carrier once before aboard Dace. He had been cautious. The carrier had escaped. Now, a year later, fate had put another one in front of him.

It is hard to imagine a cruer kind of test, not a new challenge, but the same challenge he had already failed, offered to him a second time. This time there would be no one else to blame and no second letter to write. Whatever happened in the next few hours would belong to him. But catching it was another matter. The problem was speed. Shinano was making about 20 knots.

Archer fish running flat out on the surface could make about 19. A submarine chasing a faster ship from behind was like a man on foot chasing a car. It could not be done. Enright knew the only way to attack was to get ahead. If Archerfish could reach a position in front of the carrier’s path, she could dive and wait.

The target would come to her. But the carrier was not steering a straight line. Shinano and her destroyers were zigzagging, changing course at intervals so that any submarine trying to predict their path would be thrown off. So the chase became a kind of guessing game. Enight and his officers plotted each new course the target took.

They tried to work out the pattern. They tried to position the submarine so that when the next turn came, it would bring the carrier closer instead of farther away. Every mistake costs distance, and distance with a target one knot faster could never be won back. In the engine rooms, the diesels roared without pause. The heat built up.

The men who tended those engines stood close to machinery running at the very edge of what it was built to do. They wiped the sweat from their eyes and watched the gauges. If one engine failed, the chase would be over. If two failed, archer fish would be crawling in the dark within reach of three enemy destroyers. The noise was enormous.

Men had to put their mouths almost against each other’s ears to be heard. The deck plates trembled under their feet. The smell of hot oil hung in the air so thick they could taste it. Hour after hour, they fed those engines everything they had. Nobody complained. Everyone understood. On the bridge of Shinano, Captain Abbe was fighting his own battle.

It was a battle not with an enemy he could see, but with the uncertainty of what was out there. His bridge was high above the sea. From there, the night looked empty. Black water, black sky, the faint shapes of the destroyers. But Abe was an experienced officer, and he knew that an empty ocean meant nothing. The coast of Japan had become a hunting ground for American submarines.

Every captain in the Imperial Navy had heard the reports. Tankers lost, transports lost, warships lost. Only days earlier, a battleship lost. He also knew what his own ship was. Not a finished fortress, but a giant with open doors inside. He had said as much to his superiors himself. At 10:45 that night, lookouts aboard the carrier spotted something on the surface.

A low shape in the darkness, a submarine. The report electrified the bridge on the destroyer Isocaz. The reaction was immediate. She broke away from the formation and turned toward the contact, ready to charge. For the men of that destroyer, it was the natural thing to do. They had just watched Congo die to an American submarine.

Here was a chance to strike first, but Captain Abe ordered Isokaz back. It was not cowardice. It was not carelessness. It was a calculation. Abe believed the submarine he could see was not alone. He believed he was facing an American Wolfpack, a group of submarines working together. In his mind, this visible submarine was bait, a decoy.

Its job was to draw one of his escorts away. And the moment a destroyer left its place in the screen, the other submarines waiting unseen would have an open path to the carrier. He was not going to take that bait. Isocaz turned around and returned to her station. It was a reasonable decision.

Given what Abe knew, it may even have been the wise one, but there was no wolfpack. There was only archer fish. And by calling the destroyer back, Captain Abe allowed the one submarine that was actually hunting him to keep hunting. Whether anyone aboard ArcherFish understood how close that moment had come, the danger passed. The destroyer did not come.

The chase went on. A little over half an hour later. At around 11:22 that night, a new problem appeared. This time, it came from inside Shinano herself. Deep in the ship, one of the bearings supporting a propeller shaft began to overheat. A propeller shaft on a ship like Shinano is a massive rod of steel, turning at high speed for hour after hour, supported along its length by bearings.

On a finished ship that has been through proper trials, those bearings are worn in gradually. On Shinano, rushed out of the yard, there had been no time for any of that. Now, one of those bearings was running hot. If the crew kept pushing, the shaft itself could be damaged. A damaged shaft could mean a crippled carrier, drifting in waters where enemy submarines had just been cited.

Somewhere below decks, men would have been crowding around that bearing, feeling the heat radiating from it, watching the gauges, knowing that the problem in front of them was exactly the kind of problem a proper shakedown cruise is meant to find. Shinano had been given no shakedown cruise. Her shakedown was happening now in the dark with an enemy submarine somewhere nearby. There was only one answer.

Slow down. Shinano’s speed was reduced to 18 knots. It was a small number, two knots less than planned. But in the geometry of this chase, it changed everything. 18 knots was no faster than Archer Fish could run on the surface. The target was no longer running away. The two ships were now moving at nearly the same pace.

On the submarine, the effect was not dramatic. There was no sudden cheer. The radar picture simply stopped getting worse. The gap was no longer growing the way it had been. But it was not shrinking fast either. Hour after hour, the two ships moved through the night on roughly parallel paths. The carrier zigzagged, the submarine adjusted.

Enright tried again and again to get far enough ahead to set up a submerged attack. Each time the next zigzag seemed to take the target away from where he needed it to be. Midnight came and went. November 28th became November 29th, 1:00 in the morning. Then two. The men of ArcherFish had now been at battle stations or close to them for many hours. Few of them had eaten properly.

None of them had slept. The engines were still running hot. The coffee had gone bitter. The patience of every man aboard was being tested to its limit. On the bridge, the cold had worked its way into the lookout’s bones. Their hands were stiff on the binoculars. Their eyes burned from staring into darkness.

Every so often, a man thought he saw something, a shadow, a flicker of white water, and his heart jumped, and then it was gone. In the conning tower, the plot of the chase grew more tangled with every hour. Line after line on the chart. Course changes, estimated positions, a picture of two ships dancing around each other in the dark without ever touching.

Enright’s mind kept working the problem. Speed, course, range, angle. A long range shot from the surface was possible in theory, but firing at a heavily escorted target from the surface in the dark at long range was a low percentage gamble. If it failed, the destroyers would know exactly where the submarine was. They would come for her, and the carrier would escape.

He had been called timid once. The easy thing, the thing that might silence that word forever, was to fire something, anything, and hope. He did not do it. He kept tracking. He kept plotting. He kept waiting for the right moment. Perhaps the hardest kind of courage is the courage to wait when every instinct is screaming at you to act. But waiting has a limit.

Before long, Shinano would be close enough to the entrance to the inland sea to slip into safer waters. Dawn would come. The opportunity would be gone. As the clock moved toward 3:00 in the morning, the chase seemed to be slipping away. And then, Captain Abe turned his ship. At 2:56 in the morning, Shinano changed course. She swung to the southwest.

To Abe, it was another leg in his pattern. Another move to confuse any submarine that might be following, but this turn did not take the carrier away from ArcherFish. It pointed her straight at it. On the submarine, the radar numbers began to move in a way they had not moved all night. The range was closing and closing fast.

The massive target was no longer sliding along beside them. It was coming toward them. Enight saw it at once. After 6 hours of chasing, the target had come to him. He did not hesitate. 8 minutes after the carrier’s turn, Archerfish turned east and prepared to dive. Clear the bridge. The lookouts dropped from their posts and scrambled down the ladder.

Boots clattered on steel rungs. The last man pulled the hatch shut above him and spun the wheel to lock it. Dive. Dive. The alarm sounded through the boat. The diesel engines stopped. Air intake slammed shut. The electric motors took over. And the rumble that had filled the submarine for hours suddenly gave way to a quiet hum.

Archerfish tilted forward and slid beneath the black surface of the Pacific. At periscope depth, she leveled off. Inside, the air was thick and close. The only sounds were the soft wor of machinery, the quiet voices of men passing reports, and the tick of the clock. Enright raised the periscope. The sea above was dark.

But as he turned the lens, the shape came into view. Enormous, unreal. It was far larger than any ship he had ever looked at through a periscope. It seemed to fill the glass. For hours, the target had been a number on a radar screen and a line on a chart. Now it was real. A wall of steel moving across the night with a bow wave curling white at its foot.

Somewhere in that massive hull were thousands of men. Somewhere on its bridge stood a captain Enright would never meet, making decisions Enright could only guess at. In the conning tower, no one said a word more than they had to. And then a few minutes after the submarine dived, the carrier turned again. Shinano swung toward the south.

It was another routine leg of the zigzag, but from where Archer fish lay, that turn laid the whole long side of the carrier out in front of the submarine’s bow tubes, stem to stern, broadside. It was the kind of target that submarine officers dream about and almost never see. A nearly perfect firing position.

Enright began calling out the data. Range, bearing, estimated speed, angle on the bow. In the conning tower, the fire control party fed the numbers into the torpedo data computer, a machine of gears and dials that worked out where the target would be when the torpedoes arrived. There was one more decision to make.

How deep should the torpedoes run? Enright chose shallow. He ordered the torpedoes set to run at 10 ft. A shallow hit would strike high on the hull, not far below the water line. Water pouring into one side of a ship can make her list, and a ship that lists far enough can roll over. In the forward torpedo room, men worked quickly to set the depth on each weapon.

Six torpedoes, six tubes. The outer doors were opened, the tubes flooded. The torpedoes waited in their steel sleeves with only a thin wall of water between them and the open sea. The range kept dropping. Somewhere above the submarine, the destroyers were moving through the dark. If any one of them spotted the periscope or heard the submarine, the attack would be over and the depth charges would begin.

Enright kept his eye to the glass. The range was about 1,400 yd, less than a mile. At 3:17 in the morning on November 29th, 1944, Joseph Enight gave the order. Fire one. A jolt ran through the submarine as the torpedo left the tube. Compressed air pushed it out into the sea. Its motor caught and it was on its way.

A few seconds later came the next order. Fire two. Another jolt. Fire three. Fire four. Fire five. Fire six. Fire six. Six torpedoes were now racing through the dark water toward the long side of the largest aircraft carrier on Earth. Each had been spaced to spread along the length of the target. If the solution was right, they would strike from bow to stern. Enright stayed at the periscope.

He needed to see. The seconds dragged. In the conning tower, men stared at the clock. Some of them were counting under their breath. Every man aboard knew that the Mark1 14 torpedo had a troubled history. Earlier in the war, far too many had run too deep or failed to explode.

Many of those problems had been fixed by now. But no one aboard trusted a torpedo until they heard it hit. And then through the periscope, Enright saw it. A flash against the side of the carrier. An eruption of water. Then another. He had seen two hits with his own eyes, but he could not stay to watch. One of the escorts was coming close. The time for looking was over.

The time for survival had begun. Enright lowered the periscope and ordered the submarine deep. Archerfish tilted down and went below periscope depth, sliding into the dark. As she went down, the sound of more explosions rolled through the water. Aboard the submarine. Men felt the shocks through the hull.

They heard the heavy thuds and exchanged looks. Were those torpedoes striking or depth charges? The war would be long over before anyone could say exactly what had happened. But the Japanese records would eventually tell the truth. Four of the six torpedoes had struck Shinano. At that moment though, the men of ArcherFish knew only this.

They had hit something enormous, and now its escorts were looking for them. At 3:25, the depth charging began. The first charge exploded somewhere in the water above and around them. It was a sound unlike anything else on Earth. A deep, heavy concussion that seemed to come from every direction at once. The submarine’s hull rang with it.

Men gripped pipes and railings. Some closed their eyes. Some stared at the overhead as though they could see through the steel to where the next one would fall. Light bulbs flickered. Dust and flakes of paint drifted down. Every man knew that the thin steel shell around him was the only thing standing between his lungs and the crushing weight of the Pacific. Nobody spoke.

There was nothing to say. There was only the waiting and the counting and the prayer that the next one would land farther away than the last. Another charge exploded and another. The destroyers were hunting, but they were hunting blind. They did not know exactly where Archerfish was. The explosions came, but none came very close.

Enight kept his boat quiet and deep. Orders were passed in whispers. Men moved carefully, trying not to drop tools or bang against anything. In a submarine under attack, a single careless noise could bring death down on everyone aboard. Over 20 minutes, the Japanese dropped 14 depth charges. At 3:45, the last one exploded. And then there was silence, or almost silence, because through the water, the sonar operator was hearing something else.

Something stranger and more unsettling than the depth charges. It was a sound of metal under stress, creaking, groaning, deep low noises, like something enormous being slowly torn apart. In the language of the submarine service, those were breaking up noises. the sounds of a ship dying. The men of Archerfish listened.

The noises went on and on. They seemed to last forever. Some of the men found the sound hard to bear. They were sailors, too. They knew that inside whatever was making those sounds, there were other sailors. Men who only an hour earlier had been standing watches, drinking tea, thinking about home just as they had been. The war had made those men the enemy.

But the sound of a ship breaking apart in the dark is not a sound any sailor forgets. For about 47 minutes, the sounds continued. Then, at around 4:05 in the morning, they stopped. On ArcherFish, the conclusion seemed obvious. A ship that made sounds like that for that long, and then fell silent, had gone to the bottom.

Enright and his men believed their target had sunk. In the quiet of that submarine, something like joy began to rise. Quiet handshakes, tired smiles, whispered words of disbelief. They had found an aircraft carrier. They had chased it for 6 hours. They had fired six torpedoes and heard them strike. And now they believed it was gone.

But the ocean had not finished its story yet. Because far above and beyond the submarine, on the surface of the Pacific, Shinano was not on the bottom. She was still afloat. She was still moving. And aboard her, more than 2,000 men and civilians were beginning a fight that none of them had been trained for in a ship that none of them yet understood.

At 3:17 that morning, aboard Shinano, the night exploded. The torpedoes struck along the starboard side, one after another. Columns of water climbed into the darkness and came crashing down across the ship. The giant hull shuddered. Men were thrown off their feet. Lights swung. Somewhere below, steel screamed. Four torpedoes had hit.

And they had hit in the worst possible place. on a Yamato class hull. The thick armor belt protected the upper part of the side around the water line below it. The anti- torpedo bulge protected the underwater hull. The two were supposed to work together, but the joint where the armor belt met the bulge was poorly designed.

It was a weak seam in the ship’s protection. All four of Archer Fish’s torpedoes set to run shallow exploded along that joint. One struck near the stern. It flooded refrigerated storage spaces and aviation fuel tank and engineering compartments. Another tore into the compartment around the starboard outboard propeller shaft and flooded the outboard engine room.

Another hit farther forward, flooding the number three boiler room and the rooms around it. The last flooded the starboard air compressor room, anti-aircraft magazines, and one of the ship’s own damage control stations. Within minutes, Shinano was leaning 10° to starboard. For a moment, it may have seemed survivable.

She was an enormous ship. Four torpedoes against 72,000 tons. On paper, a Yamato class hull was meant to absorb punishment like that. The crew began pumping water into tanks on the port side to balance her. 3,000 tons of seawater were moved to the opposite side. It was a massive effort. The list did not come back. It grew to 13°.

And then the ship’s executive officer heard something that chilled him. Just minutes after the last torpedo hit, he could hear air rushing through the gaps around watertight doors. Air being pushed out of compartments meant water was pushing in behind it. The doors were not holding.

Everything Captain Abe had warned about was now happening at once. the untested compartments, the open cable holes, the unsealed ducts, the pumps that did not work. Each small gap that should have been closed in the shipyard now became a path for the sea. Water moved from one compartment into the next, and then the next, spreading through the ship in ways no one aboard could fully see or stop.

And the ship was still moving. Captain Abe kept Shinano running at the best speed she could make. He ordered a course toward Shiono Point, the tip of the Ki Peninsula, where land and help were closer. All night he had believed he was facing more than one submarine. A crippled carrier sitting still in the water would be the easiest target in the world.

But moving forward also had a cost. As the ship pushed through the water, the sea pressed harder into the torn hull. More water was forced in through the damaged side and into the compartments beyond. At 3:30, the list reached 15°. Below decks, the struggle became a nightmare. Picture a dark passageway tilted like the side of a hill. Emergency lights throw weak yellow circles on the steel.

Water sloshes across the deck, cold and black and rising. Men who have been aboard the ship only a few days try to find valves they have never seen in compartments they have never entered. Some of them do not know which pumps work and which do not. Some of the shipyard workers have never been at sea at all. Men tried to close doors and found that the doors would not seal.

They did whatever their training and their courage allowed. The noise was constant. the groan of the hull, the rush of water through places it should never have been able to reach. Orders shouted down passageways and sometimes no answer coming back, and the water kept coming. At 4:20, there was a flicker of hope.

The list eased back to 12°. It did not last. By around 6:00 in the morning, dawn was breaking over the Pacific, and in its gray light, Shinano was leaning 20°. The starboard boiler room had flooded. Somewhere out at sea, the men of ArcherFish still believed their target had gone to the bottom hours earlier.

They had no idea that the giant was still fighting for her life. Around 7:00, the engines stopped. There was no longer enough steam to drive them. The largest aircraft carrier in the world was now dead in the water. Captain Abe ordered two of his destroyers, Hamakaz and Ishokaz, to take her in tow. It was an act of desperation, and every sailor who saw it must have known it.

The two destroyers together displaced about 5,000 tons. Shinano was roughly 14 times heavier, and she was now carrying thousands of tons of seawater inside her. The destroyers moved in close. Heavy cables were passed across the water and made fast. The destroyer’s engines churned. The cables rose from the sea and went taut. The giant did not move.

The cables snapped under the strain. A second attempt was started and then called off. If those steel cables parted again under that kind of tension, they could whip across the decks and cut men apart. The destroyer crews could not be sacrificed for a ship that would not budge. Around 9:00, Shinano lost all power.

The list was now more than 20° and still growing. On the flight deck, the tilt was impossible to ignore. Men could no longer stand upright without holding on to something. Loose equipment slid toward the starboard edge and over the side. The sea, which had seemed so far below the flight deck when she left Yokoska, was climbing closer.

At 10:18 in the morning, with the list at 30°, Captain Abe released his crew to save themselves. For many men, it was already too late. Some were trapped below, in flooded compartments or in spaces they could not find their way out of in the dark. Some reached the deck and hesitated, staring at the cold water. Some jumped.

Some slid down the tilted flight deck into the sea. Men grabbed anything that floated. Wooden planks, debris, each other. The water off Japan at the end of November is cold. Men who had been working below decks in their shirts found it knocked the breath from their lungs. Fuel oil spread across the surface, thick and choking, coating faces and hair and burning eyes.

Above them, the vast gray wall of the flight deck leaned farther and farther over like a building beginning to fall. Captain Toshio Abbe did not leave his ship. At 10:57 in the morning on November 29th, 1944, Shinano rolled over and sank, stern first, about 65 miles from the nearest land.

She had left Yokoska less than 17 hours earlier. She had been in commission for 10 days. She never fired her guns at an enemy ship. She never launched an aircraft in battle. Her cargo of Oka suicide planes and Shinoyo boats went down with her, never to be used. 1,435 people died, officers, sailors, and civilians. Among them were Captain Abe and his navigators.

The destroyers picked up the survivors. 55 officers, 993 petty officers and enlisted men, 32 civilians, 1,080 in all. But for them, the ordeal was not over. The Navy did not want anyone to know that Japan’s largest carrier had been lost on her very first voyage. So, the survivors were not sent home. They were taken to the island of Mitsukoima and kept there, isolated, until January of 1945.

Men who had just survived the sinking of their ship were held away from their families so that the secret would not spread. The ship had been born in secrecy. She died in secrecy and for a time even her survivors were hidden away. Meanwhile, Archerfish finished her patrol. Joseph Enright knew he had hit an aircraft carrier.

He had seen it with his own eyes. He had heard the explosions and the long, terrible sounds of a ship breaking apart. He reported that he had sunk a large carrier. And the United States Navy did not believe him. American naval intelligence was confident it knew where Japan’s remaining carriers were. The codereers had not picked up any sign of a new giant carrier.

Shinano’s construction had never shown up in decoded radio traffic. The analysts believed they had accounted for every surviving carrier Japan possessed. There had been one clue. In July of 1943, a captured Japanese aviator had told American interrogators that a third Yamato class battleship was being converted into a carrier.

But that information had not changed the picture the analysts believed. So Enright was asked what exactly he had seen. He made a drawing of the ship he had attacked. Based on that drawing, the acting commander of the Pacific Fleet Submarine Force credited him with sinking a carrier of about 28,000 tons. 28,000 tons, a respectable kill, a real carrier, but less than half the size of what Enight had actually sunk.

He had done what no submarine captain had ever done, and he was being given credit for something smaller. He would have to wait for the truth. Through the rest of the war, the record showed a smaller ship. The men of Archerfish knew what they had seen through the periscope and heard through the hull.

But knowing something and having it believed are two very different things. For month after month, the biggest kill of the Pacific submarine war sat in the files as something ordinary. It came only after the war ended. American investigators went to Japan and examined what records and witnesses remained. There the full story emerged.

The ship ArcherFish had sunk on the morning of November 29th, 1944 was not a 28,000 ton carrier. It was Shinano, around 72,000 tons, the largest aircraft carrier that had ever been built. Joseph Enright was credited with her sinking. He was awarded the Navy Cross, the second highest award for valor in the United States Navy. ArcherFish received the presidential unit citation.

A year before that night, Enright had written a letter asking to be replaced by an officer who could perform more satisfactorily. Now his name was attached to the largest warship ever sunk by a submarine. It is a record that still stands today. Enight stayed in the Navy and retired in 1963. Later he worked at Northrup on the Omega navigation system.

Years after the war, he helped write a book about that night simply titled Shinano. It told not only the triumph, but the long hours of the chase and the two ships that had been drawn together in the dark. He died on July 20th, 2000 in Fairfax, Virginia. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery and Captain Toshio Abbe was lost with his ship in the deep water off the coast of Japan along with the steel he had warned his superiors was not ready.

It would be easy to tell this story as a simple one, a small American submarine, a giant Japanese carrier, David and Goliath. But the truth is more complicated and more human. Shinano was not sunk only by four torpedoes. She was sunk by haste, by a high command so afraid of bombs from the sky that it sent an unfinished ship to sea against the warnings of her own captain.

By watertight doors that were not watertight, by pumps that did not pump, by a crew that had not had time to learn their own ship. Captain Abe was not a fool. Every decision he made that night made sense with the information he had. calling back the destroyer, slowing for the bearing, turning with his zigzag, running for shore after he was hit.

And yet each reasonable choice brought him one step closer to disaster. And Joseph Enright was not a born hero. He was a man who had once doubted himself so deeply that he asked to be removed from command. What made the difference that night was not boldness. It was patience. It was the discipline to wait for the right moment, even when every instinct begged him to act.

The Japanese believed that size and armor would keep Shinano alive. They believed that steel could make up for time. They were wrong. The ocean does not care how big a ship is. It only asks whether she is ready. Shinano was not ready. And on a cold November night in 1944, one American submarine commanded by a man who had been given a second chance found out exactly what that meant.