USS Sealion, a History: During the Pacific Theatre of Operations in WWII, U.S. Navy submarines, known collectively as “The Silent Service,” were an absolutely vital component in the defeat of Imperial Japan, ravaging the Hideki Tojo’s merchant fleet and the warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) alike. Regarding the latter target category, American subs sank their fair share of aircraft carriers, including the 69,000-ton supercarrier Shinano, sunk by the USS Archerfish under the command of Comm. Joseph F. Enright. Shinano was the largest ship killed in the history of submarine warfare, having started off her star-crossed life as a battleship, sister ship to the Yamato and Musashi, the world’s largest battleships. Interestingly though, only one American sub managed to sink a bonafide Axis battleship during the course of the war.
The submarine was the USS Sealion II, and the victim was the IJN Kongō. Let’s take a closer look at this singular event in naval warfare history.
Profile of the Predator: the USS Sealion
Just like the aforementioned Archerfish, USS Sealion II (SS-315) was a Balao-class (named for the balao halfbeak fish species, scientific name Hemiramphus balao). Her keel was laid by the famous Electric Boat Company of Groton, Connecticut, launched on October 31, 1943 (Trick or Treat, Tojo!), and commissioned on March 8, 1944. She was armed with ten 21-inch (533mm) torpedo tubes – six tubes fore and four aft – a 5-inch (127mm)/25 caliber deck gun, plus Bofors 40mm and Oerlikon 20mm anti-aircraft guns. Regarding the latter two weapons systems, Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, Commander, Submarine Force Pacific Fleet (COMSUBPAC) stated emphatically in his book Sink ‘Em All, “I did not want my submarines engaging in gun battles with planes … Why improve [our AA defenses] if there were no intention of using them?”
Sealion II projected a length of 311 feet 9 inches (95.02 meters) with a displacement of 1,550 tons surfaced and 2,463 tons whilst submerged. She traversed the seas at 20.25 knots on the surface and 8.75 knots beneath the waves. Departing for her first war patrol on 8 June 1944, she claimed her first victim 20 days later, the Japanese naval transport Sansei Maru.
Fast-forward to September 12 of that same year, and Sealion inadvertently participated in one of the most tragic “blue-on-blue” incidents of the war when she sank the Rakuyō Maru and Kachidoki Maru, which happened to be transporting a combined 2,218 Australian and British prisoners of war; 1,559 of these POWs perished as a result. Sealion II and fellow American subs managed to rescue 150 of their compatriots, with the remaining 500 or so picked up by IJN destroyers and transported onward to Japan.
At the time of her momentous encounter with battleship Kongō, the sub was skippered by 31-year-old Lt. Cmdr. Eli Thomas Reich, U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1935.
Profile of the Prey: the IJN Kongo
The Kongō (“Indestructible Diamond,” and named after Mount Kongō in Osaka Prefecture, not the African Congo) was the lead vessel in the Kongō-class of battleships, which was the IJN’s most active capital ship class during the Second World War. Kongō and her sister ships – which included the Hiei and Kirishima – displaced 36,601 tons. They were armed with eight 14-inch (356mm) main guns spread across four large turrets – two forward and two aft – as well as sixteen 6-inch (152mm) guns, eight 3-inch (76mm) guns, and eight 21-inch (530mm) torpedo tubes. The armor was 8 inches (20.32cm) thick at the belt, 2.75 inches (6.98cm) on the deck, and 9 inches (22.86cm) on the turret face. My 19FortyFive colleague Peter Suciu elaborates on one of the great ironies of this particular battlewagon’s origins:
“Kongō … was actually designed by British naval engineer Sir George Thurston. She was constructed at Barrow-in-Furness in the UK by the Vickers Shipbuilding Company, and was in fact, the last…
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