IJN Myōkō was a genuinely imposing heavy cruiser,
but she had been crippled during the Battle of Leyte Gulf and sent to Japan for repairs.
Even so, she was so damaged that she could not make the return trip alone.
It was December of 1944, and with her escort, the destroyer Ushio, she steamed for the home islands.
But as they sailed across the Pacific on the evening of the 13th,
they were suddenly attacked by an undetected enemy roaming the dark waters.
Myōkō stopped to assess the situation. She could barely sail,
and the hidden enemy could strike any moment. Incapable of engaging in an open pursuit,
the ships attempted to flee and continue their challenging trip to Japan.
The enemy, however, would not let them get away so quickly…
The
Heaviest Cruiser
As the lead ship of her class of heavy cruisers within the Imperial Japanese Navy,
Myōkō was the first of her sisters to be laid down - though she was the third to be completed.
She was also the first of the 10,000-ton cruisers
built by any nation and received her name from Mount Myōkō in Niigata.
The heavy cruiser was built within the design constraints imposed by
the Washington Naval Treaty during the 1922 to 1929 Fleet Modernization Program.
Even so, the ship received several modifications and
rebuildings throughout the 1930s, increasing her final displacement to roughly 16,000 tons.
The Myōkō class was actually an enlarged version of the Aoba-class cruiser, and the
lead ship was over 200 meters long, with a beam of roughly 20 meters and a draft of 6.36 meters.
She could reach a speed of 35.5 knots, propelled by 12 Kampon boilers that drove four sets of
single-impulse geared turbine engines, while four shafts turned three-bladed propellers.
The heavy cruiser’s armor consisted of a 102-millimeter thick side belt and a deck
of 35 millimeters. However, her bridge was unarmored. As for armament, Myōkō had a main
battery of ten 20-centimeter/40 Type 89 naval guns mounted in five main turrets. Remarkably,
she had the heaviest armament of any heavy cruiser in the world.
In addition, the warship had a secondary armament of eight 12.7
centimeter/40 Type 89 naval guns in four twin mounts on each side,
and carried 12 Type 93 Long Lance torpedoes and four triple launchers below the aircraft deck.
The massive cruiser had a capacity for
three floatplanes and an aircraft catapult for scouting missions.
Myōkō was launched in 1927 and commissioned two years later.
Ready For War
Myōkō first saw action during the Second Sino-Japanese War, serving as the flagship
of Sentai-9. Afterward, she received a retrofit that would extend her service life into the 1940s.
By the time World War 2 broke out,
she and her sisters were rather old but still capable of joining the fight.
The ship had her number of torpedoes doubled to 16 and was also fitted with
eight 25-millimeter anti-aircraft guns, which would prove useful in the Pacific clashes.
In the early stages of the war, Myōkō participated in the Invasion of the Philippines and the Battle
of the Java Sea. Then, in March of 1942, the cruiser and her sister Ashigara sank
the British heavy cruiser Exeter with help from destroyers Akebono and Inazuma.
Later on, she became the flagship of the Carrier Strike Force during Operation Mo,
the attempted invasion of Port Moresby, leading the aircraft carriers Shōkaku and Zuikaku.
She also took part in the Tulagi invasion and the subsequent Battle of the Coral Sea,
resulting in a Japanese retreat and abandoning the operation in Papua New Guinea.
During the epic Battle of Midway, the heavy cruiser was part of the Support Force and was
thus deployed as an escort for the reinforcement convoy in the Aleutian Islands Campaign.
Then in October 1942, she continued her reinforcement and resupply missions on
Guadalcanal and the bombardment of Henderson Field when it was seized by the Americans.
Myōkō also helped evacuate Guadalcanal and Kiska before being sent to Sasebo for another refit.
While there, she was equipped with newer
Type 96 25-millimeter AT/AA gun mounts and a Type 21 radar set.
In the summer of 1944, Myōkō fought in the Battle of the Philippine Sea,
responding to the American invasion of the Mariana Islands. And later that year, she crossed paths
with the US Task Force 38 and was damaged by a torpedo hit during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
Consequently, Myōkō had to limp back to Singapore and depart for Japan.
Little did she know that an encounter with USS Bergall would determine her fate.
Destiny
On December 5, 1944, USS Bergall departed Australia, bound for patrol work on the Malayan
and Indo-China coast. The submarine was loaded with anchored mines in her aft torpedo tubes,
as her mission was to lay them off along a long reef known as the Royalist Bank.
That same afternoon, Myōkō sailed for the Japanese mainland, where she could be repaired. Accompanied
by destroyer Ushio, the pair would depart sometime around December 9. However, their departure was
postponed, and Bergall was just emerging from the Lombok Strait the morning they were ready.
Shortly past dawn on the 12th, the cruiser and her companion finally got underway. Making
matters worse, Ushio was also damaged, so neither ship could sail much faster than about 17 knots.
In the middle of the chaotic scene of the Pacific Theater in late 1944,
both ships advanced slowly but surely across areas of great activity, with a slight chance
that the partly-operational cruiser might be suddenly called for duty. But unbeknownst to
the Japanese, the stealthy US submarine was just arriving to lay her cargo off at Royalist Bank.
As the sun set on the 13th, Bergall was preparing to complete her mission when
an unexpected radio signal came in. It meant that a powerful transmitter had to be around.
Commander J. M. Hyde then looked through the periscope, and there she was, a Japanese
warship at 35,000 yards heading northeast at 14 knots. The skipper swung the boat around,
all four engines on maximum speed, and hurried to get ahead of the enemy's track.
Bergall was gaining the advantage, but the engines’ vibrations forced the crew to slow down.
At 7:20pm, they finally secured a firm contact as Bergall made the position.
An hour later, the target was clearly in sight. But recognizing the impending danger
of assaulting a mighty heavy cruiser and her escort, Hyde and his officers held their breath.
Encounter
A submerged approach was impossible; the waters were too shallow.
And to complicate matters, Bergall's aft tubes were filled with mines,
rendering them unusable. An attack could only be launched from the bow tubes.
Undaunted, Hyde had his vessel run under cover of the darkening skies,
hoping that the enemy's radar did not pick his own too soon.
The crew then noticed a window of opportunity just as the heavy cruiser and her escort overlapped.
Bergall immediately fired all bow tubes at 3,300 yards, and within
seconds, the first and second torpedoes hit home, detonating into a thundering explosion.
Myōkō stopped in her tracks, while her escort also stopped abeam.
This led to the submarine's crew believing she had also been struck.
Myōkō’s damage was severe, with fires around the cruiser's aft turrets.
However, her main body forward of the mainmast remained untouched, and the ship was not nearly
shattered. Even so, Hyde believed the impact had been more significant. He then turned to
reload for the final blow, while Ushio began setting a trap for the attacking submarine.
Believing them inoperable, Bergall came in for the coup-de-grace, but Ushio immediately opened fire.
The precise salvo tore through the forward torpedo loading trunk's hatch,
piercing the submarine. Water quickly started pouring into the pressure hull.
Hyde maneuvered and evaded a second pair of shells just as Ushio snapped on a searchlight,
but the submarine avoided detection.
Unable to dive, Hyde fled the scene, putting as much distance between his
crew and the enemy as possible. Luckily for the Americans, Ushio did not go after them.
In the end, Myōkō was severely harmed, but not as much as the skipper pondered. Still able to
make six knots, the cruiser's captain resolved to save her. Ushio would keep Myōkō on track with a
tow line given that she could no longer steer, and both began an arduous crawl to Singapore.
Fight For Survival
The situation was no better onboard Bergall, where the crew stuffed mattresses into the
hole to keep the spray out and struggled with electrical fires for a couple of days.
Now that any aerial attack would have to be evaded on the surface, vigilance was redoubled,
and all available guns were manned. The nearest base, Exmouth Gulf, was 2,000 miles away.
In a clever decision, the skipper opted to sail closer to the coast so
that patrolling aircraft would confuse the submarine with an ordinary boat.
Then, on the 15th, Bergall met with USS Angler and transferred 54 men and an officer to safety,
hanging on to a skeleton crew that would attempt to take the submarine across the Karimata Strait.
Hyde ordered Angler's skipper not to rescue them should they be attacked. Instead,
he stated: (QUOTE) "Save your boat and the rest of my men."
Meanwhile, fires raged onboard Myōkō. It wasn't until the 15th,
too, that the Japanese found friendly ships, but the weather was severe. Even so,
the small convoy managed to escort the cruiser to Singapore for repairs.
By February of 1945, it was evident that Myōkō was irreparable and that it was
impossible to tow her to Japan. Instead, the heavy cruiser remained in Singapore,
acting as an anti-aircraft battery while her nemesis continued her service well into the 1950s.
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