IJN Kongō

Alone among Japan's Second World War capital ships, Kongō was built abroad. Ordered from Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness and commissioned in 1913, she was designed by the British naval architect George Thurston as a battlecruiser — fast, lightly armoured, and armed with eight 356 mm (14-inch) guns. She was so successful that her three sisters — Hiei, Haruna and Kirishima — were built in Japan, marking the moment Japanese yards reached world-class capability.

Conceived as a battlecruiser, Kongō traded armour for speed. Over the following decades that emphasis on speed would be retained and her protection improved, transforming the old ship into something the Imperial Navy badly needed: a true fast battleship able to escort carriers and screen the fleet.

Kongō was rebuilt twice. The first reconstruction (1929–1931) added deck armour, anti-torpedo bulges and improved her machinery, reclassifying her from battlecruiser to battleship. The second and more drastic rebuild (1935–1937) lengthened the stern, replaced the powerplant entirely and raised her speed back above 30 knots.

After modernisation she displaced around 36,600 t standard, made ~30.5 knots on roughly 136,000 shp, and ranged about 10,000 nmi at cruising speed. Her main belt remained modest at around 203 mm — the legacy of her battlecruiser origins — but her gun elevation was increased to extend the range of the eight 356 mm rifles beyond 33,000 m. The result was the fastest battleship type the IJN possessed in 1941, faster than the giant Yamato. Four ships served: Kongō, Hiei, Haruna and Kirishima. Their speed made them the most heavily used Japanese capital ships of the war, constantly in demand to escort the fast carrier striking forces. All four were lost. Hiei and Kirishima were sunk in the night battleship actions off Guadalcanal in November 1942 — Kirishima crippled by USS Washington's radar-directed 16-inch guns. Kongō was torpedoed in 1944, and Haruna, the last survivor, was finally sunk by carrier aircraft at Kure in July 1945.

Her most destructive night came off Guadalcanal. On 13–14 October 1942 Kongō and her sister Haruna stood off the island and bombarded Henderson Field, the airstrip from which American aircraft were strangling Japanese supply runs, firing hundreds of rounds of high-explosive and incendiary shell into the perimeter over roughly ninety minutes.

It was the heaviest blow the Marines on Guadalcanal took from the sea: aircraft destroyed on the ground, the fuel dump burning, the runway cratered and men killed in their foxholes. It also demonstrated exactly what a fast battleship was for in that campaign — not a fleet action, but the ability to arrive at night, deliver a weight of fire no aircraft could match, and be beyond air range by dawn. The field was flying again within days, repaired from engineer stores already on the island.

Kongō was everywhere in the Pacific war. She covered the invasion of Malaya and the Dutch East Indies in 1941–42, screened the carriers at Midway, and in October 1942 she and Haruna carried out one of the most destructive bombardments of the war, firing hundreds of 356 mm shells into the American airfield at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal.

She fought through the carrier battles of 1942, the great surface action at Leyte Gulf in October 1944 — where she helped maul the American escort carriers and destroyers off Samar — and survived where larger ships did not. Her speed and reliability made her the dependable workhorse of the battle line for over thirty years. On 21 November 1944, steaming in the Formosa Strait, Kongō was hit by torpedoes from the American submarine USS Sealion. Flooding spread, and she capsized and sank with heavy loss of life — the only Japanese battleship sunk by submarine in the war, and the last battleship of any navy to be sunk by one.

Kongō’s last battle honour came on 25 October 1944 off Samar, when the Japanese Centre Force surprised the escort carriers and destroyers of the American unit “Taffy 3”. Alone among the battleships present, the thirty-year-old Kongō had the speed to press the pursuit, working up towards 30 knots on machinery designed before the First World War.

Her 356 mm salvos are credited with contributing to the sinking of the escort carrier USS Gambier Bay and the destroyer USS Hoel — two of the very few warships ever sunk by Japanese battleship gunfire.

She did not die in a surface battle. On 21 November 1944, returning to Japan through the Formosa Strait after the Philippines, she was torpedoed by the American submarine USS Sealion — the only US submarine of the war to sink a battleship. Kongō took two hits, held her course for a time, then flooded progressively and blew up as her magazines went, taking well over a thousand men with her.

The manner of it is the point. A capital ship built in Britain before the First World War, rebuilt twice into one of the fastest battleships afloat, was destroyed by a submarine that saw her only as a target angle in a periscope. By the winter of 1944 that was how Japanese capital ships were dying — not in the decisive gun battle their whole navy had been designed around, but singly, to aircraft and submarines, on passages between one shrinking position and the next.

Kongō's career spanned the entire dreadnought era. Launched in Edwardian Britain in 1913, twice rebuilt between the wars, she fought from the opening months of the Pacific war to its final year — a span of service no other capital ship engaged in the conflict could match.

She was never the most powerful ship afloat: her armour stayed thin and her guns were eclipsed by Yamato's 18-inch monsters. But her speed, range and sheer availability made her arguably the hardest-working capital ship of the Imperial Navy, present at almost every major action. She was sunk on 21 November 1944 by torpedoes from the submarine USS Sealion, the only Japanese battleship lost to submarine attack in the war.

• William H. Garzke & Robert O. Dulin, Battleships: Axis and Neutral Battleships in World War II (Naval Institute Press).
• Mark Stille, Imperial Japanese Navy Battleships 1941–45 (Osprey, New Vanguard).
• Steve Wiper, Kongo Class Battleships (Warship Pictorial).