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The Largest Warship Ever Sunk By A Submarine
The massive Frankenstein ship did not last long
The Battle of Midway was a disaster for the Japanese. Over the course of the battle, the Imperial Japanese Navy lost four out of its six fleet carriers to American bombers. It left the Japanese navy crippled and had planners back in the home islands scrambling. It was clear that aircraft carriers were the weapons platform that was going to win the war. Before the outbreak of World War II, many people believed it would be battleships that were going to carry the day. After Midway, there was no mistaking the fact that battleships were obsolete.
The result was that the battleship Shinano, which had been laid down in 1940 to be the third of the infamous super-battleships built by Japan, was ordered to be converted into an aircraft carrier. The result was a hastily rebuilt battleship masquerading as an aircraft carrier.
The final form of the Shinano, which left drydock in 1944 and pressed into a hopeless battle, was a mix between a carrier and a battleship. It did not excel at either.
Look At The Size Of That Thing
The Shinano was a large ship by any metric. It measured over 872 feet long and displaced 65,800 tons. It was the largest aircraft carrier put down during the war…
