ARMY & NAVY: Down Went Shinano

During World War II the Japanese, not the U.S., had the biggest aircraft carrier ever built. But they did not have her for very long. Last week Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood Jr., wartime commander of the Pacific Fleet’s submarines, told the story.

The Japanese took a battleship of the Yamato class while still under construction, converted her to a carrier, named her the Shinano. At 59,000 tons, she was 14,000 tons larger than the Midway class, the U.S. Navy’s mightiest.

On Nov. 29, 1944, she was under way on her trial run. Instead of her regular crew, she had aboard hundreds of dockyard men and technicians. Some 180 miles south of Nagoya, the U.S. submarine Archerfish sighted her, dark and enormous among a shoal of destroyers.

The Archerfish’s skipper, Commander Joseph F. Enright, let go with a spread of torpedoes, and then “took her down.” He heard one torpedo explode. Not until after the war did the U.S. know what had happened after that. The Japanese civilian workers had lost their heads. No one thought to shut the water-tight doors. Slowly, water welled into the Shinano. Six hours later, her Japanese skipper tucked a portrait of Emperor Hirohito under his arm, scrambled over the side and left the biggest carrier ever built to sink ignominiously, the victim of one torpedo.