Post

Untold War Stories

May 29 • 6 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X

Scrolly

On Palm Sunday morning April 18 1943, 18 American P-38 Lightning fighters took off from Guadalcanal at dawn.

16 of them would continue on a 1,000 mile round trip mission across open ocean.

Their target was a single Mitsubishi G4M Betty bomber.

Inside that bomber was the Japanese admiral who had planned the attack on Pearl Harbor.

American codebreakers had handed his flight itinerary to the Navy 4 days earlier.

This is the story of Operation Vengeance..🧵1/6

🧵 2/6

The intercepted message was decrypted on April 14 1943 by United States Navy codebreakers working under a program codenamed Magic. The Americans had been quietly reading the Japanese naval cipher JN-25D for over a year. The Japanese did not know.

The decoded message contained the complete inspection itinerary of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet. It listed his departure time from Rabaul. It listed his arrival time at the airstrip on the island of Ballale, just off the southern coast of Bougainville. It identified the aircraft he would be flying in. It identified his fighter escort.

The information went straight to Admiral Chester Nimitz at Pacific Fleet headquarters in Pearl Harbor. From there it went to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox in Washington. From there it went to the White House.

President Franklin Roosevelt is reported to have given Knox a short instruction. Get Yamamoto. There is no surviving official record of those exact words but the order was passed down. On April 17 1943 Knox transmitted an authorization to Admiral Nimitz that read: "Squadron 339 P-38 must at all costs reach and destroy. President attaches extreme importance to mission."

Yamamoto was the man Americans blamed more than any other for Pearl Harbor. He had planned the attack. He had ordered it. He was now flying himself directly into range of American fighters operating from Guadalcanal.

The Americans had one chance to kill him.

🧵 3/6

The mission was assigned to Major John W. Mitchell, commander of the 339th Fighter Squadron of the 347th Fighter Group, 13th Air Force, based at Kukum Field on Guadalcanal.

The only American aircraft with the range to reach Bougainville from Guadalcanal was the Lockheed P-38G Lightning. Twin engined. Twin tailed. Heavily armed with four .50 caliber machine guns and a single 20 millimeter cannon mounted in the nose.

Mitchell rejected the flight plan prepared by his command operations officer and drew his own. He calculated the intercept point on the southwestern edge of Bougainville. He calculated the time of intercept as 9:35 AM, ten minutes before Yamamoto was expected to land. He worked backwards from that time and drew four precisely calculated legs across the open Pacific.

To avoid Japanese radar and observation posts on the Solomon Islands, the P-38s would not fly the direct 400 mile route to Bougainville. They would fly a circuitous 600 mile route west of the islands. They would fly at no more than 50 feet above the open ocean. They would maintain strict radio silence the entire way.

Mitchell privately told friends he believed the odds of even finding Yamamoto's flight, let alone shooting it down, were a thousand to one.

18 P-38s were assigned to the mission. 4 of them would form the killer flight tasked with attacking Yamamoto's bombers directly. The remaining aircraft would provide top cover at 18,000 feet, with two acting as spares.

The killer flight as originally planned was led by Captain Thomas Lanphier with First Lieutenant Rex Barber as his wingman. The second element was led by First Lieutenant James McLanahan with First Lieutenant Joseph Moore as his wingman.

🧵 4/6

The P-38s lifted off from Kukum Field at 7:25 AM on Palm Sunday, April 18 1943.

Two aircraft dropped out within minutes. McLanahan blew a tire on takeoff. Moore could not release his drop tanks. The two spare pilots in the formation, First Lieutenant Besby Holmes and First Lieutenant Raymond Hine, moved up to fill their places in the killer flight. The mission continued with 16 aircraft.

For the next two hours they flew west across the open Pacific at 50 feet above the waves. Some pilots later said they could count sharks beneath their wings. Some counted pieces of driftwood. They did not transmit a single radio message.

Mitchell's navigation was perfect. The American formation arrived over the southwestern coast of Bougainville at 9:34 AM. One minute earlier than planned.

At that moment one of the pilots called out over the radio.

Two Mitsubishi G4M Betty bombers were descending toward Ballale airfield with six Zero fighters flying escort above them. Yamamoto was in the lead Betty. His chief of staff Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki was in the second.

The American pilots dropped their fuel tanks. The killer flight broke right and climbed to attack. Holmes could not release his drop tank. He and his wingman Hine continued on briefly to deal with it. That left only Lanphier and Barber to engage the bombers.

Lanphier broke upward to engage the descending Zero escorts. Barber attacked the bombers alone.

He fired his guns into the first Betty from behind and below. He saw smoke streaming from its left engine. The bomber rolled violently to its left and disappeared into the jungle canopy below.

Barber did not yet know which bomber he had just shot down.

🧵 5/6

The Betty that Barber had shot down crashed into the jungle north of Buin on Bougainville. There were no survivors. The other Betty, carrying Ugaki, was hit by Barber and Holmes minutes later and ditched in the sea. Ugaki survived. Two other men with him also survived.

Barber's P-38 took 104 hits from Japanese fire during the engagement and his return flight. He flew it back to Guadalcanal.

Lieutenant Raymond Hine did not return. His P-38 was last seen during the engagement. He was never found. He was the only American lost on the mission.

The next day a Japanese army search party led by Lieutenant Hamasuna hacked through the jungle and reached the crash site of Yamamoto's bomber.

They found his body sitting upright in the wreckage of his seat which had been thrown clear of the aircraft. He was still strapped in. His white gloved hand was still clutching the hilt of his katana sword. His head was tilted slightly forward as if he was thinking. Hamasuna later wrote that the admiral was instantly recognizable.

A Japanese navy doctor later concluded that Yamamoto had been killed before the aircraft hit the jungle.

Yamamoto's body was cremated on Bougainville. Two papaya trees, his favorite fruit, were planted on the cremation pit. A small shrine was erected over the site. His ashes were carried back to Japan aboard the battleship Musashi, which had been his flagship.

The Japanese government kept his death secret from its own people for over a month. On May 21 1943 the Imperial Japanese Navy finally announced that Admiral Yamamoto had died "while engaged in combat operations on the front lines."

He was given a state funeral attended by one million mourners.

🧵 6/6

Yamamoto was succeeded as Commander in Chief of the Combined Fleet by Admiral Mineichi Koga.

Koga reportedly said: "There was only one Yamamoto, and no one can replace him."

The American mission pilots were each awarded the Navy Cross for the operation. Major Mitchell was originally nominated for the Medal of Honor for his navigation across the open Pacific. Admiral Halsey downgraded the nomination to the Navy Cross.

A controversy erupted almost immediately over who had actually shot down Yamamoto's bomber. Captain Lanphier publicly claimed the kill. So did First Lieutenant Barber. The United States Army Air Forces officially split the credit between both pilots.

The controversy continued for the next 60 years.

In the 1990s an aviation research team examined the wreck of Yamamoto's Betty bomber in the jungle of Bougainville. They analyzed the bullet hole patterns and found that every visible round had entered the aircraft from directly behind. The only American P-38 directly behind that bomber during the engagement had been Barber's. The Japanese fighter pilot Kenji Yanagiya, who had been escorting Yamamoto that morning and survived the war, confirmed the same details.

The 1985 official US Air Force panel split the credit between Lanphier and Barber. The 1993 Secretary of the Air Force called it "glory for the whole team." Most modern historians now credit Rex Barber alone.

Barber lived until 2001. Lanphier died in 1987. Mitchell died in 1995.

The wreck of Admiral Yamamoto's bomber still lies in the jungle north of Buin on Bougainville.

It has been there since Palm Sunday morning, April 18 1943.

The operation is often described as the longest successful fighter intercept mission of the entire Second World War, flown by American pilots that day, against an enemy admiral whose death had been authorized at the highest level of the United States government, from a flight plan delivered by codebreakers reading mail the enemy did not know they could read.

I post a story like this every single day. Most people never see them. Follow so you don't miss the next one.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh

More from @UntoldWarFacts

Untold War Stories

@UntoldWarFacts

May 26

The first man to fly the prototype of America's heaviest single-engine fighter took off into a cockpit slowly filling with smoke.

He could not see. He considered bailing out.

He landed safely and shouted: "I think we've hit the jackpot."

The aircraft was designed by two refugees from the Russian Revolution.

More than 15,000 of them were eventually built.

This is the story of the P-47 Thunderbolt...🧵1/5

🧵 2/5

The story begins in the city of Tiflis in the Russian Empire in the 1890s. Two boys were born within two years of each other. Their names were Alexander de Seversky and Alexander Kartveli.

Seversky was born in 1894 to a Russian aristocratic family. He joined the Imperial Russian Navy as a young man and was trained as a naval aviator. In the First World War he flew combat missions against the Germans. He was shot down. He lost a leg.

He recovered. He learned to fly again with a wooden prosthetic. He returned to combat and was credited in some accounts with 13 aerial victories.

Kartveli was Georgian. He was born in Tiflis in 1896 and went on to study aviation engineering in Paris in the 1920s.

By 1917 the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Tsar. The Red Army was sweeping across the former empire. Seversky had been sent to the United States in 1918 as part of a Russian military mission. He decided to stay. Kartveli could not return to Georgia after his Paris studies because the country had fallen to the Red Army in the Soviet-Georgian War of 1921.

The two engineers eventually met in New York.

In 1931 Seversky founded an aircraft company called the Seversky Aircraft Corporation on Long Island. He hired Kartveli as chief engineer. By 1939 the company had been renamed Republic Aviation and Kartveli was its Chief of Design.

He was working on something new.

🧵 3/5

In the spring of 1940 reports of the air war over Europe were arriving in America. The German Luftwaffe had cut through the French and British air forces. The Messerschmitt Bf 109 was outperforming everything the Allies could put against it. The United States Army Air Corps wanted a new fighter aircraft built around the best ideas in American engineering.

Alexander Kartveli sketched out his design on the back of an envelope during a meeting with Air Corps officers.

His concept was radical. He proposed building the fighter around the Pratt and Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp radial engine. The engine was massive. 18 cylinders arranged in two rings. Around 2,000 horsepower at full output. No fighter aircraft had ever been built around such a heavy engine.

Kartveli's design used the engine as the foundation and built everything else around it. A turbosupercharger was placed in the rear of the fuselage to give the engine maximum performance at high altitude. The supercharger ducting ran 20 feet from the engine through the fuselage to the turbine and back again. Eight .50 caliber machine guns were placed in the wings.

The aircraft would weigh nearly 8 tons when fully loaded. It would be the heaviest single-engine fighter ever built.

Kartveli submitted his proposal to the Army Air Corps on June 12 1940. The Air Corps placed a prototype order in September. The project was designated the XP-47B.

The Republic Aviation factory in Farmingdale, New York worked through the autumn and winter of 1940 building the prototype. They finished it in the spring of 1941.

On May 6 1941 a test pilot named Lowery Lawson Brabham climbed into the cockpit at Farmingdale and started the engine.

Read 5 tweets

Untold War Stories

@UntoldWarFacts

May 24

In 1940 Britain desperately needed a new fighter aircraft to fight the Germans.

An American company nobody had heard of promised they could design and build an entirely new fighter in 120 days.

They delivered it in 117.

The aircraft they built became one of the most important fighters of the entire Second World War.

This is the story of the P-51 Mustang..🧵1/5

🧵 2/5

By the spring of 1940 Britain was in serious trouble.

The German army was pouring across France. Britain feared it would soon lose fighter aircraft faster than its factories could replace them. The Luftwaffe was massing in occupied airfields just across the English Channel. Within months the Battle of Britain would begin.

The British Purchasing Commission was sent to the United States to buy as many fighter aircraft as American factories could produce. They wanted Curtiss P-40 Warhawks. Curtiss could not build them fast enough.

In April 1940 the Commission walked into the offices of a small American aircraft company in Los Angeles called North American Aviation. The company had never built a successful fighter. They had built training aircraft and a few bombers. The British asked them to build Curtiss P-40s under license for the Royal Air Force.

The president of North American was James Henry Kindelberger. The men who knew him called him Dutch. He looked at the British and gave them a different answer.

He told them North American could design and build a brand new fighter from scratch that would be faster, better, and more capable than the P-40. He told them North American could deliver a prototype in 120 days.

The British thought he was lying. He insisted.

They signed the contract anyway. The date was May 4 1940.

The chief engineer Dutch handed the project to was a 40 year old German immigrant named Edgar Schmued.

🧵 3/5

Edgar Schmued had been born in Hornbach, Germany in 1899. He had no formal engineering degree. He was almost entirely self-taught from books and apprenticeships in German engine factories.

He had immigrated to the United States in 1931 with little money and a head full of ideas about how aircraft could be built better. He worked for several aviation companies before joining North American Aviation in 1936. By 1940 he was their Chief of Preliminary Design.

Schmued had been quietly sketching designs for the kind of fighter he wanted to build for years. When Kindelberger called him into the office and told him about the British contract he already knew exactly what he wanted to do.

He assembled a small team. Raymond Rice as the lead engineer. Ed Horkey on aerodynamics. Larry Waite and Art Chester on structures.

They worked in shifts around the clock. The Inglewood factory ran day and night. The engineers slept in their offices. The draftsmen drank coffee until they could not see straight.

Schmued's design used a radical new wing profile from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. The NACA laminar flow wing was designed to delay airflow separation and reduce drag. No combat aircraft had used one before. He built the airframe in six wing sections and modular fuselage components specifically so it could be mass produced quickly.

The prototype was given the designation NA-73X.

By September 9 1940 the airframe was finished. 102 days after the contract had been signed.

The Allison V-12 engine that was supposed to power it had not even been delivered yet. North American wheeled the empty aircraft out of the hangar and photographed it with painted dummy exhaust stacks.

Read 5 tweets

Untold War Stories

@UntoldWarFacts

May 23

There is a cemetery on the island of Guam where 24 Marine war dogs are buried.

They were Doberman Pinschers and German Shepherds who fought alongside the Marines in the Pacific.

This is the story of the Marine Devil Dogs..🧵1/5

🧵 2/5

By early 1942 the United States Marine Corps had a problem in the Pacific.

The Japanese were dug into the dense jungles of every island the Marines tried to take. They were masters of concealment. They moved silently through the undergrowth. They set ambushes at night. They infiltrated American positions while the Marines slept. Marine patrols were being cut to pieces by an enemy they could not see, hear, or smell.

The Marines needed an answer. They found one in a civilian organization called Dogs for Defense.

In late 1942 the Marine Corps established its first War Dog Platoon at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. American families donated their family pets. Breeders donated trained working dogs. The most common donations were Doberman Pinschers and German Shepherds.

The Marines wanted dogs that were 25 inches tall at the shoulder and weighed about 60 pounds. Big enough to be intimidating. Small enough that a Marine could carry one out of combat if it was wounded.

The training course ran 14 weeks. The dogs learned to obey hand signals so handlers could direct them silently in combat. They learned to alert without barking when they detected the enemy. They learned to crawl, swim, climb cargo nets, ride in landing craft, and ignore the sound of gunfire and explosions. They learned to track a man by scent through dense jungle.

They were assigned roles. Scout dogs walked at the head of patrols and alerted to enemy positions ahead. Messenger dogs ran communications between units across battlefields where radios had failed. Sentry dogs guarded camps at night.

Over 1,000 dogs completed the Marine training program during the war. The Marines called them Devil Dogs, borrowing the famous Marine Corps nickname from the First World War.

🧵 3/5

November 1 1943. Bougainville. Solomon Islands.

The first Marine War Dog Platoon went into combat. 24 dogs and 55 handlers attached to the 2nd Marine Raider Regiment. 21 Dobermans and 3 German Shepherds. They were lowered from the deck of the attack transport USS George Clymer in cargo nets and improvised harnesses. They climbed into Higgins boats with their handlers and went ashore under heavy Japanese fire.

Two dogs entered the history books that morning.

Andy was a Doberman scout dog handled by PFCs Robert Lansley and John Mahoney. He walked at the head of the Raider patrols. On day two of the invasion he alerted to a Japanese machine gun nest hidden in the jungle 100 yards ahead. The Marines took cover. The machine gun opened up. Not one of them was hit.

Caesar was a large German Shepherd messenger dog handled by PFC Rufus Mayo. On the first night ashore Caesar was sleeping in a foxhole beside Mayo when he suddenly leaped out and attacked a Japanese soldier creeping up on the position in the dark. The Japanese soldier shot Caesar at point blank range and ran. Caesar survived. Mayo had survived too because the dog had not waited to be told.

On day three Caesar carried a message from Company M to the regimental command post when American telephone lines had been cut by Japanese mortars. He was the only means of communication between the two units. He was wounded again. Marines carried him back to safety on a stretcher.

Of the 24 dogs and 55 handlers who went ashore at Bougainville, only 2 dogs and 2 handlers did not come home.

Handlers later claimed no Marine patrol guarded by war dogs was successfully surprised during the Bougainville campaign.

After Bougainville every Marine division in the Pacific was assigned its own War Dog Platoon.

Read 5 tweets

Untold War Stories

@UntoldWarFacts

May 23

In 1944 the United States turned old bombers into giant flying bombs controlled by television cameras.

Pilots had to arm 21,000 pounds of explosives in midair and parachute out before the aircraft flew itself into German targets.

One of those pilots was Joseph Kennedy Jr.

This is the story of Operation Aphrodite..🧵1/5

🧵 2/5

By the summer of 1944 the Allies had a problem.

Hitler's V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets were launching from heavily fortified concrete sites along the French coast. The sites were buried under tons of reinforced concrete. Conventional bombing was barely scratching them.

The British had developed massive 12,000 pound Tallboy bombs to penetrate the bunkers. The Americans wanted their own solution.

In June 1944 the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe authorized a top secret experiment.

They called it Operation Aphrodite.

The plan was simple in concept and almost impossible in execution.

The Americans had thousands of war weary B-17 Flying Fortress bombers that were too damaged to keep flying conventional missions.

Engineers stripped out much of the aircraft to reduce weight. The guns. The armor. The seats. The bomb bay doors. Most of the wiring.

Then they filled the hollow fuselage with 21,000 pounds of a British explosive called Torpex. Torpex was 50 percent more powerful than TNT.

They installed a single television camera in the cockpit. They installed radio control receivers connected to the flight controls.

The aircraft became known as the BQ-7.

It was one of the first large scale American combat drone programs ever attempted.

🧵 3/5

The mission profile was nightmare on paper.

A two man volunteer crew took off in the BQ-7 from RAF Fersfield in Suffolk, England.

They flew the aircraft manually for the first 20 minutes. The stripped aircraft was loud, cramped, and dangerously exposed.

They climbed to altitude over the English Channel. They armed the 21,000 pounds of Torpex by manually removing the safety pins.

They handed control of the aircraft over to a mother plane flying close behind them.

A pilot in the mother plane took the radio control stick and the television feed from the BQ-7's nose camera came up on his viewfinder.

Then the volunteer crew had to bail out over the Channel after handing over control.

The mother plane would then fly the BQ-7 by remote control across the Channel into German occupied France.

The remote pilot watched through the television camera as he aimed the drone at his target.

At the last second he would put the BQ-7 into a steep dive into the fortified bunker.

22,000 pounds of high explosive would do the rest.

That was the theory.

In practice the radio controls failed constantly. The television camera was vulnerable to electromagnetic interference. The unstable Torpex could detonate spontaneously. The bailout procedure from a stripped cockpit was lethal.

The first Aphrodite mission flew on August 4 1944.

Four BQ-7s launched against German V-weapon sites. Two crashed in England. One was destroyed by anti-aircraft fire. One missed its target by thousands of feet.

The United States Navy still wanted to try its own version.

Read 5 tweets

Untold War Stories

@UntoldWarFacts

May 22

American bombardiers said they could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 20,000 feet.

The device they used to do it cost America $1.1 billion to build.

90,000 of them were manufactured during WW2.

Pilots took an oath to destroy it before letting it fall into enemy hands.

The Nazis had already stolen the plans in 1938.

This is the story of the Norden bombsight..🧵1/5

🧵 2/5

By the late 1920s a Dutch born American engineer named Carl Norden was working on a problem that no air force in the world had solved.

How to drop a bomb from 20,000 feet in the air, traveling at hundreds of miles per hour, into something the size of a small building.

The math was punishing.

The bomb had to be released early enough to fall through wind and air resistance to a target the bombardier could no longer see.

Speed, altitude, drift, temperature, the curvature of the earth — all of it had to be calculated in real time by a man looking through a small telescope in a moving aircraft.

Carl Norden built a machine that did it for him.

The Norden bombsight was a 50 pound electromechanical analog computer containing approximately 2,000 precision parts.

Gyroscopes. Motors. Gears. Mirrors. A telescopic sight. A rotating directional indicator.

An autopilot link that allowed the bombsight to actually fly the aircraft during the final minutes of the bomb run, holding the bomber rock steady on its approach to the target.

The bombardier set the variables.

The Norden calculated the release point.

The Norden flew the aircraft.

The Norden dropped the bombs.

In controlled tests it seemed astonishingly accurate.

Bombs were placed inside areas the size of football fields from four miles up.

🧵 3/5

The United States government treated the Norden bombsight as one of the most closely guarded secrets in the war.

Some historians later argued that the secrecy was a deliberate decoy designed to distract enemy intelligence from the Manhattan Project.

Whether by accident or design, the United States spent the equivalent of $24 billion in modern dollars to build the Norden program.

90,000 bombsights rolled off production lines between 1939 and 1945.

Every American bombardier in the Pacific and European theaters took a solemn oath.

He swore to defend the Norden with his life.

The bombsights were carried to and from aircraft under armed guard in locked metal cases.

They were installed and removed before and after every mission.

The bombardier on the bomb run was the only crew member permitted to see the Norden in operation.

Each Norden installation included a small thermite grenade.

If a bomber was shot down or about to be captured, the bombardier was required to detonate the thermite charge on top of the Norden.

The grenade burned at over 4,000 degrees.

It would melt the bombsight into a slag of unrecognizable metal.

Some versions of the oath were dramatic enough to include the idea that the bombardier should die before letting the sight be captured.

This was the most carefully protected piece of military technology in American history.

It had also been completely compromised before the war began.

Read 5 tweets

Untold War Stories

@UntoldWarFacts

May 18

What you are seeing here is a 10 year old American boy wearing the Medal of Honor around his neck.

The medal had been awarded to his father.

His father gave the order that saved his crew and sealed his own fate in 1943.

His three final words became one of the most legendary phrases in US Navy history.

This is the story of Howard Gilmore..🧵1/5

🧵 2/5
Howard Walter Gilmore was born on September 29 1902 in Selma, Alabama. His father worked in dry goods. His mother's maiden name was Howard. He grew up in the small towns of the Deep South.

He enlisted in the United States Navy on November 15 1920. He was 18 years old. Two years later he sat for the competitive entrance examination for the United States Naval Academy. He scored high enough to be admitted. He graduated from Annapolis in 1926, ranked 34th of 436.

His classmates included Wade McClusky, who would lead the dive bomber attack at Midway, and Lofton Henderson, the namesake of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal.

He served four years on the battleship USS Mississippi. Then he volunteered for the submarine force.

In 1932 Gilmore returned to New Orleans and married Hilda Jane St. Raymond. They had two children. A son named Howard Jr. and a daughter named Vernon Jeanne.

While serving as the executive officer of the submarine USS Shark in the Panama Canal Zone, Gilmore was attacked by a gang of thugs on shore leave. They cut his throat and left him for dead. He survived.

The day after Pearl Harbor he was given his first major command. The brand new submarine USS Growler, still being built in Connecticut.

🧵 3/5
Gilmore took the Growler to sea in 1942. His first patrol took him to the Aleutian Islands.

July 5 1942. Off the island of Kiska in Alaska. Growler surfaced in the morning fog and found three Japanese destroyers. Gilmore attacked. He sank one, the Arare. He damaged the other two. The Japanese fired two torpedoes at him. He evaded them. He was awarded the Navy Cross for the action.

His second patrol took him to the East China Sea near Formosa. He sank four Japanese merchant ships. Another Navy Cross.

His third patrol off Truk produced nothing. His fourth patrol began on January 1 1943 from Brisbane, Australia. He sank two more Japanese transports in the Solomon Islands. The waters were thick with Japanese ships now evacuating Guadalcanal.

On the night of February 6 1943 Growler was running on the surface in the Bismarck Sea. The diesel engines hummed in the dark. The crew was charging the batteries. Gilmore was on the bridge with three other men. They spotted a small Japanese ship moving toward them through the darkness.

It was the Hayasaki. A 900 ton Japanese provision ship that had been converted into a convoy escort. Her lookouts had spotted the submarine first. She was turning to ram.

Read 5 tweets

Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

Untold War Stories

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @UntoldWarFacts

Untold War Stories

Untold War Stories

Untold War Stories

Untold War Stories

Untold War Stories

Untold War Stories

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Send Email!