What Was the Last Japanese Battleship to be sunk in WW2?

by 00RUSE00

As far as I'm aware there are two candidates for this title. The first is IJN Haruna, the second IJN Ise. Both were sunk on the same day, but which one went down first?

wotan_weevil

Ise sank first, in the middle of the day. However, her crew only abandoned her at the end of the day (she sank in very shallow water). Ise was hit 6 times in the first raids of the day, in the morning, and then took 9 more direct hits in a later wave at 1100, which sank her. She was bombed later in the day, at 1400, by which time she was already on the bottom (but this wasn't obvious, given the shallowness of the water), by B-24s flying Okinawa, but they all missed. The B-24s had a bad day, with their first success being hitting the already-sunk cruiser Aoba with 4 bombs (Aoba was sitting on the bottom, having been sunk on 24th July).

Haruna was under attack all day, receiving a total of 13 direct hits (and, like Ise, also took damage from near misses). Eventually, a list caused by flooding from the damage put an open part of her hull (open due to damage from the air raids 4 days earlier, on 24th July). She then took on a lot of water quickly, and promptly sank. The last attacks on Haruna were at about 1615, and she sank after that (but not long after). (The B-24s attacked Haruna at about 1245 and missed.)

Ise had been heavily damaged by 4 direct hits in the raids of 24th July (which also killed her captain), and she took on enough water that her bow touched bottom. She was refloated in time to be properly sunk on 28th July. Haruna was only lightly damaged, with unimportant-at-the-time damage to her hull above the waterline - it was this damage that would sink her on 28th July.

This left Nagato as the remaining Japanese battleship. She had taken a mere two direct hits (one of which hit her bridge and killed her captain) in the 18th July air attacks on Yokusuke, a small yield from the 60 dive bombers who attacked her. She was also hit by rocket which failed to explode.

Finally, a point of probably excessive pedantry: While Nagato was the last Japanese battleship still in service as a battleship, she was survived by three other "battleships". Three Japanese ex-battleships, pre-dreadnoughts converted to accommodation, training, and target ships survived the war, but these were ex-battleships rather than battleships. Mikasa, a museum ship since 1922, also survived, and is now the last pre-dreadnought battleship (unless you call HMS Victory, a museum ship for even longer, a "pre-dreadnought", which she technically is in a sense, but it is perverse to call a wooden ship-of-the-line a "pre-dreadnought" (HMS Victory is still in commission!)).