Transcription
Japan built the most advanced aircraft carrier in the world. An armored flight deck thick enough to shrug off bombs, 30,000 tons of steel and technology, the flagship of the entire Japanese fleet. And on its very first day of combat, it was sunk by a single torpedo from a submarine whose fire control computer developed a fault at the critical moment. The commander of that submarine did not think he had hit anything. And the most extraordinary part of this story is not how the Taiho was lost. It is that nobody has ever found it. The Taiho is still missing. Right now, somewhere at the bottom of the Philippine Sea, the most heavily armored carrier Japan ever built is sitting in the dark. And nobody knows exactly where.
I want to be straight with you about something. When I started looking into this, I assumed the Taiho must have been found by now. Ships the size of a city block do not simply vanish. But it has. And the reasons why tell you something important about just how enormous and how deep the ocean really is.
To understand why nobody has found the Taiho, you first need to understand what it was and why Japan built it differently from every other carrier that came before. By 1939, Japan's naval planners had a problem. The carriers they had built were fast and carried a lot of aircraft, but they were fragile. Wooden flight decks, fuel lines that ran too close to the hangars, no real protection against bombs. The Japanese had watched the British build armored carriers in the Mediterranean and taken note. They started designing something new.
The Taiho, which translates as Great Phoenix, was Japan's answer. Laid down in July 1941 at the Kawasaki shipyard in Kobe, the Taiho was unlike anything the Japanese navy had built before. The flight deck was armored steel, thick enough to withstand a 500 kg bomb dropped in a dive. The hangar walls were reinforced. The belt armor at the waterline was heavier than any previous Japanese carrier. In total, 8,800 tons of armor went into the Taiho, 30% of the entire weight of the ship dedicated purely to protection. Only the Shinano, which was a converted battleship hull, carried a greater armor proportion.
The Taiho was not just armored. The Taiho was the first Japanese carrier to carry air search radar, the first to feature an enclosed funnel built into the island to keep smoke off the flight deck, and the first with lifts capable of handling the heavier aircraft Japan was developing. At nearly 30,000 tons and 260 m long, the Taiho was the most capable carrier Japan had ever sent to sea. Japanese naval general staff requirements were clear. The Taiho had to survive bombs. It had to survive heavy shellfire. It had to be, in the words circulating among the design team, an unsinkable carrier. That word, unsinkable, is one you should remember.
The Taiho was commissioned on the 7th of March 1944, 3 years of construction, 3 years of design and refinement and armored steel, and then 3 months of trials, training her crew, working up her air group before sailing to join the fleet at Tawi-Tawi in the Philippines. Stay with me here because this next part matters. Japan knew what was coming in June 1944. American forces were pushing through the Pacific island chain. Saipan was next. If Saipan fell, American bombers would be within range of the Japanese home islands for the first time. Japan could not let that happen.
Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa assembled the most powerful carrier fleet Japan had put to sea since Midway. Nine carriers, five battleships, 13 cruisers, 28 destroyers, 430 aircraft. Ozawa's flagship was the Taiho, the brand new unsinkable carrier. The plan was called Operation A-Go, a decisive battle that would destroy the American fleet and turn the tide of the Pacific War. Ozawa was confident his carriers outnumbered the Americans in several categories. And the Taiho was supposed to be untouchable. The battle that followed became known to American sailors as the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. Japan lost over 400 aircraft in two days. Three carriers went to the bottom. The operation was a catastrophe.
It was the morning of the 19th of June, 1944. The Taiho was launching aircraft for the first strike wave when a lookout spotted something in the water. White tracks cutting through the surface towards the carrier. Torpedo wakes. One of the pilots who had just launched his aircraft saw what was happening. Warrant Officer Sakio Komatsu turned his plane around, dropped it into a dive, and flew directly into the path of one of the torpedoes. He destroyed it with his own aircraft. It saved the Taiho from that one weapon, but there were others.
A single torpedo struck the Taiho on the starboard side. The explosion jammed the forward aircraft elevator, leaving a gaping hole in the flight deck, and ruptured an aviation fuel tank directly below the lift well. Fuel began seeping into the flooded elevator pit. The damage looked manageable. The armored flight deck was completely intact. The Taiho was still moving. Ozawa reassured that his flagship was operational, ordered launch operations to continue. What nobody had fully grasped was what was happening below decks.
Aviation fuel from the ruptured tank was mixing with water in the elevator well and producing vapor. Because the broken elevator had sealed off normal ventilation in that section, the vapor had nowhere to go. It began spreading into the hangar decks. Slowly, silently, the Taiho was filling with an invisible explosive mixture. The damage control officer noticed the problem. He made a decision that ended the Taiho. He ordered all the ventilation hatches opened and the ventilation system switched on at full power. The idea was to flush the vapor out of the ship. Instead, the ventilation system pulled the vapor through every space in the carrier. Within hours, both hangar decks were saturated. Men started collapsing. Work parties were driven up to the open deck. Smoking was banned across the entire ship. Everyone who understood what was happening knew they were sitting inside something that could go off at any moment.
At half past 3:00 in the afternoon, nearly 7 hours after a single torpedo had struck, something created a spark. The Taiho exploded, not gradually, all at once. The blast buckled the armored flight deck upward from the inside. The sides of the carrier blew out. Both hangar decks were destroyed instantly. Every aircraft aboard was gone. Secondary explosions tore through the ship one after another. Ozawa, standing on the bridge, looked at the wreckage spreading around his flagship and said he would die with it. His staff persuaded him otherwise. Ozawa transferred to the heavy cruiser Haguro to continue directing the battle. At 28 minutes past 4:00 in the afternoon on the 19th of June 1944, the Taiho sank stern first. Hundreds of officers and men went down with it. Japan's unsinkable carrier had lasted one day in combat.
Now, here is the part of the story that everybody seems to forget. The submarine that fired the torpedo, the USS Albacore, commanded by Lieutenant Commander James Blanchard, did not know it had sunk anything. Blanchard had been lining up his attack when a fault appeared on the fire control computer, casting doubt on his targeting solution. Rather than let the carrier escape, Blanchard raised his periscope and fired by eye, six torpedoes. Then the Albacore dived immediately to avoid the destroyer escorts and went deep. The crew heard some explosions, but they had no way of knowing what had happened above them. Blanchard surfaced later that day, frustrated. He was angry, in his own words, for missing what he called a golden opportunity. He believed every torpedo had missed. The Albacore returned to base and filed a report crediting possible damage to a carrier, not a sinking. Damage.
It was not until after the war ended, when American intelligence was able to review Japanese records, that the full picture became clear. The Albacore had not missed. The Albacore had hit Japan's most advanced carrier with one torpedo and started a chain of events that destroyed it 7 hours later. Blanchard was awarded the Navy Cross. By that point, the Albacore itself was gone, lost on its very next patrol in November 1944, sunk by a Japanese mine off the coast of Japan. The submarine that sank the Taiho was never found either. Until 2023, when a team from the University of Tokyo located the wreck off Hokkaido, the Albacore has been found. The Taiho has not.
So, why not? Why, 80 years later, has nobody found it? Three reasons, and all three of them are real. The first is the ocean itself. The battle took place in open water in the Philippine Sea, a body of water that covers nearly 6 million square kilometers. The average depth across the Philippine Sea is over 4,000 m. In the area where the battle was fought, north of Yap Island, between the Marianas and the Philippines, the ocean floor sits between 4 and 5,000 m down. The Taiho is not resting in the shallow coastal waters where most of the famous wrecks have been found. It is sitting in deep open ocean, far beyond the reach of conventional diving, at depths that challenge even remotely operated vehicles.
The second reason is that nobody recorded exactly where the Taiho sank. The battle was fluid, ships were moving. The Japanese fleet was under attack from submarines and preparing air strikes simultaneously. Nobody stopped to note a precise position when the carrier went down. The Taiho's approximate sinking location is known only from the general positions of the fleet during the battle, which gives a search area measured in hundreds of square kilometers. And the third reason is the simplest, nobody has gone looking. Unlike the Yamato found in 1985 or the Musashi which Paul Allen spent 8 years and vast resources searching for before finding it in 2015, no expedition has specifically targeted the Taiho. It has not been a priority. The logistics and cost of searching several hundred square kilometers of ocean at 4 to 5,000 m depth are extraordinary. Without dedicated funding and a specific search operation, the Taiho simply stays where it fell.
There's something worth sitting with here. Three Japanese carriers were lost at the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The Hiyo was found in 2021. The Shokaku remains missing. The Taiho remains missing. The battle that destroyed Japan's carrier air power, the battle that American sailors nicknamed Turkey Shoot, left most of its wrecks completely unlocated. The Yamato was found, the Musashi was found, the Shinano is still missing, and the Taiho, Japan's great unsinkable carrier, the ship they built with 30% of its weight in armor, the ship that was going to be the one that would not go down, is still missing, too. Somewhere in the dark at the bottom of the Philippine Sea, with hundreds of men still aboard, and not a single expedition has ever gone to look for it properly.