I have a bit of a tale to tell, and like any good story it is equal parts luck and incompetence. Our story begins somewhere off the coast of Hong Kong, on one spring evening during a war between Japan and Great Britain. The Japanese had gotten wind of a British convoy moving through the area and had moved to engage it. Their intercepting force consisted of three rather outdated battleships, seven light cruisers, a trio of destroyers and a pair of newly converted light carriers. The British had not left this convoy unguarded though, protecting it with a pair of battleships, one quite modern, a somewhat dated battlecruiser and five destroyers. However, let's pay close attention to the three biggest characters in our story.
It was at dusk that the Japanese fleet encountered the British convoy and it's escort. A decision was made quickly among the Japanese commanders that fighting the British capital ships was an unwise proposal. Certainly the difference between their fleets was not great, but it was very early in the war and Britain could afford losses Japan could not. Thus, a plan was concocted. Night was only a bit away, the Japanese would wait for the sun to set before sending a pair of cruisers around the British escorts to attack the convoy while a strike force of elite torpedo bombers would attack the British escort fleet. The dangers of doing all this at night were not underappreciated, but it was considered an acceptable risk.
Soon the results of this plan began to bear fruit. The cruisers managed to slip past the escort fleet and wrecked havoc among the convoy, sinking all fourteen of the merchants before turning away and heading for port. Roughly 20 torpedo bombers,
Kawasaki Zuiuns, found targets and began to drop their torpedoes. Messages were relayed back to command that a full half-dozen hits had been achieved. Post battle analysis would show that 2 of these had struck the British battlecruiser, causing significant damage, 1 had hit the modern battleship to little effect and 3 of them, one after the other, had slammed into the truly unfortunate British destroyer
Liffey.
Satisfied with there results, the Japanese fleet turned back for port, recovering all but one of the Zuiuns successfully. However, here is where the CVL
Izumo decided to make things a bit more interesting. Navigating in the darkness, she managed to lose contract with the rest of the fleet. Clearly, her captain decided, the best thing to do would be to return to the site of the engagement. And so
Izumo sailed, unescorted, directly into three British capitals and several destroyers. Soon, the inevitable took place. The British ships encounter her in the darkness and wasted little time in taking their revenge. The older British battleship, the
Royal Sovereign, fired point blank into her at only 95 yards. The last radio transmission from
Izumo was a report of the
Royal Sovereign being hit with a torpedo.
That last report caused a bit of confusion among the Japanese commanders. The
Izumo-class had been fitted with no torpedo tubes and any strike planes had long since returned with no follow-up strike ordered. Post battle analysis would soon provide the answers, of events that would tarnish British naval history forever and serve as a constant source of embarrassment, especially on online message boards 80 years later.
When Izumo emerged within the British escort fleet, the destroyers
Arun and
Moy wasted no time in conducting torpedo attacks. None of these impacted Izumo, but one of
Arun's did find a target: the
Royal Sovereign. Though it was only a single hit, it was enough to cause uncontrollable flooding. Two hours later, the
Royal Sovereign began to slip beneath the waves, the only British capital ship lost that day.
And what became of
Arun and
Moy? Were their captains court martialed? Well, fate seems to enjoy ironic punishments. Roughly an hour after the catastrophic friendly fire incident, the Japanese battleship
Shikishima, similarly lost after losing contact with the main Japanese fleet, emerged from the darkness. The positioning was perfect for a torpedo firing solution, but alas, all those torpedoes had been spent attempting to claim credit on the
Izumo. Both
Arun and
Moy were torn apart by 12, 5 and 3 inch guns from the Japanese battleship.