America Sent Submarines Instead of Battleships, and Japan's Empire Starved One Ship at a Time

On November 29, 1944, the American submarine USS Archerfish sank the Japanese aircraft carrier Shinano off the coast of Japan. At around seventy-two thousand tons, Shinano was the largest warship Japan ever built and the largest carrier in the world. She had been in commission for ten days, had never operated an aircraft, and went down seventeen hours after leaving Tokyo Bay. She remains the largest ship ever sunk by a submarine. This documentary follows the six-hour surface chase by Commander Joseph Enright's Archerfish, the four torpedo hits at 3:17 in the morning, and the seven hours of flooding that followed in a ship whose watertight doors had never been tested. It explains why Shinano existed at all, from the Yamato-class battleship hull to the conversion ordered after Midway, and it traces the American submarine force from an interwar design specification written for a fleet battle to the campaign that sank half of Japan's merchant tonnage. Every number in this film comes from after-action reports, loss tables and postwar Japanese records, not from legend. Subscribe for the definitive history of the United States in the Second World War — new documentaries every few days.