Battle of Truk: A US battleship sank a Japanese cruiser and could not say what it was

On 16 February 1944, two American battleships and a destroyer opened fire on a Japanese light cruiser off Truk and sank her at close range in daylight. All three filed action reports. Between them they wrote down three different classes for the same ship, and the one with the most instruments got it wrong twice. This film is built from the reports themselves: what each ship claimed, what the endorsements did to those claims, what a Japanese staff officer could still say about it twenty months later, and why the number of ships sunk at Truk still hasn't settled. The narration is synthetic. Every document shown is on screen at the resolution it was scanned at, and if you want to check any of it, the sources are listed below in the order the film used them. 00:00 Three cruiser silhouettes 00:29 The clock 01:00 The sweep 02:51 Three ships and one cruiser 07:19 What each ship had 09:33 Paragraph fifty-four 11:57 The count 17:10 Next time SOURCES United States National Archives, Record Group 38, World War II Action and Operational Reports. Catalogue identifiers are NARA naIds and every one is free to view online. 78322794 USS Iowa, Report of Engagement off Truk, secret serial 002, 26 February 1944, with Commander Battleship Division Seven's first endorsement of 3 March 1944 78395958 USS Iowa, Identification of Japanese cruiser sunk off Truk, secret serial 036, 6 April 1944, with the silhouette enclosure and the Central Pacific Force endorsement 78321307 USS New Jersey, action report, secret serial 015, 25 February 1944, with the tactical plot of the surface action and Enclosures C-2 to C-8, seven combat photographs 78334043 USS Bradford, action report, secret serial 013, 24 February 1944 78342737 Commander Task Force 58, action report, Truk, 16 and 17 February 1944 78321174 Commander Task Group 58.2, secret letter serial 0058, 25 February 1944 78354933 Commander Torpedo Squadron Ten, Night Radar Minimum Altitude Bombing Attack on Enemy Shipping in Truk Atoll, secret serial 001, 26 February 1944 Japanese Naval and Merchant Shipping Losses During World War II by All Causes. Joint Army-Navy Assessment Committee, February 1947. Naval chronology printed page 10, merchant chronology printed pages 53 and 54. Interrogations of Japanese Officials. United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Naval Analysis Division, 1946. Volume I, HathiTrust mdp.39015046357342. Interrogation Nav No. 11, USSBS No. 61, Captain Oi Atsushi, Tokyo 18 October 1945, printed page 56. Interrogation Nav No. 34, USSBS No. 139, Commander Nakajima Chikataka, Tokyo 21 October 1945, printed page 143. Volume II, mdp.39015046357334, Plate 87-1, printed page 378. Tonan Maru No. 3's movements after 17 February 1944 are taken from a compiled tabular record at combinedfleet.com. That is a derived source rather than a document, it disagrees with other accounts on the year she was scrapped, and the film says so where it uses it. More at https://actionreporthistory.com/video...