The torpedoing of USS Saratoga

On the evening of 11 January 1942, just over a month after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese submarine I-6 hit the American aircraft carrier USS Saratoga with a torpedo. The ship did not sink, but of the mere four carriers the United States then had in the Pacific, one was out of action for almost five months. In the weeks when the Japanese were seizing Malaya, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, this was a painful loss for the American fleet.

The ship and her task

Saratoga was one of the oldest and largest aircraft carriers in the world. She had been laid down as a battlecruiser, and after the Washington Treaty of 1922, which limited the tonnage of capital ships, she was converted, like her sister Lexington, into an aircraft carrier. She entered service in 1927. She could carry nearly eighty aircraft.

On 7 December 1941 the ship was entering San Diego after a refit, which is why she escaped the fate of the battleships at Pearl Harbor. A few days later, by now in Hawaii, she became the core of the expedition to relieve Wake Atoll that had been prepared by Admiral Husband Kimmel. Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher’s force was, however, recalled on 23 December, and Wake fell the same day (the fall of Wake Island). On the way back Saratoga delivered to Midway the Marine Corps fighters originally intended for Wake.

On 29 December the carrier returned to Pearl Harbor, and the next day Rear Admiral Herbert F. Leary took command of her task force (TF 14). On 31 December, the day Admiral Chester Nimitz took over the Pacific Fleet, the force put to sea again and patrolled the waters between Hawaii, Midway and Johnston Atoll. On 11 January it was heading for a rendezvous with the task force of the carrier Enterprise, which had left Pearl Harbor that day to cover convoys carrying reinforcements to Samoa.

The attack by I-6

Japanese submarines had been prowling around Hawaii since the start of the war. They were to shadow the American fleet and attack ships leaving Pearl Harbor, but until January they had achieved no great successes. On 9 January the submarine I-18 reported a Lexington-class carrier north-east of Johnston Atoll. The command of the 6th (Submarine) Fleet set up a line of several boats in the area. One of them was I-6, a large ocean-going submarine of the J2 type commanded by Lieutenant Commander Michimune Inaba. On 10 January her lookouts sighted American patrol aircraft several times, and from their courses the navigator worked out the approximate position of the carrier.

At dusk on 11 January I-6 sighted a destroyer and dived. Soon afterwards Saratoga appeared in the periscope, steaming at 15 knots, screened by a heavy cruiser and destroyers. From a range of about 4,300 metres Inaba fired three Type 89 torpedoes. At around 7.15 p.m. one of them struck the carrier amidships on the port side.

The explosion flooded three boiler rooms and killed six firemen. About 1,100 tons of water poured into the hull. The ship listed first to starboard, then to port, and briefly lost way. The crew quickly corrected the list, and within some tens of minutes Saratoga was able to make 16 knots. The escorting destroyers counter-attacked with depth charges but did not find the submarine, which had gone down to a depth of about a hundred metres.

According to Japanese records, I-6’s sound operator heard two powerful explosions and a series of smaller ones, which were taken for the sounds of a sinking ship. Inaba reported two hits and the probable sinking of a Lexington-class carrier. In Japan, therefore, it was believed that Lexington had been sunk, although that ship had not been involved at all.

Where it happened

According to Japanese data, the attack took place at about 19° north and 165° west, roughly 270 miles north-east of Johnston Atoll. That is about 420 nautical miles, or nearly 780 kilometres (about 480 statute miles), west-south-west of Pearl Harbor. The distance of 480 miles given in some chronologies is therefore consistent with this, if it is understood as statute rather than nautical miles.

Repairs

On 13 January Saratoga reached Pearl Harbor under her own power. During temporary repairs her four twin 203 mm (8-inch) gun turrets, obsolete on a carrier, were removed; the guns were later emplaced as coastal defence batteries on Oʻahu. On 9 February the ship sailed for the navy yard at Bremerton on Puget Sound. There she was thoroughly rebuilt: she received an additional anti-torpedo bulge, modern 127 mm (5-inch) dual-purpose guns, many light anti-aircraft guns and new radars.

The work was finished at the end of May. On 22 May Saratoga left Bremerton, and she returned to Pearl Harbor on 6 June, the last day of the Battle of Midway. She thus missed all the great carrier battles of the first half of 1942. Her airmen, however, did not sit idle: Lieutenant Commander John Thach’s fighter squadron VF-3 moved to Lexington, and one of its pilots, Edward O’Hare, shot down several Japanese bombers in defence of that ship on 20 February 1942, becoming the first US Navy ace of the war.

A shortage of carriers

The damage to Saratoga came at the hardest time for the Pacific Fleet. The battleships hit on 7 December lay on the bottom or were awaiting repair, and the carriers made up the fleet’s entire striking power. In January Nimitz had Lexington, Enterprise and Saratoga in the Pacific, and Yorktown had only just arrived from the Atlantic, reaching San Diego on 30 December. Hornet was still working up, and Wasp remained in the Atlantic. The Imperial Japanese Navy, meanwhile, had about ten carriers, including the six large ones of Admiral Nagumo’s force, which had attacked Pearl Harbor.

The loss of a quarter of their strength at a stroke forced the Americans to be even more cautious. Nimitz, pressed by Admiral Ernest King in Washington to take the offensive, could send his carriers only on short raids. The first attempt, a strike by Lexington on Wake, was called off when on 23 January a Japanese submarine sank the oiler Neches, which was accompanying the force. The next succeeded: on 1 February 1942 aircraft from Enterprise and Yorktown attacked Japanese bases in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands.

Significance

The attack by I-6 was one of the greatest successes of the Japanese submarine force in the first months of the war. Japanese submarines, intended above all for fighting warships, attacked merchant shipping relatively rarely, and in that role they achieved far less over the whole war than the German U-boats in the Atlantic. To carriers, however, they could be dangerous: on 31 August 1942 Saratoga was torpedoed off the Solomon Islands by another submarine, I-26, and two weeks later I-19 sank Wasp.

For the United States the January torpedoing of Saratoga was another blow in a run of defeats that stretched from Pearl Harbor through Guam and Wake to the Philippines. It also showed that the carriers, on which the whole of American strategy in the Pacific had rested since December, were few and hard to replace. Until new carriers began coming off American slipways in series in 1943, each of these ships was worth its weight in gold, and Saratoga, despite being hit by torpedoes twice in 1942, survived the whole war.