Kaga
June 4, 1942
At 1:25 p.m., the crew of the Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft carrier Kaga removed the portrait of the Japanese emperor Hirohito from its place in one of the mess rooms. They knew their ship was doomed. Several hours before, Kaga had suffered direct hits from at least four 500- and 1,000-pound bombs dropped by Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bombers flying from USS Enterprise. Jisaku Okada, Kaga’s captain, had been killed instantly, and the explosives had ignited the vessel’s fuel tank, fuel lines, ammunition, and the just-filled tanks of her Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter planes. The fires could not be extinguished, and three hours later, the crew abandoned ship. At 7:25 p.m., Kaga was scuttled by two 1,000-pound warheads fired into her starboard side from the destroyer Hagikaze. The 816-foot-long ship began to sink rapidly to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. As she slipped away, her flight commander, Takahisa Amagai, watched from his place on Hagikaze, convinced that he should have been with his ship and her 811 doomed sailors.
Akagi
June 5, 1942
At five in the morning, burned brightly against the blue sky and dark water of the Pacific Ocean. The flagship of Japan’s carrier force, she had been built in 1920 as a cruiser but was retrofitted as an aircraft carrier and had led the attack on Pearl Harbor six months earlier. During the Battle of Midway, a dive-bomber just missed the ship but jammed her rudder, crippling the massive vessel. There may still, but her fate was sealed by a single 1,000-pound bomb dropped by Lt. Cmdr. Richard “Dick” Best that struck her upper hangar deck and 18 fully fueled aircraft, igniting uncontrollable fires. To prevent ’s capture, Combined Fleet Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto made the wrenching decision to scuttle her, and four different destroyers fired torpedoes into her damaged sides. She went down bow first and soon joined on the seafloor. Her captain, Taijiro Aoki, survived, while 267 members of her crew did not.
