IJN Takao Poster

She was one of the most powerful and handsome heavy cruisers ever built — the lead ship of a class that represented the very peak of Japanese cruiser design, with a massive, castle-like bridge tower, ten 8-inch guns, and a fearsome array of "Long Lance" torpedoes. IJN Takao looked every inch the predator she was, and she prowled the Pacific through years of hard and often victorious fighting before meeting one of the strangest fates of any ship in the fleet. Takao was active from the very opening of the war, supporting the invasions that carried Japan across Southeast Asia and into the Dutch East Indies. She came into her own in the savage night battles around Guadalcanal, where Japanese cruisers used their superb optics, rigorous night-fighting training and devastating torpedoes to maul the Americans in close-range brawls in the dark — actions that earned the Imperial Navy a fearsome reputation in the confined, treacherous waters of the Solomons, where Takao and her kind were among the most dangerous warships afloat. Her dramatic decline began at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. As part of Admiral Kurita's Center Force steaming to attack the American landings in the Philippines, Takao was ambushed in the narrow Palawan Passage by two American submarines, USS Darter and USS Dace. Torpedoes ripped into the cruiser, flooding her and killing scores of her crew; the same well-laid attack sank two other heavy cruisers outright, including Kurita's own flagship Atago, a stunning blow struck before the battle had even properly begun. Crippled but stubbornly afloat, Takao limped away to the great naval base at Singapore. There she sat, too badly damaged to be repaired under the worsening conditions of a losing war, serving as little more than a static floating anti-aircraft battery guarding the harbour. But even then her story was not finished: in 1945, British XE-craft midget submarines crept into the heavily defended harbour and planted explosive charges beneath her hull, damaging her further in one of the boldest and most audacious commando operations of the entire war — a daring raid that earned its crews the highest decorations. Takao survived even that, battered and immobile, to live to the surrender — a rare veteran of the Pacific's fiercest fighting still afloat at the end. After the war she was taken out into the deep water of the Malacca Strait and finally scuttled, sent to the bottom by her captors in 1946. To reconstruct IJN Takao is to capture the apex of the Japanese heavy cruiser — that distinctive towering bridge, those eight-inch guns and Long Lance tubes — a ship that fought from the invasions of 1941 through the deadly night battles of Guadalcanal to the disaster at Leyte, was crippled by submarines, attacked by midget submarines in her own harbour, and survived it all only to be scuttled at the war's end. Few ships packed so much drama into a single career.