IJN Soryu

The Story of IJN Soryu

Fast and graceful, IJN Soryu — the "Blue Dragon" — was one of the first truly modern Japanese fleet carriers, a sleek ship designed for speed, capable of slicing through the water at more than 34 knots to keep pace with the hardest-hitting forces in the fleet. She was a key member of the Kido Butai, the elite carrier strike force that carried Japan to its early run of stunning victories, and she looked every inch the swift, dangerous predator she was. Soryu's aircraft were part of the storm that broke over Pearl Harbor on the morning of 7 December 1941. In the months that followed she ranged across the Pacific and deep into the Indian Ocean with the Kido Butai, her planes striking at Allied bases, ships and territory from Wake Island to Java to the raids on Ceylon. Wherever Nagumo's carriers went, victory seemed to follow, and Soryu was always in the thick of it, one of the fast, sharp blades of a fleet that knew only success. Then came Midway, and the morning that destroyed her in minutes. On 4 June 1942, Soryu's flight deck was crowded with aircraft being readied for a strike against the American fleet when dive bombers from the carrier USS Yorktown plunged down upon her out of the sky. In the space of about three minutes, three bombs struck the carrier in quick succession, ripping open her flight deck and igniting the fuelled, armed aircraft packed below. The fires were instant and unstoppable. Explosions ripped through her hangars, and Soryu — the fastest of the four doomed carriers — was reduced to a blazing hulk almost at once, dead in the water with her engines stopped and her decks an inferno. Her crew were forced to abandon ship as the flames consumed her, and within hours the Blue Dragon slipped beneath the Pacific, taking hundreds of men with her, including many who could not escape the fire below. She was one of four irreplaceable fleet carriers — Akagi, Kaga, Soryu and Hiryu — that Japan lost in that single catastrophic day at Midway, a blow that shattered the Kido Butai and broke the back of the Imperial Navy's offensive power. Soryu had helped open the war with triumph after triumph, ranging from Hawaii to the Indian Ocean, and then died in minutes on the morning the war turned against her country. To reconstruct IJN Soryu is to capture one of the sleekest and fastest of the early Japanese carriers — the Blue Dragon at the height of her speed and power — in the brief, brilliant career that ran from Pearl Harbor to the catastrophe at Midway. Her swiftness could not save her from the dive bombers that found her with her decks full of fuel and bombs, and in three terrible minutes one of the proudest ships of the Kido Butai was doomed.