Maritime History

Japanese aircraft carrier Chūyō

Chūyō (冲鷹, "hawk which soars") was a Taiyō-class escort carrier originally built as Nitta Maru (新田 丸), the first of her class of three passenger-cargo liners built in Japan during the late 1930s. She was requisitioned by the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) in late 1941 and was converted into an escort carrier in 1942. She spent most of her service ferrying aircraft, cargo and passengers to Truk until she was torpedoed and sunk by an American submarine in late 1943 with heavy loss of life. When it went down, of over 1280 people on board, 161 were saved. The ship was carrying 21 American prisoners of war that had survived the sinking of USS Sculpin, and of them only one survived.

Also on this shelf

See also

• ▸Katakolo
• ▸Battle of Lundenæs
• ▸Flat Top Island Light

Uncatalogued shelf

Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.