57 seconds after the first torpedo was fired, Enright raised the periscope again: "The torpedo hit the tail of the carrier, and I could see an exploding fireball rising from the side of the hull." Ten seconds later, the second torpedo also hit, about 50 yards ahead of the first. Then I saw that the enemy destroyers had swooped in. ”
Enright ordered an emergency dive to a depth of 40 meters to evade the attack. During the dive, he heard 4 explosions in succession. The sonar officer reported hearing the sound of the hull cracking. Enright judged that all 6 torpedoes had hit their targets. The Japanese destroyers apparently did not find the exact location of the American troops, and the depth charges they dropped were also 300 meters away from the submarine recently, and it was impossible to cause fatal damage to the "Shooting Water Fish". At 6:10 a.m., when Enright floated up to the depth of the periscope and extended the periscope, the sea was empty. He judged that the Japanese carrier must have sunk.
Four of the six torpedoes fired by the Water Fish hit the target accurately and two ran off targets. Two of the torpedoes hit the middle of rib 188-201 at the rear of the carrier's starboard side, hitting Rib 120 and 1 hitting Rib 104. The fuel tank of the Shinano, the mechanical room on the outside of the starboard side, and the boiler chamber no. 3 were quickly filled with surging seawater, and the shock wave generated by the explosion cracked the hull compartment, and the adjacent no. 1 and no. 7 boiler chambers were flooded, and the air compressor room was damaged. Poor loss control led to the rapid expansion of water inlet to the rear cooling machine room, the officers and men's quarters of the organ section, the injection and drainage command post and the first generator room, and the right tilt of the aircraft carrier reached 9 degrees.
A staff officer suggested to Abe that a shoal be found as soon as possible to run the carrier aground, so that at least more people could be rescued. Abe categorically rejected this "no-show" suggestion. A month ago, the Americans used 19 torpedoes and many bombs to barely sink the Musashi, and what can I do with just 4 torpedoes? Fearing that the deceleration would be attacked again by submarines, Abe ordered shinano to remain at a speed of 18 knots.
Again, this is a stupid decision. The hastily launched Shinano is actually still unfinished, and a large number of cables that are not installed in place are piled up in the passages inside the ship, resulting in the waterproof gates not being closed or closed. The drainage system is not yet complete, and manual drainage pumps alone cannot drain the large amount of water ingress due to high-speed navigation.
Originally designed as a battleship, the Shinano was later temporarily converted into an aircraft carrier, and the internal structure of the hull was far more complicated than that of ordinary aircraft carriers, and the sailors who had just boarded the ship - at this stage of the war, like the extreme lack of experienced pilots, the Japanese Navy also lacked sailors with actual combat experience - like entering a maze, which brought great difficulties to the rescue work. At first they were able to organize drainage under unified command, but as soon as danger arose, they quickly lost confidence and fled for their lives. Although the damaged pipe personnel injected at least 3,000 tons of water into the opposite side to ease the tilt slightly, due to the continuous expansion of the damage range, the successive failures of the water injection switch and the drainage pump greatly reduced the drainage efficiency. Interior Minister Osamu Mikami decided to close the lifts between the upper and lower decks. To his great surprise, the edge of the lifting mouth secret door was closed to reveal more than 2 centimeters of gaps! Mikami, who saw this scene, realized that the cabin had either not undergone a watertight test or that the test was not qualified at all. He knew it was all over.
At 4 o'clock, the aircraft carrier tilted to the right to 10 degrees, and half an hour later it was even larger to 15 degrees. As one cabin after another was filled with seawater, at 5 a.m., the Shinano tilted to the right at 18 degrees. The starboard turbine stopped running and reduced the speed to 11 knots. The lack of training of the crew was completely mentally broken, and all efforts to control the ingress failed. At 6 o'clock, the aircraft carrier tilted to the right to 20 degrees, and at 7 o'clock it reached a staggering 30 degrees. By 7:45 a.m., the Shinano had come to a complete stop at sea. Abe ordered the Isokaze and Hamakaze to go forward and prepare to carry out the towing, and personally went to the bow of the ship to take command. But the two destroyers were too small, and the Shinano was too big, and it was doomed for the ants to pull the bullock cart. The steel cable that was towed was pulled off several times, and the towing failed.
At 8:30 a.m., the sea had flooded the injection and drainage command post, and all the sailors who rushed to the rescue at the site were drowned. The tragic fate of the Shinano was already doomed. At 10:25, Abe, who saw that the rightward tilt had reached 35 degrees, ordered the flag to be lowered, and three minutes later ordered all the staff to prepare for evacuation. At 10:37, Abe issued an order to abandon the ship. At 10:55 a.m., the Shinano, which had never fired a single shot or taken off or landed a single aircraft, sank 50 kilometers southeast of Cape Shiogu in a deafening noise, at 33 degrees 06 minutes north latitude and 136 degrees 46 minutes east longitude. It set multiple records that are unprecedented and likely to be unprecedented: the largest warship sunk by a submarine; the largest aircraft carrier built during World War II; and the shortest-lived aircraft carrier , which was sunk just 17 hours after its first voyage.
According to the records of Shiro Yamauchi, a technician in the Shipbuilding Department of the Yokosuka Plant who was in charge of the construction of the Shinano, after exchanging views with the Minister of internal affairs Mikami Nakasa and the commander of the injection and drainage, Captain Fumio Inada, Yamauchi asserted that it was the mistake of the damage control personnel that led to the sinking of the Shinano: "From the injection and drainage commander to the ordinary operator, all the portlets on the starboard side were not opened in time when the mine was on the starboard side. By the time everyone reacted and began to pour water into the starboard side, the warship had tilted sharply and was powerless to return to the sky. This is such a low-level error that it is a pity that there are intact facilities that cannot be used effectively. ”
At 14:00 on the same day, the Combined Fleet Headquarters in Nichiyoshidai received a message from the captain of the "Hamanaze" Maekawa Manee Shōsa: "The Shinano was sunk by a US submarine, 2515 crew members were missing 1435 people, and 1080 people were rescued. Captain Daisaku Abe was not among the survivors, and it was estimated that he did not have the face to go back to see people. It is worth mentioning in particular that in the Battle of Guadalcanal two years ago, his second brother, Lieutenant General Hiroshi Abe, lost his first battleship, the Hiei, so that some people later jokingly called the two brothers "traitors" sent by the army. Of the three brothers, only the eldest brother of the Army, Ichiro Abe, appeared somewhat obscure.
Shinano sank into the sea after only 4 torpedoes, first of all because of its lack of objective conditions, secondly because of the lack of experience of sailors, which made it lose organized rescue, and thirdly, because it had a pig-headed captain. There is another major reason that no one has said, that is, there is the first Xiangrui ship "Snow Wind" in the escort ship.
To be honest, the Shinano is just an empty shelf with a beautiful appearance, but it is actually not vulnerable at all. Even if it can escape this hunt, its fate is nothing more than two endings: one is that it is afraid to leave the port because of the powerful naval and air forces of the United States until the end of the war; the other is to take the initiative like the Yamato and become a martyr of Japanese militarism. Later, when Navy Minister Mitsumitsu Minai was reporting to the Emperor the nightmare of Shinano's sinking, Hirohito, who had always been silent, unusually opened his mouth: "This is a pity." ”
Enright reported to Pearl Harbor that it had sunk a Falcon-class aircraft carrier. Because the Japanese had sealed the news of the sinking of the Shinano, the staff of task force XVII was half convinced of Enlet's record of sinking the aircraft carrier. The battle reports provided by Enright and the drawings drawn of the shape of the attacked aircraft carrier convinced Lockwood that his men had indeed done just that. On Lockwood's application, Enright was awarded the Naval Cross in March 1945.
As for the exact news that the Americans received from the sinking of the Shinano, it was already a post-war event. From the Japanese population, Nimitz and Lockwood learned that the Japanese had such a supercarrier that was sunk by their own submarine during the maiden voyage. As a result, the meritorious Enright set a record for the highest tonnage of submarine sinking in a single battle.