On June 9, 1942, the American submarine Trout was running on the surface west of Midway when lookouts spotted an oil slick spread wide across the water, littered with debris. In the middle of it floated a large wooden hatch cover, and on that hatch cover were two Japanese sailors, still alive. They were survivors of the heavy cruiser Mikuma, which American dive bombers had left burning and dead in the water three days earlier, taking somewhere between 650 and 700 of her crew with her. One of the two men later told American interrogators that twenty men had been on his float when the cruiser went down.
Three days later, eighteen were gone. The two survivors had spent three nights at sea with no food and no water, and one had crushed ribs. The Trout’s crew hauled both aboard and set course for Pearl Harbor, carrying with them a mystery that runs through a Navy intelligence file issued under Admiral Nimitz’s name, a prisoner of war camp in Louisiana, and a submarine that had less than two years left to live. The Mikuma’s troubles began four nights earlier, on June 4, when an order was called off halfway through execution.
With his carriers burning off Midway, Admiral Yamamoto had wanted the island’s airfield shelled by daybreak. The task fell to Cruiser Division 7, four heavy cruisers under Admiral Takeo Kurita: the Kumano, Suzuya, Mikuma, and Mogami. They were 410 miles out and ran south at 35 knots, fast enough that their two escorting destroyers fell behind in the chop, and the cruisers pressed on alone. It was all for nothing.
A little after 9:00 that night, the order was canceled, and the four cruisers turned away in a long line, spaced 800 meters apart. Then the flagship’s lookouts spotted a surfaced submarine, the Tambor, and the Kumano signaled an emergency turn to avoid torpedoes. Exactly what happened in the next few seconds depends on whose account is followed. Researchers Bob Hackett and Sander Kingsepp, who compiled the Mikuma’s service history from Japanese documents, say the Kumano ordered a 45-degree turn and the Mikuma turned 90 degrees by mistake.
Japan’s official war history places the blame on a staff officer aboard the Kumano who radioed a second turn that the ships behind mistook for a repeat of the first. Both versions end the same way. The Mogami, last in line, drove her prow into the Mikuma’s port side below the bridge. About forty feet of the Mogami’s forward end crumpled.
The Mikuma got off lighter, but her port fuel tanks were split open, and from that night on, she left a trail of oil behind her on the sea. Kurita took the two healthy cruisers and left. The Mikuma’s captain, Shakao Sakiyama, stayed behind to shepherd the crippled Mogami, and the pair limped west at about 12 knots with two destroyers, the Asashio and Arashio. Aboard the Mikuma was a fireman third class named Kenichi Ishikawa.
He had joined the ship at Kure on April 22, meaning he had been aboard for only about six weeks. Also aboard was a chief radioman named Katsurichi Yoshida, about whom almost nothing appears in published American paperwork beyond his rank and injuries. On the morning of June 5, a Catalina flying boat from Midway found the two cruisers still trailing oil, and Marine dive bombers came out from the island to attack. One of those planes, flown by Captain Richard Fleming, was hit by anti-aircraft fire and went into the sea after dropping its bomb.
Eight Flying Fortresses that followed hit nothing at all. On June 6, the American carriers came after them. Twenty-six dive bombers from the carrier Hornet arrived after 9:30 and scored only a near miss on the Mikuma, which the American pilots reported as a battleship. Then, just before 1:00 in the afternoon, 31 dive bombers from the carrier Enterprise arrived, and this time they did not miss.
The Enterprise pilots put five bombs into the Mikuma. The first came down on the roof of her number three turret, and the blast badly injured Captain Sakiyama at his anti-aircraft station. His executive officer, Commander Hideo Takeshima, took over the ship. Two more hits wrecked the forward starboard engine room, and another knocked out the aft port one.
A bomb near the bridge set off the ready ammunition for the anti-aircraft guns, and fires broke out along the middle of the ship. She stopped. At two minutes to 2:00, her own torpedoes exploded. The blast wrecked the catapult deck, brought down the main mast, and opened a hole below the waterline.
Commander Takashima gave the order to abandon ship, and the destroyer Arashio came alongside to take men off. At about 3:00 that afternoon, the Hornet’s second strike arrived, and a bomb killed Commander Takashima on the Mikuma. Another hit the Arashio while she was loaded with the cruiser’s survivors, and some of the men who had just been pulled off the Mikuma died aboard the destroyer. By 3:25, the destroyers had taken off about 240 men, and they left.
Everyone still on the Mikuma or in the water around her was now on their own. Ishikawa jumped over the side and ended up on a float with 19 other men. He estimated there were several hundred in the water with him, but said most of the crew never got off the ship before she rolled over. Around 5:15, two Enterprise dive bombers came back for photographs.
The flight was led by pilot Kroeger, with a Fox Movietone newsreel cameraman named Brick in his rear seat. A second plane carried Navy chief photographer Mihalovich. The Navy later called their shots the war’s first low-level photographs of a sinking Japanese warship. The images showed the Mikuma gutted amidships, a torpedo hanging from its launcher on the port side, and a tangle of wreckage on top of her number four turret.
For decades, that wreckage was said to be Captain Fleming’s plane, the story being that he had dived his burning bomber into the turret. Later researchers, including Hackett and Kingsepp, concluded the wreckage was a section of the Mikuma’s own main mast blown down by her torpedo explosion, and that Fleming had gone into the sea the day before, nowhere near her. The Mikuma sank that evening, rolling onto her port side most likely around 7:30. The timing is one of several details about her end that no one agrees on.
In his first interrogation, Ishikawa is quoted as saying she went down within an hour and a half of the day’s first bombing, which cannot be squared with photographs taken that afternoon. In Walter Lord’s 1967 book on Midway, Ishikawa’s account has her settling faster just before sunset and then capsizing to port. That same night, the Asashio was sent back to find the ship and sink her. The destroyer reported reaching the position, seeing no ship, and searching the area to no avail.
The Mikuma, named for a river in Oita on the island of Kyushu, was the first Japanese heavy cruiser lost in the war. Captain Sakiyama died of his injuries aboard the Suzuya a week later. The men on Ishikawa’s float had three nights ahead of them. According to his account, there was nothing to eat and nothing to drink.
Some died. Others fell asleep in the dark and slid off into the sea. By the morning of June 9, the float held two men. The file does not say why these two lasted when eighteen others did not, and if either man ever explained it, that explanation has not survived in any source this channel could find.
The Trout had not fired a single torpedo during the whole Midway operation. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Frank Fenno, was the oldest of the dozen submarine skippers the Navy had posted around Midway. His boat was already famous. In February, Fenno had taken the Trout into Corregidor with anti-aircraft ammunition.
Because the base had no sandbags left, the Navy gave him ballast of a different kind for the trip out: 319 gold bars and 630 bags of silver pesos from the Philippine currency reserve. Four months later, the same boat steamed through the Mikuma’s oil and pulled two men off a hatch cover, an event the Navy’s official history of the Trout covers in a single sentence. The Trout reached Pearl Harbor on June 14 with two prisoners aboard. The Navy photographed her arrival, and the caption notes that among the officers waiting on the pier were Rear Admiral Robert English, commander of the Pacific Fleet submarines, and Admiral Chester Nimitz himself.
At that point in the war, the United States held very few Japanese prisoners of any kind. Yoshida went straight to the naval hospital at Pearl Harbor with his crushed ribs. Ishikawa went to the intelligence officers. The report they wrote went out under Nimitz’s name, and it is not what anyone expecting a defiant prisoner would have predicted.
The interrogators noted, in their own words, that contrary to usual practice, Ishikawa was not in the least reticent about discussing the Japanese Navy. They believed he told the truth to the limit of what he knew. He described how the Mikuma carried three floatplanes and two catapults, and how a plane would taxi up alongside under the crane to be hooked aboard. He described the engine rooms.
The interrogators then checked his description against the 1940 edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships, a reference book anyone could buy, and found that it matched. On one question, the interrogators pressed. They asked about radar. Ishikawa said he knew nothing about radar equipment, but he had the impression the ship carried some kind of apparatus worked with earphones for detecting approaching planes and ships.
The report says the Americans then told him they had heard from a German that the Japanese had such an instrument. He had nothing to add. A note in brackets adds that photographs of the damaged Mogami-class cruiser showed no radar screens. The Mikuma, he said, had carried no underwater sound gear and no depth charges.
Paragraph 16 of the report is about Ishikawa himself. It gives his age as 22 and then, in the same line, as 21 by the Western calendar, because Japan counted a newborn as one year old. It calls him nonchalant and says he seemed happy enough with his lot as a prisoner of war in the United States, with no particular wish to go back to Japan before the war was over. The same file promised a further report would follow once Yoshida was well enough to be questioned.
If that second report was written, it is not in the file the Navy has published, and Yoshida’s own answers do not appear in any English-language source this channel could find. Most modern summaries say only that at least one of the two cooperated. There is also a small problem with Yoshida’s name. The interrogation report, the service history compiled by Hackett and Kingsepp, and the Japanese edition of Walter Lord’s book all call him Katsurichi.
The caption on the Navy’s own photograph of the Trout arriving at Pearl Harbor calls him Hatsuichi, and that caption is the version most websites copy. From Pearl Harbor, the Navy shipped both men to the mainland. Japanese author Naoki Kodachi, writing about the war’s first Japanese prisoner, describes where they ended up: Camp Livingston in Louisiana. The camp took in a group of about fifty new prisoners that spring and summer.
Two were the Mikuma men. Thirty-six were engine room men from the carrier Hiryu, whom the seaplane tender Ballard had found in a drifting cutter on June 19 after nearly two weeks at sea. Four came from a Japanese picket boat the Americans sank after it radioed the first warning of the carriers carrying Doolittle’s bombers toward Tokyo. Waiting in the camp was Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki.
He had been captured on December 8, 1941, after his midget submarine ran aground off Oahu during the Pearl Harbor attack. He had been a prisoner for more than half a year, and until the men from Midway arrived, he did not know what Japan had said about him. The new prisoners told him that in March 1942, Tokyo had announced the nine other men from the midget submarine attack as war gods, promoted two ranks after death, their photographs on the front pages, without ever explaining why ten men in five two-man boats had ended up as nine heroes. Sakamaki heard it months after the fact in a camp in Louisiana from the new arrivals, the two Mikuma men among them.
Sakamaki later became the leader of the prisoners at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin and went home to Japan in 1946 with the rest of the prisoners shipped back after the surrender. After Camp Livingston, the two men from the Mikuma disappear from every source this channel could find. The Japanese accounts that named them stop at the camp. What the Imperial Navy told their families in 1942, and whether either man ever spoke about the hatch cover afterward, is not in anything published in English or Japanese that turned up in research.
The submarine is a different matter. Her paper trail runs right up to the end. Frank Fenno was relieved as the Trout’s captain within days of reaching Pearl Harbor. Under Lieutenant Commander Lawson Ramage, and then under her former executive officer Lieutenant Commander Albert Clark, she went to Australia and spent more than a year working the waters around Truk, Borneo, and the Philippines.
She planted mines, landed an Army team on Mindanao, and picked up a party that included Lieutenant Colonel William D. S. who had escaped from a Japanese prison camp. In August 1943, she took more Japanese prisoners from a fishing vessel she boarded and then sank.
One of them would not eat, and on September 22, he died aboard the Trout and was buried at sea. On February 8, 1944, the Trout left Pearl Harbor on her 11th war patrol. She topped off her fuel at Midway, the same atoll she had been guarding the morning the war began, and headed for the East China Sea. On February 29, a Japanese convoy called Matsu number one was carrying the 29th Infantry Division from Manchuria toward Guam when a submarine attacked it in the area assigned to the Trout.
The attacker badly damaged one large ship and sank the 7,000-ton troopship Sakito Maru. One of the officers aboard her was Captain Sakai Alba of the 18th Infantry Regiment. He survived the sinking, reached Saipan, and after the island fell, held out in its jungle with a band of soldiers and civilians until December 1, 1945, three months after Japan had surrendered. The destroyer Asashimo found the boat and dropped 19 depth charges.
Some accounts raise another possibility, that the Trout was hit by one of her own electric torpedoes making a circular run, as happened to at least one other American submarine. Nothing in the surviving report settles it. The Navy listed the Trout as overdue on April 17 and later declared her lost with all 81 men aboard, among them Lieutenant Commander Clark and his executive officer Lieutenant Harry Woodworth, who had both made all eleven of her patrols. After the 19th depth charge, oil and debris came up to the surface of the Philippine Sea a few hundred miles southeast of Okinawa, and the Asashimo dropped one more charge on the spot where they appeared.
There was no one on the water for anyone to pull aboard.