November 11th, 1944.
The waters of Ormach Bay in the Philippines.
Cutting through the waves, one name stands out with unparalleled pride.
The Shimakazi or Island Wind.
This is no ordinary ship.
It is a unique machine of war.
The fastest and most modern destroyer the Imperial Navy has ever built.
A speed monster carrying devastating firepower.
Yet, ironically, that superior power will soon mean nothing.
In less than 15 fateful minutes, the convoy it is escorting will be torn apart.
5,000 elite soldiers will be wiped out under a barrage of bombs, turning the sea into a cauldron of oil and blood before the desperate eyes of this super ship.
Why was a super weapon designed to dominate the ocean rendered helpless as its comrades were slaughtered? Why did the Shimakazi’s legendary speed become its final dance of death? Today, Fireline will decode the file on the final day of the island wind.
To truly grasp the magnitude of this tragedy, look at the raw power of the Shimikazi.
With a massive 75,000 horsepower engine compressed into a slender hull, it could tear through the water at 41 knots.
That is a speed so fast that the optical targeting systems of the era struggled to track it.
Added to this were 15 torpedo tubes loaded with a type 93 long lance.
The most terrifying weapon in the ocean.
The Shimakazi was truly a perfect assassin capable of threatening an enemy fleet on its own.
But the sharpest sword was wielded in the most foolish way possible.
In late 1944, in a desperate bid to save the Laty front, the Japanese high command committed a fatal strategic error.
They took the Shimakazi, a racehorse born for speed, and shackled it to lumbering transport ships capable of only 10 knots.
By their own hand, the Japanese neutralized the supers ship’s greatest defense.
The man placed in command of this highstakes mission was Rear Admiral Mikio Hayakawa.
In a decision that highlights the desperation of the Japanese Navy, Hayakawa chose the Shimakaz as his flagship.
He didn’t choose a heavy cruiser with thick armor.
He chose speed.
He gambled that if the trap was sprung, the Shimakaz could outrun anything the Americans threw at it.
But by placing his flag on a destroyer, he was signaling that he expected a running fight, not a stand-up brawl.
Worse still, they placed their faith in the cover of night and bad weather, unaware that American intelligence had intercepted every line of their marching orders.
Admiral Hally did not intend to merely drive them off.
He wanted total annihilation.
He unleashed task force 38 with 347 aircraft, turning Ormock Bay into a lethal trap that was already sprung.
Another factor made this tragedy certain, the absence of Japanese air cover.
Why did such a critical convoy sail without a single zero fighter to protect it? The answer lies in the great Mariana’s Turkey shoot just months earlier.
That battle had decimated the cream of Japan’s pilot cores.
The skies over the Philippines now belonged to the Americans.
The Shimakaz and its convoy sailed naked, exposed to the firestorm that was about to descend.
The morning of November 11th broke with a deceptive calm.
The convoy had reached the bay, preparing to unload men and supplies.
The crews were exhausted, eyes scanning the horizon, praying for the cloud cover to hold.
But then the radar screens on the Shimikazi lit up.
The glowing phosphor didn’t show a few blips.
It showed a solid wall of interference.
The sky to the east began to darken, not with storm clouds, but with aircraft.
The sound arrived before the visuals.
A low drone that quickly escalated into a deafening roar as hundreds of engines screamed in unison.
347 American planes descended upon the bay.
It was a swarm of locusts made of aluminum and steel.
The Japanese anti-aircraft crews manned their 25 mm guns, weapons that were slow firing and prone to vibration, but the sheer volume of the attack made their resistance look pathetic.
It was not a battle.
It was a calculated slaughter.
The American pilots flying with cold precision and absolute air superiority had their priorities set by their commanders.
They ignored the dangerous warships initially.
The destroyers like Shimakazi were hard targets, agile and biting.
The priority was the army.
The pilots focused their fury on the five heavy transport ships sitting low in the water, packed with soldiers and ammunition.
What followed was a massacre that showcased the terrifying coordination of American carrier tactics.
While hell divers screamed down in vertical dives, Avengers approached at mast head height.
Some pilots improvising to ensure kills on the transport ships, released their bombs at suicidally low altitudes, slamming them directly into the water lines.
The effects were devastating.
A bomb hitting the side of a ship acts like a torpedo, but with a larger warhead.
The thin hulls of the merchant vessels stood no chance.
They didn’t just sink, they disintegrated.
Explosions ripped through fuel tanks and ammunition holds, sending gazers of flame and debris thousands of feet into the air.
5,000 Japanese soldiers laden with heavy packs, rifles, and helmets were hurled into the oil sllicked water.
For those who survived the initial blasts, the ocean itself became the enemy.
As the ships went down, their massive boilers, superheated and under immense pressure, exploded underwater upon contact with the cold sea.
The shock waves traveled through the incompressible water, creating a water hammer effect.
This hydrostatic shock crushed the internal organs of men floating in the water hundreds of yards away.
Within 15 minutes, the transport element of the convoy was gone.
5,000 lives were extinguished in a slaughter that turned Ormach Bay into a floating graveyard.
On the bridge of the Yip Shimacaz, Rear Admiral Hayakawa and his crew watched in horror.
These were the men they were sworn to protect.
They were the unbeatable Imperial Navy.
Yet, they were unable to stop the carnage.
Their main battery guns were designed to fight other ships, and their legendary long lance torpedoes were useless against an enemy in the sky.
The pride of the fleet was reduced to a spectator at a funeral.
With the transports destroyed, the swarm of American planes turned their attention to the escorts.
This was the moment the difference between the Shimakazi and the rest of the fleet became starkly apparent.
Sailing alongside were the convoys other Guardians, the Yugumo class destroyers Hamonami and Nagonami and the Akazuki class Wakatsuki.
These ships were the backbone of the Japanese fleet, but they lacked the Shimakazi’s extreme speed.
Facing the swarm of hell divers, they were quickly surrounded and overwhelmed.
They were smashed by bombs and disappeared into massive columns of water.
Only the Shimakazi remained.
Thanks to its superior speed, it was the last survivor, alone in a circle of hundreds of enemies.
The island wind was now the primary target.
Hundreds of eyes in the sky focused on the lone destroyer.
The air was filled with radio chatter from American pilots calling out the big destroyer as they rolled into their attack runs.
The captain of the Shimacazi ordered flank speed.
This was the moment the ship was built for.
The boilers screamed as the pressure spiked to critical levels.
The ship surged forward, its bow lifting out of the water as it accelerated from a standstill to over 40 knots in a matter of seconds.
It began a wild, desperate dance.
The ship carved massive scurves into the ocean, banking hard to port and starboard, heeling over so far that the deck rails almost touched the water.
American pilots later reported their astonishment at the target’s behavior.
They had never seen a ship move like that.
It was erratic, unpredictable, and impossibly fast.
Bombs that were aimed perfectly would miss by yards, splashing harmlessly into the white foam where the ship had been just seconds before.
Torpedoes dropped by Avengers trailed harmlessly in its wake, unable to close the distance on the fleeing speedster.
For a brief shining moment, the Shimacaz proved why it was a legend.
It was the wind itself, uncatchable and untouchable.
But individual skill cannot defeat overwhelming mathematics.
The Americans did not need to hit the ship directly to kill it.
They simply overwhelmed the ocean around it.
They boxed the ship in with explosions.
Dozens of bombs exploded in the water alongside the hull.
These near misses were lethal.
The concussive force of high explosives detonating just feet from the steel plates acted like a sledgehammer.
The hull began to buckle.
Rivets popped like rifle shots, turning into deadly projectiles inside the ship.
Seams split open, allowing water to seep in.
But the killing blow came from the shrapnel.
Thousands of jagged fragments of steel from the bombs riddled the ship’s superructure.
They punched through the unarmored decks and sliced into the heart of the beast, the engine rooms.
In a cruel twist of irony, the very technology that gave the Shimacaz its legendary speed became the instrument of its demise.
The ship relied on high-press steam pipes to drive its massive turbines.
When the shrapnel tore through these pipes, the engineering spaces were instantly transformed into scalding chambers of death.
Superheated steam is invisible and hotter than fire.
The crewmen below decks were boiled alive in seconds as the escaping steam filled the compartments.
The engines choked and died.
The screaming turbines fell silent.
The island wind lost its breath.
Drifting dead in the water, wreathed in steam and smoke.
The fastest ship in the world became a stationary target.
It was helpless.
The American pilots circled back for the final blow.
They strafed the decks, suppressing the few remaining gun crews who were firing until the very end.
Then a massive explosion erupted from the stern of the ship.
This brings us to the second fatal flaw of the Shimikazi.
Those 15 long lance torpedoes, the source of its offensive power, were fueled by pure oxygen.
While this gave them range and speed, it made them incredibly volatile.
It is highly probable that the American strafing runs ignited the oxygen tanks.
The weapons meant to kill Americans detonated on the deck, tearing the Shimikazi apart from the inside.
The ship didn’t linger.
Broken and burning, it slipped beneath the waves of Ormach Bay.
It took with it Rear Admiral Hayakawa, its secrets, its advanced technology, and the frustration of a warrior who never drew his sword.
It sank without ever firing a single torpedo at an enemy ship.
The sinking of the Shimakaz marked more than just the loss of a single destroyer.
It was a strategic catastrophe that signaled the end of the Japanese presence in the Philippines.
With the supplies and reinforcements at the bottom of the bay, the Japanese garrison on Leday was effectively cut off.
They were left to starve, rot, and die of disease in the jungle.
The failure of the Ormach transport runs meant the loss of the Philippines was inevitable.
This had a domino effect on the course of the war.
The Philippines sat a stride the vital shipping lanes that connected Japan to the oil fields of Southeast Asia.
Once the Americans controlled these waters, the oil road was severed.
The empire was out of fuel.
The remaining battleships and carriers in the Japanese home islands would soon be rendered immobile, reduced to floating batteries because there was no oil to run their engines.
The destruction of the Shimakazi and its convoy was the beginning of the end.
But on a deeper level, the fate of the Shimakazi serves as a stark historical lesson about the nature of technology and warfare.
The Japanese poured their limited resources into creating a Ferrari, a machine of perfect mechanical engineering, a duelist designed for a fair fight.
But they failed to realize that modern war is not a duel.
It is a system.
The Americans did not build Ferraris.
They built a demolition derby backed by a system of intelligence, logistics, and combined arms that no single ship could overcome.
For decades, the final resting place of the Shimacazi was a mystery.
But in December 2017, the research vessel Petrol, funded by Paul Allen, located the wreck.
The images sent back from the deep confirm the violence of its end.
The ship lies upright, but the damage is catastrophic.
One of the main gun turrets is missing entirely, blown off by internal explosions.
Another turret remains trained to the port side, barrels elevated, frozen in the act of firing at the swarm of aircraft that killed it.
The wreck serves as a tomb for hundreds of sailors and a monument to a failed strategy.
The island wind blew fiercely for a brief moment, a testament to what human engineering can achieve, only to be extinguished forever by the gathering storm of a new age.
So, here is the question for you.
If the Japanese had focused their resources on radar and anti-aircraft defense instead of building super ships like the Shimakazi or the Yamo, could they have prolonged the war? Or was their defeat inevitable regardless of their technology? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
If you enjoyed this deep dive into naval history, make sure to like this video and subscribe to Fireline for more files from the archives of World War II.
Until next time.
November 11th, 1944.
The waters of Ormach Bay in the Philippines.
Cutting through the waves, one name stands out with unparalleled pride.
The Shimakazi or Island Wind.
This is no ordinary ship.
It is a unique machine of war.
The fastest and most modern destroyer the Imperial Navy has ever built.
A speed monster carrying devastating firepower.
Yet, ironically, that superior power will soon mean nothing.
In less than 15 fateful minutes, the convoy it is escorting will be torn apart.
5,000 elite soldiers will be wiped out under a barrage of bombs, turning the sea into a cauldron of oil and blood before the desperate eyes of this super ship.
Why was a super weapon designed to dominate the ocean rendered helpless as its comrades were slaughtered? Why did the Shimakazi’s legendary speed become its final dance of death? Today, Fireline will decode the file on the final day of the island wind.
To truly grasp the magnitude of this tragedy, look at the raw power of the Shimikazi.
With a massive 75,000 horsepower engine compressed into a slender hull, it could tear through the water at 41 knots.
That is a speed so fast that the optical targeting systems of the era struggled to track it.
Added to this were 15 torpedo tubes loaded with a type 93 long lance.
The most terrifying weapon in the ocean.
The Shimakazi was truly a perfect assassin capable of threatening an enemy fleet on its own.
But the sharpest sword was wielded in the most foolish way possible.
In late 1944, in a desperate bid to save the Laty front, the Japanese high command committed a fatal strategic error.
They took the Shimakazi, a racehorse born for speed, and shackled it to lumbering transport ships capable of only 10 knots.
By their own hand, the Japanese neutralized the supers ship’s greatest defense.
The man placed in command of this highstakes mission was Rear Admiral Mikio Hayakawa.
In a decision that highlights the desperation of the Japanese Navy, Hayakawa chose the Shimakaz as his flagship.
He didn’t choose a heavy cruiser with thick armor.
He chose speed.
He gambled that if the trap was sprung, the Shimakaz could outrun anything the Americans threw at it.
But by placing his flag on a destroyer, he was signaling that he expected a running fight, not a stand-up brawl.
Worse still, they placed their faith in the cover of night and bad weather, unaware that American intelligence had intercepted every line of their marching orders.
Admiral Hally did not intend to merely drive them off.
He wanted total annihilation.
He unleashed task force 38 with 347 aircraft, turning Ormock Bay into a lethal trap that was already sprung.
Another factor made this tragedy certain, the absence of Japanese air cover.
Why did such a critical convoy sail without a single zero fighter to protect it? The answer lies in the great Mariana’s Turkey shoot just months earlier.
That battle had decimated the cream of Japan’s pilot cores.
The skies over the Philippines now belonged to the Americans.
The Shimakaz and its convoy sailed naked, exposed to the firestorm that was about to descend.
The morning of November 11th broke with a deceptive calm.
The convoy had reached the bay, preparing to unload men and supplies.
The crews were exhausted, eyes scanning the horizon, praying for the cloud cover to hold.
But then the radar screens on the Shimikazi lit up.
The glowing phosphor didn’t show a few blips.
It showed a solid wall of interference.
The sky to the east began to darken, not with storm clouds, but with aircraft.
The sound arrived before the visuals.
A low drone that quickly escalated into a deafening roar as hundreds of engines screamed in unison.
347 American planes descended upon the bay.
It was a swarm of locusts made of aluminum and steel.
The Japanese anti-aircraft crews manned their 25 mm guns, weapons that were slow firing and prone to vibration, but the sheer volume of the attack made their resistance look pathetic.
It was not a battle.
It was a calculated slaughter.
The American pilots flying with cold precision and absolute air superiority had their priorities set by their commanders.
They ignored the dangerous warships initially.
The destroyers like Shimakazi were hard targets, agile and biting.
The priority was the army.
The pilots focused their fury on the five heavy transport ships sitting low in the water, packed with soldiers and ammunition.
What followed was a massacre that showcased the terrifying coordination of American carrier tactics.
While hell divers screamed down in vertical dives, Avengers approached at mast head height.
Some pilots improvising to ensure kills on the transport ships, released their bombs at suicidally low altitudes, slamming them directly into the water lines.
The effects were devastating.
A bomb hitting the side of a ship acts like a torpedo, but with a larger warhead.
The thin hulls of the merchant vessels stood no chance.
They didn’t just sink, they disintegrated.
Explosions ripped through fuel tanks and ammunition holds, sending gazers of flame and debris thousands of feet into the air.
5,000 Japanese soldiers laden with heavy packs, rifles, and helmets were hurled into the oil sllicked water.
For those who survived the initial blasts, the ocean itself became the enemy.
As the ships went down, their massive boilers, superheated and under immense pressure, exploded underwater upon contact with the cold sea.
The shock waves traveled through the incompressible water, creating a water hammer effect.
This hydrostatic shock crushed the internal organs of men floating in the water hundreds of yards away.
Within 15 minutes, the transport element of the convoy was gone.
5,000 lives were extinguished in a slaughter that turned Ormach Bay into a floating graveyard.
On the bridge of the Yip Shimacaz, Rear Admiral Hayakawa and his crew watched in horror.
These were the men they were sworn to protect.
They were the unbeatable Imperial Navy.
Yet, they were unable to stop the carnage.
Their main battery guns were designed to fight other ships, and their legendary long lance torpedoes were useless against an enemy in the sky.
The pride of the fleet was reduced to a spectator at a funeral.
With the transports destroyed, the swarm of American planes turned their attention to the escorts.
This was the moment the difference between the Shimakazi and the rest of the fleet became starkly apparent.
Sailing alongside were the convoys other Guardians, the Yugumo class destroyers Hamonami and Nagonami and the Akazuki class Wakatsuki.
These ships were the backbone of the Japanese fleet, but they lacked the Shimakazi’s extreme speed.
Facing the swarm of hell divers, they were quickly surrounded and overwhelmed.
They were smashed by bombs and disappeared into massive columns of water.
Only the Shimakazi remained.
Thanks to its superior speed, it was the last survivor, alone in a circle of hundreds of enemies.
The island wind was now the primary target.
Hundreds of eyes in the sky focused on the lone destroyer.
The air was filled with radio chatter from American pilots calling out the big destroyer as they rolled into their attack runs.
The captain of the Shimacazi ordered flank speed.
This was the moment the ship was built for.
The boilers screamed as the pressure spiked to critical levels.
The ship surged forward, its bow lifting out of the water as it accelerated from a standstill to over 40 knots in a matter of seconds.
It began a wild, desperate dance.
The ship carved massive scurves into the ocean, banking hard to port and starboard, heeling over so far that the deck rails almost touched the water.
American pilots later reported their astonishment at the target’s behavior.
They had never seen a ship move like that.
It was erratic, unpredictable, and impossibly fast.
Bombs that were aimed perfectly would miss by yards, splashing harmlessly into the white foam where the ship had been just seconds before.
Torpedoes dropped by Avengers trailed harmlessly in its wake, unable to close the distance on the fleeing speedster.
For a brief shining moment, the Shimacaz proved why it was a legend.
It was the wind itself, uncatchable and untouchable.
But individual skill cannot defeat overwhelming mathematics.
The Americans did not need to hit the ship directly to kill it.
They simply overwhelmed the ocean around it.
They boxed the ship in with explosions.
Dozens of bombs exploded in the water alongside the hull.
These near misses were lethal.
The concussive force of high explosives detonating just feet from the steel plates acted like a sledgehammer.
The hull began to buckle.
Rivets popped like rifle shots, turning into deadly projectiles inside the ship.
Seams split open, allowing water to seep in.
But the killing blow came from the shrapnel.
Thousands of jagged fragments of steel from the bombs riddled the ship’s superructure.
They punched through the unarmored decks and sliced into the heart of the beast, the engine rooms.
In a cruel twist of irony, the very technology that gave the Shimacaz its legendary speed became the instrument of its demise.
The ship relied on high-press steam pipes to drive its massive turbines.
When the shrapnel tore through these pipes, the engineering spaces were instantly transformed into scalding chambers of death.
Superheated steam is invisible and hotter than fire.
The crewmen below decks were boiled alive in seconds as the escaping steam filled the compartments.
The engines choked and died.
The screaming turbines fell silent.
The island wind lost its breath.
Drifting dead in the water, wreathed in steam and smoke.
The fastest ship in the world became a stationary target.
It was helpless.
The American pilots circled back for the final blow.
They strafed the decks, suppressing the few remaining gun crews who were firing until the very end.
Then a massive explosion erupted from the stern of the ship.
This brings us to the second fatal flaw of the Shimikazi.
Those 15 long lance torpedoes, the source of its offensive power, were fueled by pure oxygen.
While this gave them range and speed, it made them incredibly volatile.
It is highly probable that the American strafing runs ignited the oxygen tanks.
The weapons meant to kill Americans detonated on the deck, tearing the Shimikazi apart from the inside.
The ship didn’t linger.
Broken and burning, it slipped beneath the waves of Ormach Bay.
It took with it Rear Admiral Hayakawa, its secrets, its advanced technology, and the frustration of a warrior who never drew his sword.
It sank without ever firing a single torpedo at an enemy ship.
The sinking of the Shimakaz marked more than just the loss of a single destroyer.
It was a strategic catastrophe that signaled the end of the Japanese presence in the Philippines.
With the supplies and reinforcements at the bottom of the bay, the Japanese garrison on Leday was effectively cut off.
They were left to starve, rot, and die of disease in the jungle.
The failure of the Ormach transport runs meant the loss of the Philippines was inevitable.
This had a domino effect on the course of the war.
The Philippines sat a stride the vital shipping lanes that connected Japan to the oil fields of Southeast Asia.
Once the Americans controlled these waters, the oil road was severed.
The empire was out of fuel.
The remaining battleships and carriers in the Japanese home islands would soon be rendered immobile, reduced to floating batteries because there was no oil to run their engines.
The destruction of the Shimakazi and its convoy was the beginning of the end.
But on a deeper level, the fate of the Shimakazi serves as a stark historical lesson about the nature of technology and warfare.
The Japanese poured their limited resources into creating a Ferrari, a machine of perfect mechanical engineering, a duelist designed for a fair fight.
But they failed to realize that modern war is not a duel.
It is a system.
The Americans did not build Ferraris.
They built a demolition derby backed by a system of intelligence, logistics, and combined arms that no single ship could overcome.
For decades, the final resting place of the Shimacazi was a mystery.
But in December 2017, the research vessel Petrol, funded by Paul Allen, located the wreck.
The images sent back from the deep confirm the violence of its end.
The ship lies upright, but the damage is catastrophic.
One of the main gun turrets is missing entirely, blown off by internal explosions.
Another turret remains trained to the port side, barrels elevated, frozen in the act of firing at the swarm of aircraft that killed it.
The wreck serves as a tomb for hundreds of sailors and a monument to a failed strategy.
The island wind blew fiercely for a brief moment, a testament to what human engineering can achieve, only to be extinguished forever by the gathering storm of a new age.
So, here is the question for you.
If the Japanese had focused their resources on radar and anti-aircraft defense instead of building super ships like the Shimakazi or the Yamo, could they have prolonged the war? Or was their defeat inevitable regardless of their technology? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
If you enjoyed this deep dive into naval history, make sure to like this video and subscribe to Fireline for more files from the archives of World War II.
Until next time.
