July 1945.
The waters of Kore Naval Base lay unnaturally still under the summer sun.
Anchored among the remnants of what was once the mighty Imperial Japanese Navy, sat a massive steel giant, JN Haruna, one of the oldest and most distinguished battleships in Japan’s fleet.
For over three decades, Haruna had sailed the Pacific, a symbol of Japanese naval power and engineering excellence.
But now in these final weeks of World War II, the proud battleship found herself trapped, unable to sorty, unable to fight as she was meant to, reduced to waiting for the inevitable end.
Haruna’s story would not conclude with a glorious last stand on the open ocean with guns blazing against an enemy fleet.
Instead, her fate would be sealed from above under waves of American aircraft that now ruled the skies unchallenged.
This is the story of how a legend died, not with thunder, but with the quiet resignation of an empire crumbling into dust.
Magnify.
To understand Haruna’s final moments, we must first understand her extraordinary life.
Launched in 1913 at the Kawasaki shipyard in Kobe, Haruna was originally classified as a battle cruiser, part of the revolutionary Congo class that would define Japanese naval doctrine for decades to come.
The Congo class ships were marvels of their time.
Fast, powerful, and elegant, they represented Japan’s ambition to stand among the world’s great naval powers.
Haruna and her three sisters, Congo, Hay, and Kiroshima, were designed to combine the speed of cruisers with the firepower of battleships, a revolutionary concept that would influence warship design worldwide.
Throughout the interwar years, Haruna underwent extensive modernization.
Her engines were upgraded, her armor reinforced, and her armament enhanced.
By the time the Pacific War erupted in December 1941, she had been reclassified as a fast battleship capable of keeping pace with aircraft carriers while delivering devastating firepower.
When war came, Haruna was ready.
She participated in the raid on Darwin, Australia.
She fought at the Battle of Midway, escaping the disaster that befell Japan’s carrier fleet.
She bombarded Henderson Field during the brutal Guadal Canal campaign.
She sailed through the Battle of the Philippine Sea and survived the catastrophic defeat at Lady Gulf.
One by one, her sisters fell.
Haay went down in the savage night fighting off Guadal Canal in November 1942.
Pounded to scrap by American battleships and cruisers.
Kirishima followed just days later.
Her hull torn apart by the 16-in guns of USS Washington.
Congo, the name ship of the class, was torpedoed by the submarine USS Celion in November 1944 while transiting the Formosa Strait.
Only Haruna survived, earning her reputation as the lucky ship.
But luck, like everything else in war, eventually runs out.
By the summer of 1945, the strategic situation for Japan had become utterly desperate.
The Imperial Navy, which had once dominated the Pacific, existed now only in fragments.
American submarines had strangled Japan’s maritime commerce.
Carrier strikes had devastated what remained of the fleet.
The fuel needed to operate capital ships had become scarce to the point of non-existence.
Haruna along with the remnants of the combined fleet had withdrawn to the relative safety of Japan’s inland sea.
Cure naval base located on the southern coast of Honshu became their final refuge.
But safety was an illusion.
With air superiority lost and no prospect of regaining it, these anchored warships were simply targets waiting to be destroyed.
The crew of Haruna knew what was coming.
They had watched as American forces advanced island by island, coming ever closer to the home islands.
They had seen Okinawa fall after a bitter 3-month struggle.
They knew that invasion, or something worse, was inevitable.
The battleship herself was in deteriorating condition.
Maintenance had become nearly impossible with resources exhausted.
Her anti-aircraft batteries, while numerous, were insufficient against the overwhelming numbers of enemy aircraft.
Her experienced crew had been depleted by years of attrition, replaced partially by inexperienced recruits who had received minimal training.
Still, Haruna represented a potential threat.
As long as she floated, as long as her guns could fire, she remained a capital ship of the Imperial Navy, and the United States Navy had no intention of leaving her intact.
Dawn broke clear and hot on July 24, 1945.
Aboard Haruna, the crew went about their duties with the mechanical efficiency born of long practice and grim determination.
Then at approximately 0600 hours, the air raid sirens began to wail.
From the decks of Task Force 38 operating brazenly close to the Japanese coast, aircraft began launching in massive numbers.
Hellcat fighters, Helldiver dive bombers, and Avenger torpedo bombers rose into the morning sky, formed up and turned toward Cure.
The attack came in waves.
First the fighters strafing gun positions and suppressing anti-aircraft fire.
Then the dive bombers screaming down from altitude to release their heavy ordinance.
Finally, the torpedo planes skimming low over the water to launch their deadly fish at the anchored ships.
Haruna’s anti-aircraft guns erupted in a desperate barrage.
Tracers arked across the sky.
Shells burst among the attacking formations.
A few American planes fell, trailing smoke and flame, but there were simply too many.
The first bomb struck Haruna’s forward deck with a tremendous explosion.
Steel plates buckled.
Equipment was blown apart.
Fire spread rapidly through the damaged sections.
More bombs followed, walking across her length.
Near misses threw up towering columns of water that crashed down on her decks.
Through it all, the old battleship held together.
Her thick armor, designed in an earlier age to withstand heavy shells, proved remarkably resistant to bombing.
Her damage control parties worked frantically to contain fires and flooding.
When the attack finally ended and the American aircraft withdrew, Haruna was hurt, but she was still afloat, still fighting.
The crew allowed themselves a moment of hope.
Perhaps their ship’s legendary luck would hold one more time.
They were wrong.
4 days later, the Americans returned.
This time, they came with overwhelming force and absolute determination.
July 28 dawned with an ominous calm.
Then, at midm morning, the sky filled with aircraft.
Over 300 planes from multiple carrier groups, all converging on Kur.
This was not a raid.
This was annihilation.
The coordinators had learned from the previous attack.
This time, strikes were carefully synchronized.
Fighters swept in first, systematically destroying anti-aircraft positions.
The dive bombers followed immediately, giving defenders no time to recover.
Torpedo planes attacked from multiple angles simultaneously, making evasion impossible, even if Haruna could have moved.
The barrage was devastating.
Bomb after bomb slammed into the battleship’s hull.
Torpedoes ripped open her underwater compartments.
Explosions rippled along her length in a continuous roar of destruction.
Steel that had withtood decades of service finally began to fail.
Below decks, the situation became catastrophic.
Compartments flooded faster than they could be sealed.
The list increased as water shifted the ship’s balance.
Power systems failed, plunging interior spaces into darkness, broken only by the flash of explosions and the glow of spreading fires.
The crew fought with desperate courage to save their ship.
Damage control parties waited through flooded passages.
Engineers struggled to maintain power and pumping systems.
Medical personnel treated the wounded under impossible conditions, but human effort could not overcome the physics of the situation.
Haruna was dying.
By early afternoon on July 28th, Captain Shiganaga Kajiwara made the inevitable decision.
With his ship listing heavily, flooding uncontrollably, and more attacks likely, he ordered the crew to abandon ship.
The evacuation was orderly despite the circumstances.
A final testament to Japanese naval discipline.
Wounded were carried to boats.
Essential documents were gathered.
The crew took their last looks at the ship that had been their home, their workplace, their world.
Haruna did not sink dramatically like ships torpedoed in deep water.
The waters of Kur Bay were too shallow for that.
Instead, she settled slowly onto the bottom, rolling onto her port side as she went down.
Her starboard side remained visible above the waterline.
A massive steel corpse lying in her own harbor.
There was no final explosion, no magazine detonation to provide a dramatic conclusion.
Just the groaning of stressed metal, the hiss of steam, and then silence.
The lucky ship’s luck had finally definitively run out.
On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender.
The war that had consumed millions of lives and reshaped the world was over.
In the ruins of Kur Harbor, Haruna lay where she had fallen.
Allied survey teams examined her after the surrender, documenting the damage and determining she was beyond salvage as a warship.
In 1946, scrapping operations began.
Over the following months, the great battleship was cut apart, her steel reclaimed and recycled.
By 1947, nothing remained of Haruna except photographs, documents, and memories.
34 years of service, countless miles sailed, dozens of battles fought, all reduced to scrap metal and historical footnotes.
Today, Haruna is largely forgotten except by naval historians and enthusiasts.
No museum preserves her artifacts, no memorial marks where she fell.
Yet her story embodies larger truths about war, technology, and the rise and fall of empires.
Haruna’s end demonstrated conclusively that the age of the battleship was over.
These massive, expensive platforms could not survive in an environment dominated by air power.
The future belonged to carriers, submarines, and aircraft, not to the steel leviathans that had ruled the seas for generations.
Her final battle also symbolized the death of Imperial Japan itself, a nation that had reached for empire and found only destruction.
Like Haruna, Japan’s military ambitions had been crushed not in one dramatic moment, but through systematic overwhelming force applied without mercy or respit.
In the silence of Cure Bay, where once a proud battleship lay broken, there is now nothing.
The water flows as it always has.
Ships pass by, their crews perhaps unaware of the history beneath them.
But for those who know the story, that empty water speaks volumes about the cost of war and the ultimate futility of human conflict.
Haruna was built to fight, and fight she did with distinction and courage.
But in the end, she like all weapons served only to add another chapter to humanity’s long tragic history of violence.
Her legacy is both a testament to engineering excellence and a reminder of the terrible waste of war.
The lucky ship’s luck ran out.
But perhaps in the peace that followed her destruction, there was a different kind of fortune.
The chance to build a better world from the ruins of the old.
