At the Battle of Midway, as Japan's carriers burned and the battle was already lost, a single Japanese submarine slipped through the American fleet, sank a wounded aircraft carrier and a destroyer, and then survived one of the most savage depth charge poundings of the war to limp home. This is Yahachi Tanabe and the submarine I-168.
Midway, in June 1942, was a catastrophe for Japan. In a single day American dive bombers sent four Japanese aircraft carriers to the bottom and broke the back of Japan's navy. But amid that disaster, one Japanese commander salvaged a hard, cold victory. The American carrier Yorktown had been badly damaged and was being fought to save, sitting nearly dead in the water and screened by destroyers. Tanabe, commanding the submarine I-168, was ordered to find her and finish her.
He did it with patience and nerve. Tanabe worked his submarine slowly and carefully through the ring of American destroyers guarding the crippled carrier, evading their sonar, until he was in perfect position. Then he fired a spread of torpedoes. One tore into the destroyer Hammann alongside the carrier and sank her in minutes. Two more slammed into the Yorktown herself, dooming the ship that had helped win the battle. The Yorktown finally went under the next day.
But now Tanabe had to survive, and the Americans were out for revenge. The destroyers pounced on I-168 and hammered her with depth charges for over an hour, something like 40 of them, battering the submarine so badly that she was damaged, leaking, and eventually forced to the surface, seemingly finished. Tanabe even sent what he believed was a final message, we sank Yorktown, expecting to die. But his crew coaxed the crippled boat back under and away, and against the odds Tanabe brought I-168 limping home.
Decorated as a hero for sinking the Yorktown, Tanabe had pulled off the one clear Japanese success at Midway, a reminder that even in the middle of a crushing defeat, a single skilled and determined commander in a single small ship could still change the ledger. He survived the war, and decades later told the story himself.
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