The Ships of Battlegroup: Japan Kongo (BB)

Displacement	31,700 tons	Belt Armor	8 inches
Overall Length	728.5 feet	Deck Armor	2.75 inches
Beam	102.3 feet	Main Turret Armor	9 inches
Speed	30.5 knots	Main Guns	8 × 14″

Laid down on January 17, 1911, launched on May 18, 1912 and commissioned on August 16, 1913, the ship carried a main armament of eight 14 inch main guns mounted two per turret; two superfiring centerline forward, one centerline aft and one centerline aft placed up one deck to allow it to fire over the other aft turret. Kongo was the name ship of a four-ship battlecruiser class and the ships had coal-fired turbine engines with oil-fired supplementary burners. Japan lacked experience in building large warships at the time and wanted a "model" battlecruiser built at a British yard. Since Great Britain and Japan were close allies (the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902) at the time, the Kongo was built in Britain, the largest and last Japanese warship to be built overseas. Designed by Sir George Thurston, the ship was an excellent design for the period and even more powerful than her British contemporary Lion class battlecruisers. The class was capable of 27.5 knots, a high speed for World War One. As was ominously common with all British battlecruisers, her armor was thin. The later H. M. S. Tiger battlecruiser was a close copy of the Kongo. The remaining ships in the class, Haruna, Hiei and Kirishima, copied the Kongo but were all built in Japanese yards. The "Kongo" name comes from a mountain in Japan and all four ships in the class were named after Japanese mountains.

Kongo saw little activity during World War One. The ship had torpedo bulges added in 1929–1931, which slowed the ship enough that she was re-designated as a "battleship." A more comprehensive overhaul from January 1936 to January 1937 saw a new set of oil-fired turbines installed that increased speed to 30.5 knots, protection improvements (the belt armor remained the same but deck armor was thickened) that increased displacement from 27,500 to 31,700 tons, the addition of a characteristically Japanese "pagoda" foremast, added antiaircraft protection and yet another re-designation to "fast battleship." Although these modernization changes, which were made to all four ships of the class, made them useful fast carrier escorts, the class lacked the armor protection to be considered real "fast battleships."

During World War II, the Kongo and her sisters were often called on to use their speed to accompany the fast carriers in operations against Indonesia, Ceylon, Midway and Guadalcanal. At Guadalcanal, the Kongo and all her sisters were also used in a surface role and sent down the "Slot" to bombard Henderson Field. This use of these vulnerable ships resulted in the loss of Hiei to crippling cruiser shell hits and continuous air attacks and Kirishima to the radar-directed 16 inch shells of the fast battleship U. S. S. Washington .

At the Battle of Leyte Gulf on October 20–25, 1944, Kongo was part of the Japanese surface force (which also included Haruna, Nagato and Yamato) that broke through and engaged the U. S. escort carriers with disappointing results for the Japanese. On November 21, 1944, after a short refit when updated radar and additional antiaircraft guns were added, Kongo was sunk by torpedoes from the American submarine Sealion.

For other nation’s "battlecruisers" that served in World War II, see: Dunkerque, Gneisenau, Guam, Repulse and Scharnhorst .

For other World War One ships extensively modernized between the wars, see: Andrea Doria, Caio Duilio, Conte di Cavour, Giulio Cesare and Repulse .

For a further discussion of what happened to the battleships of World War One, see the Introduction to these articles.