19441776 Club
American submarines tear apart a Japanese troop convoy; over 4,000 soldiers go down in the Celebes Sea
The Take Ichi convoy, carrying two veteran divisions from Shanghai toward New Guinea, limps into Halmahera with its reinforcements largely at the bottom of the ocean.
In May 1944, the Japanese Take Ichi convoy attempted to carry two veteran infantry divisions from Shanghai to reinforce defenses in New Guinea and the Philippines—a desperate gamble to hold Japan's crumbling Pacific perimeter. American submarines, guided by intercepted and decrypted Japanese radio signals, stalked the convoy across 2,000 miles of open ocean. By the time the battered remnants reached Halmahera in the Dutch East Indies, over 4,000 soldiers lay dead at the bottom of the Celebes Sea, and Japan's strategic defensive line had collapsed westward by 600 miles…
