Pacific ships

Photos and the story

Shinonome

Back to Shinonome

ClassFubuki class
TypeDestroyer (DD)
BuilderSasebo Naval Arsenal
Launched1927-11-26
Commissioned1928-07-25
FateSunk. Lost with all hands on 17 December 1941 off Miri, Sarawak, when two bombs from a Dutch Dornier Do 24 flying boat hit her aft magazine. Her wreck has not been found.
Armament (class)Special Type. Three twin 5-inch mounts, two funnels, and three banks of tubes.

Laid down, displacement, length, beam, draft, speed, and complement are not stored for each hull, so this table leaves them out.

The armament line is the class drawing, not a measurement of this hull.

Shinonome
Shinonome, photographed in 1930. Photo from the Kure Maritime Museum's destroyer album (Todaka, ed.). Wikimedia Commons File:Shinonome II.jpg. Public domain.

The name means daybreak. Shinonome was a Fubuki-class destroyer. Sasebo Naval Arsenal laid her down on 12 August 1926, launched her on 26 November 1927 and commissioned her on 25 July 1928 in Destroyer Division 12. In the 1930s she patrolled the south China coast and took part in the 1940 occupation of French Indochina.

At Pearl Harbor she was in Destroyer Division 12 of Destroyer Squadron 3, at Samah on Hainan. From 4 to 12 December 1941 she covered the Japanese landings at Kota Bharu in Malaya. From 16 December she covered the landings in British Borneo.

On 17 December 1941 two bombs from a Dutch Dornier Do 24 flying boat, X-32 of the Royal Dutch Naval Air Group GVT-7, hit her aft magazine. She blew up and sank with all hands near Miri, Sarawak. She was struck from the Navy List on 15 January 1942. Searchers, including a Miri team supported from the Netherlands, have looked for the wreck since 2004, and a 2023 expedition failed to find it.

Sources: Allyn Nevitt's combinedfleet.com Tabular Record of Movement for IJN Shinonome; Wikipedia, Japanese destroyer Shinonome, rewritten here.

The pictures on this page are the originals.