Japan’s Unluckiest Cruiser - Mogami’s Torpedo Incident 

The Mogami fires torpedoes at the Kamchatka. The Kamchatka fires at the Mogami. Aurora gets hit by both ships.

it seems like USS Houston and HMAS Perth got caught in a brawl between the Japanese Army and Navy...

Mogami sees IJA transport *neuron activation*

One of the many truism's of battle is "Friendly Fire, Isn't"

Mogami's mishap simply cements the joke that the true enemy of the Navy is the Army...

Imagine boasting that you have successful five torpedo hits out of six in your salvo, that’s darn accurate……until they ask you what targets you hit.

Thank you for sharing your research. The Battle of Sunda Strait is most definitely a difficult one to make heads or tails of. I think you hit the salient points nicely, and I appreciate the way you covered the commonly accepted accounts and details clearly and without judgment. To me that is the mark of a true historiographer.

Great work Skynea. The Mogami is my favorite Japanese cruiser, despite her bad luck. I really like her 43' refit.

IJN versus IJA? I see no reason to call it "friendly fire"

Japanese and local times are 1 1/2 hours off, since the Japanese sources use Tokyo time, BTW, so both sources you use are correct.

This story always cracks me up. Drachinifel puts it best in one of his videos. "The friendly part in this friendly fire incident is in doubt, given the relationship between the army and the navy."

A cruiser that run on the bad luck it caused to all the ships she sailed with.

There's an idea for a t-shirt design somewhere there.

Japan would soon find itself very short of transport craft during the late summer and autumn during the Guadalcanal campaign.

Friendly torps aren't so friendly.

Are their plans to talk about South American carriers in the future?

Aoba was up there as luckiest/unluckiest. She was at the Battle of Cape Esperence, where she was hit by ~40 shells, severely damaged and put out of action for 4 months repair at Kure. Less than two months later, she became the only Japanese cruiser to survive her torpedoes detonating when a B-17 bomb detonated two of them onboard and towed back to Kure for more repairs. Four months of repairs later, Aoba then participated in the very unsuccessful 2nd Indian Ocean raid, which sank a grand total of 1 ship and the admiral aboard Aoba was later killed for war crimes for ordering the massacre of the survivors of the single ship sunk. Aoba was then torpedoed by USS Bream. She fled to Manila, where she was damaged again, before fleeing to Japan and declared irreparable and converted to a floating AA battery. She was then bombed several more times before sinking in shallow water in Kure harbor.

Shes still my waifu

Is it really friendly fire if the transports were from the IJA.

While Mogami WAS responsible for this particular fuckup, she wasn’t for the other errors usually attributed to her, like the erroneous claim she rammed Nachi (which was the other way around, but was blamed on her in US secondary sources due to them quoting a typo)

Japan was ruled by War Lords!!!

Staking my spot as 1st