Explosion aboard the Kawachi

At 3.51 p.m. on 12 July 1918 an explosion occurred aboard the Japanese battleship Kawachi in Tokuyama Bay on the Inland Sea, in Yamaguchi Prefecture. The 1st Fleet lay at anchor here: the battleships Yamashiro, Fusō, Ise, Settsu and Kawachi, the cruiser Tone and destroyers. The weather was stormy. In the morning torpedo-firing exercises had been cancelled because of the heavy swell, and the ships stayed in the bay. First came a weaker explosion near the forward starboard main-armament turret, and immediately afterwards a tremendous blast. Flames and smoke shot out of the turret and from between the funnels, and the foremast collapsed. The ship heeled over to starboard and after about four minutes capsized keel up. She came to rest on the bottom of the bay at a depth of a dozen or so metres.

The Kawachi was the first of the two ships of her class, the first true Japanese dreadnoughts. She was built at the naval arsenal at Yokosuka and commissioned in the spring of 1912. She displaced more than 21,000 tons and carried twelve 305 mm guns. In autumn 1914, together with her sister Settsu, she bombarded German fortifications during the siege of Tsingtao. It was her only participation in combat. Afterwards she served in Japanese waters, while the heavier wartime tasks of the Japanese navy fell mainly to cruisers and destroyers, sent among other places to the Mediterranean.

More than a thousand men were on board at the time of the explosion. According to Japanese figures from the days after the disaster, 621 people were killed, including several civilian workers. In Western studies the figures range from about 620 to 700 killed, and the American press in its first reports wrote of five hundred drowned. About 430 sailors survived. The ship’s commanding officer, Captain Masaki, was thrown into the water as the battleship capsized. He was rescued by a boat from the battleship Yamashiro. On 21 July a mass funeral for the victims was held at Kure, attended according to the press of the time by about 30,000 people.

The very next day after the explosion the navy appointed a commission chaired by Vice-Admiral Kakuichi Murakami. At first it suspected arson, as it had a year and a half earlier in the case of the cruiser Tsukuba, which blew up at Yokosuka. This time, however, it found no suspect. It concluded that the most likely cause was the spontaneous ignition of decomposing cordite in the forward turret’s magazine. It was later supposed that this was propellant that had been stored about five years longer than regulations allowed, although the magazines had been inspected at the beginning of the year and no irregularities found. Unstable propellant also destroyed several British warships during this war, the deadliest being the explosion of the battleship Vanguard at Scapa Flow in July 1917. The commission recommended stricter control over the manufacture and storage of cordite.

The navy considered raising the wreck but gave up the idea, because it would have delayed the construction of new ships. On 21 September 1918 the Kawachi was struck from the navy list, and the wreck was partly broken up where she lay. It was the most tragic accident of the Japanese navy during the First World War, worse than any loss inflicted on it by the enemy.