Japanese Battleship Kirishima - Design and Construction

Design and Construction

Kirishima was the third of the Imperial Japanese Navy's Kongō class battlecruisers, a group of capital ships designed by the British naval engineer George Thurston. The class was ordered in 1910 in the Japanese Emergency Naval Expansion Bill after the commissioning of HMS Invincible in 1908. The four battlecruisers of the Kongō class were designed to match the naval capabilities of the other major powers at the time; they have been called the battlecruiser version of the British (formerly Turkish) battleship HMS Erin. With their heavy armament and armor protection (which took up 23.3% of their approximately 30,000 ton displacement), Kirishima and her sister ships were vastly superior to any other Japanese capital ship afloat at the time.

The keel of Kirishima was laid down at the Nagasaki shipyards of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries on 17 March 1912, with most of the parts used in her construction manufactured in Japan. Due to a shortage of available slipways, Kirishima and her sister ship Haruna were the first two capital ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy to be built in private Japanese shipyards. After her launch on 1 December 1913, Kirishima's fitting-out began later that month. On 15 December 1914, Captain Kamaya Rokuro was assigned as her chief equipping officer, and she was completed on 19 April 1915.