Japanese Merchant Raiders
In 1940, two passenger-cargo vessels of the Osaka Shipping Line were requisitioned for conversion to Armed Merchant Cruisers (AMC)s, in anticipation of the likely thrust southward by the Japanese. The Aikoku Maru and Hokoku Maru, under construction for the route between Japan and South America, started their rebuilds in 1941, by the time they were commissioned, they were significantly armed.
Specifications for both ships are shown below:
Read more about this topic: Japanese Raiders In The Indian Ocean
Famous quotes containing the words japanese, merchant and/or raiders:
“I am a lantern—
My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.”
—Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)
“Bid her paint till day of doom,
To this favour she must come.
Bid the merchant gather wealth,
The usurer exact by stealth,
The proud man beat it from his thought,
Yet to this shape all must be brought.”
—Francis Beaumont (1584-1616)
“This is our fate: eight hundred years’ disaster,
crazily tangled like the Book of Kells:
the dream’s distortion and the land’s division,
the midnight raiders and the prison cells.”
—John Hewitt (b. 1907)