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:
“The Japanese do not fear God. They only fear bombs.”
—Jerome Cady, U.S. screenwriter. Lewis Milestone. Yin Chu Ling, The Purple Heart (1944)
“I need not tell you of the inadequacy of the American shipping marine on the Pacific Coast.... For this reason it seems to me that there is no subject to which Congress can better devote its attention in the coming session than the passage of a bill which shall encourage our merchant marine in such a way as to establish American lines directly between New York and the eastern ports and South American ports, and both our Pacific Coast ports and the Orient and the Philippines.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“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)