Japanese submarine I-17
| History | |
|---|---|
 Empire of Japan
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| Name: | I-17 |
| Builder: | Yokosuka Navy Yard |
| Laid down: | April 1938 |
| Launched: | 19 July 1939 |
| Commissioned: | 24 January 1941 |
| Struck: | 1 December 1943 |
| Fate: | Sunk on 19 August 1943 by HMNZS Tui (T234) and US Kingfisher float-planes |
| General characteristics | |
| Class and type: | Type B1 submarine |
| Displacement: |
|
| Length: | 108.7 m (356.6 ft) |
| Beam: | 9.3 m (30.5 ft) |
| Draft: | 5.14 m (16.9 ft) |
| Propulsion: |
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| Speed: |
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| Range: | 14,000 nautical miles (25,928 km) at 16 knots (30 km/h) |
| Test depth: | 100 m (328.1 ft) |
| Complement: | 94 officers and men |
| Armament: |
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| Aircraft carried: | 1 Yokosuka E14Y seaplane |
I-17 was a Japanese B1 type submarine of the Imperial Japanese Navy which saw service during World War II. This long-range submarine cruiser spent the early months of the war in the eastern Pacific and was the first Axis ship to shell the United States mainland. She later supported the Japanese Army in fighting around the Solomon Islands and remained active in the southwest Pacific until she sunk in August 1943.
During the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, I-17 patrolled north of Oahu. Its mission was to reconnoiter and engage any ships that tried to sortie from Pearl Harbor.I-17 proceeded to a patrol station off Cape Mendocino following the attack on Pearl Harbor. The 6912-ton General Petroleum tanker SS Emidio was sailing in ballast from Seattle, Washington en route to San Pedro, California. I-17 hit the tanker with five 14-centimeter (5.5 in) shells in the early afternoon of 20 December 1941. The tanker was within sight of land, and survivors reached the Blunt Reef lightship in lifeboats. The tanker drifted north onto rocks off Crescent City, California where the wreck remained until scrapped in 1959. A scheduled shelling of American coastal cities on Christmas Eve of 1941 was canceled because of the frequency of coastal air and surface patrols.
At night on 19 February 1942, I-17 covertly landed on Point Loma, San Diego to determine her position after arriving from Kwajalein Atoll.I-17 then headed north along the coast of California. On 23 February, I-17 achieved some notability as the first Axis ship to shell the United States mainland in an incident known as the Bombardment of Ellwood. A few minutes after 7 pm, she surfaced a few hundred yards off a beach 10 miles (16 km) west of Santa Barbara, California, within the Ellwood Oil Field. Over 20 minutes, she fired 17 shells from her 14 cm gun at the giant Richfield aviation fuel storage tanks on the blufftop behind the beach. The shots were mostly wild, one landing more than a mile inland. The closest shell exploded in a field 30 yards (27 m) from one of the tanks. The shelling did only minor damage to a pier and a pumphouse, but news of the shelling triggered an "invasion" scare along the West Coast.
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Wikipedia