history · 09 April 1945 · 79 years ago
The Japanese Navy scored a notable success against the Americans when a large Shinyo Motor Boat packed with explosives charged out of Naha harbour, Okinawa, Japan to ram the USS Charles J. Badger putting the destroyer out of the war with both engines utterly unserviceable. A landing-craft was sunk on the same night and, from the fringes of the destroyer screen, came a report of swimmers armed with hand-grenades, although whether these were, in fact, Fukuryu ("Crawling Dragons") suicide-frogmen still remained uncertain.
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