Wikipedia:Today's featured article/June 4, 2012



Kaga was an aircraft carrier of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Originally intended to be one of two Tosa-class battleships, Kaga was converted under the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty into an aircraft carrier as the replacement for the battlecruiser JAPANESE BATTLECRUISER Amagi, which had been damaged during the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake. Kaga's aircraft first supported Japanese troops in China during the Shanghai Incident of 1932 and participated in the Second Sino-Japanese War in the late 1930s. With other carriers, she took part in the Pearl Harbor raid in December 1941 and the invasion of Rabaul in the Southwest Pacific in January 1942. The following month her aircraft participated in a combined carrier airstrike on Darwin, Australia, helping secure the conquest of the Dutch East Indies by Japanese forces. During the Battle of Midway in June, Kaga and the other carriers were attacked by American aircraft from Midway Atoll and the carriers USS Enterprise (CV-6), USS Hornet (CV-8), and USS Yorktown (CV-5). Dive bombers from Enterprise severely damaged Kaga; when it became obvious she could not be saved, she was scuttled by Japanese destroyers to prevent her from falling into enemy hands. In 1999, debris from Kaga was located on the ocean floor; the main body of the carrier has not yet been found. (more...)

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