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What Happened to Japan's Heavy Cruiser Fleet Divided Among Allied Powers After WW2

What happened to Japan's powerful heavy cruiser fleet after World War II ended? This is the untold story of five surviving warships—Myoko, Takao, Aoba, Tone, and Haguro—and how they were divided among the Allied powers.

In September 1945, as Allied inspection teams walked the docks of Yokosuka Naval Base, they faced a complex question: what to do with the captured Japanese warships? Of the eighteen heavy cruisers Japan possessed at the war's beginning, only five survived to surrender. Each would meet a different fate—scrapped in Singapore, used as bomb targets, deliberately sunk, or left to rust on the ocean floor.

This documentary explores the diplomatic negotiations between the United States, Britain, Soviet Union, and China as they divided these spoils of war. Discover how the Myoko was cut apart by Dutch salvage teams, how the Takao became a British weapons test subject, why the Aoba met an ignominious end at the bottom of Kure harbor, and how American engineers studied the unusual design of the Tone before destroying her.
Beyond the ships themselves, this is a story about the total dismantling of Japanese naval power, the technical intelligence gained from examining enemy vessels, and the human cost felt by Japanese veterans who watched their former ships reduced to scrap metal.

From the engineering secrets extracted during inspections to the Cold War tensions that influenced ship allocations, this deep dive reveals a forgotten chapter of World War II's aftermath.
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