Japanese cruiser Tone (1937)

Tone was the lead ship of the two-vessel Tone class of heavy cruisers of the Imperial Japanese Navy, named after the Tone River in the Kantō region and completed on 20 November 1938 at Mitsubishi's Nagasaki shipyards. She was designed for long-range scouting, with a large seaplane capacity, and almost always worked with her sister ship Chikuma, scouting for the aircraft carrier task forces. She was assigned to Cruiser Division 8 at the attack on Pearl Harbor, helped sink the destroyer USS Edsall in the Java Sea, and escorted carriers during the Indian Ocean raid and the battles of Midway, the Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz in 1942. In 1944 she sank the British steamship Behar, and between 60 and 80 civilians were murdered aboard the ship in a war crime. At the Battle of Leyte Gulf she survived several bomb hits from American aircraft and fought the escort carriers of Taffy 3 off Samar. Near the end of the war she was sunk in port by American carrier aircraft, removed from the navy list on 20 November 1945 and scrapped from 1947 to 1948.