Japanese cruiser Chikuma (1938)

Chikuma was the second and last vessel of the Tone class of heavy cruisers of the Imperial Japanese Navy, named after the Chikuma River in Nagano Prefecture and completed at the Mitsubishi Nagasaki shipyards on 20 May 1939. The class began as the fifth and sixth ships of the Mogami class, but after the Fourth Fleet Incident of 1935 exposed weaknesses in the Mogami hull a new design was drawn, with four twin 203 mm turrets forward of the bridge and the whole stern given over to a seaplane hangar, because the Japanese carriers had no dedicated reconnaissance aircraft and the floatplanes of the cruisers did that work. She carried the heaviest armour fitted to a Japanese cruiser, a 145 mm main belt over the citadel and 150 mm over the machinery, and could make 35 knots. She served with her sister Tone from Pearl Harbor through the Indian Ocean raids and the carrier battles of 1942. On 25 October 1944, in the Battle off Samar, she damaged the destroyer USS Heermann before being crippled by gunfire from the destroyer escort USS Samuel B. Roberts and sunk by air attacks.