Japanese corvette Kongō (1877)

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Career

Builder:	Hull, Great Britain
Ordered:	1874 Fiscal Year
Laid down:	24 September 1875
Launched:	17 April 1877
Commissioned:	1878 January
Fate:	Scrapped 20 July 1909
General characteristics
Displacement:	2,250 tons (3718 tons fully loaded)
Length:	67.1 meters overall
Beam:	12.5 meters
Draft:	5.3 meters
Propulsion:	One Shaft Horizontally-mounted Reciprocating Engine; 6 boilers; 2,270 shp
Speed:	13.7 knots
Fuel & Range:	340 tons coal
Complement:	308
Armament:	3 × 170 mm guns (6.7" Krupp breech-loading) 6 x 150 mm guns (5.9" Krupp breech-loading) 2 x 75mm guns (1 pounder breech-loading) 4 x 25 mm quad-mount repeating guns 2 x 11 mm dual-mount repeating guns 1 x 360 mm torpedo
Armor:	belt: 4.5 inch at waterline

IJN Kongō (金剛(コルベット), Kongō bōgō-korubetto^?) was the second and last vessel in the Hiei class of armored corvettes in the early Imperial Japanese Navy. Kongō was named after the Mount Kongō, in Nara Prefecture and the name was subsequently used for the World War II battleship Kongō, as well as the Kongō class destroyers of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force.

[edit] History

Kongō was designed by Edward James Reed and built at the Arles shipyard at Hull, United Kingdom. She arrived in Yokosuka on 26 April 1878 after her shake-down cruise from England.

With heightened tensions between Japan and Joseon dynasty Korea after the assassination of several members of the Japanese embassy, Kongō was assigned to patrols of the Korean coast in the summer of 1882. It again patrolled of Korea during the instability following the Gapsin Coup of 1884.

From 1889-1890, Kongō made several long distance navigational training voyages, visiting Hawaii seven times during this period. From October 1890 to May 1891, together with its sister ship Hiei, Kongō visited Istanbul. Both ships were on a good will mission to Ottoman Empire, carrying the surviving crew members of the Turkish frigate Ertuğrul which sank off the coast of Wakayama.

Kongō saw combat service in the first Sino-Japanese war, at the battles of Lushunkou, Weihaiwei and Yalu river.

During the Russo-Japanese War, Kongō was based as a guard ship at Chikai, in southern Korea, and was subsequently relocated to Port Arthur after that naval base had fallen to the Japanese.

After the war, Kongō was assigned to surveying duties until 20 July 1909 when she was stricken from the lists. It was sold for scrap and broken up in 1910.

[edit] References

Chesneau, Roger and Eugene M. Kolesnik (editors), All The World's Fighting Ships 1860-1905, Conway Maritime Press, 1979 reprinted 2002, ISBN 0-85177-133-5
Jentsura, Hansgeorg. Warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1869-1945. Naval Institute Press (1976). ISBN 087021893X