Talk:Tango Maru

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[copied from Talk:USS Rasher (SS-269) ]

I stumbled acrcoss the article on one of the ships sunk by this ship (the Tango Maru. I decided to add a date to the sinking to expand it's substub status, but when i googled the name it turned up, on three different pages (two outside wikipedia and this one) three different dates. Any ideas on the way forward? I notice this page seems really comprehensive, so perhaps the author can point me in the direction of a decent source? Sabine's Sunbird 04:19, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Hmm. I took the text of the article from DANFS, http://www.history.navy.mil/danfs/r3/rasher.htm -- I don't know who originally wrote it. Checking, I see two(2) Tango Marus!

• while patrolling the shipping lanes off the Borneo coast, ... The submarine's next victim was tanker Tango Maru which lost her stern to a spread of three torpedoes on the afternoon of 8 November [1943].
• On 25 February [1944] she attacked a Japanese convoy off Bali, sinking cargo ships Tango Maru and Ryusei Maru.

Looking further, I found

• Tango Maru sinking (June 29, 1944) — about 3,000 deaths List of disasters#Ship and ferry disasters
• The Tango Maru [6893.04 tons] was eventually sunk by American aircraft in the China Sea on the 11 March 1942.http://home.st.net.au/~dunn/tangomar.htm
• In February of 1943, the 6,200 ton cargo vessel, Tango Maru, crammed with 3,500 Javanese labourers and some hundreds of Allied POW's, was plying between Java and Ambon. US Submarine Rasher, using 3 torpedoes sunk this ship, and only about 500 native people survived.http://ahoy.tk-jk.net/macslog/DeathatSeainWorldWar2.html

http://www.geocities.com/dutcheastindies/allied_losses.html suggests that the Japanese really did have multiple Tangos:

• Talang Akar (2.046 tons) - Tanker
  Date of loss - March 2nd, 1942
  Reason for loss - Scttled off Soerabaja, salved by IJN and renamed Tango Maru, sunk by torpedo from USN submarine Rasher on November 8th, 1943 in Strait Makassar.
• Toendjoek (6,200 tons) - Freighter, confiscated former German ship Rendsburg
  Date of loss - March 2nd, 1942
  Reason for loss - Scuttled as blockship off Tandjung Priok, salved by IJN, renamed Tango Maru, sunk by torpedo from USN submarine Rasher on February 25th, 1944 in the Java Sea.

That matches DANFS--but they may both be drawing on the same sources.

If we assume the tanker was correctly identified as such, we can put that aside. That leaves two reports that a cargo ship was sunk by Rasher in February 1944, another saying February 1943, and another saying June 1944, and a totally different story about aircraft in 1942. The simplest explanation is that a couple of people got the date of one incident wrong--one the year and one the month--and the last is something else entirely. If DANFS is correct, Rasher hadn't even been commissioned in Feb '43.

The next step would seem to be to go into the page histories and find the users who added the info to Tango Maru and List of disasters, and ask them what their sources said. Also, searching for Rendsburg might be fruitful.

—wwoods 09:19, 26 May 2005 (UTC)