She was 64 meters long and displaced 266 tons -- barely larger than a modern tugboat. Her crew of 45 men carried 36 depth charges and a pair of 40-millimeter guns into a war fought across an ocean that dwarfed everything about their vessel. The Japanese submarine chaser CH-2 was not the kind of ship that earns chapters in naval histories. She did not sink enemy carriers or shell distant beachheads. Her war was the grinding, invisible work of convoy escort and anti-submarine patrol, the kind of duty where success meant nothing happened and failure meant oil slicks and silence. For eleven years, from her commissioning in 1934 to her sinking in 1945, CH-2 lived in the margins of the Imperial Japanese Navy's story -- until a torpedo hit in the stern wrote her ending off the coast of Lombok.
CH-2 was laid down at the Ishikawajima Shipbuilding and Engineering Company shipyard in Tokyo on June 9, 1933, launched that December, and commissioned on March 25, 1934. She was a CH-1-class submarine chaser, a type that the Imperial Japanese Navy would discover carried a dangerous flaw. Like many Japanese warships of the era, the CH-1 class suffered from excessive topweight -- the center of gravity sat too high, making the ships dangerously unstable in rough seas. The problem was bad enough that the Navy ordered modifications: ballast was added to CH-2, pushing her standard displacement from 266 long tons up to 376, with a full load of 400 tons. The fix worked, but it was an inelegant solution -- strapping dead weight to the bottom of a ship to compensate for what sat too high at the top. Her two diesel engines, generating 3,400 brake horsepower, could push her to 24 knots, a decent speed for submarine hunting but nothing that would outrun a destroyer.
CH-2's war began on the first day. On December 7, 1941, she sortied as part of Operation M, supporting the Japanese landings in the northern Philippines. Three days later she was at Aparri, on the northern tip of Luzon, where Japanese forces came ashore against light resistance. From the Philippines, CH-2 moved south to support Operation H, the invasion of Celebes in the Dutch East Indies. This was the great southward thrust of early 1942, when Japanese forces swept through Southeast Asia with a speed that stunned the colonial powers. CH-2 operated alongside minesweepers, patrol boats, her two sister ships, and at least one cruiser -- a fleet of small vessels clearing the way and guarding the flanks while larger warships and transports drove the offensive forward.
After the Dutch East Indies fell, CH-2 settled into the role she would occupy for most of the war: convoy escort and anti-submarine patrol across the South Pacific. It was repetitive, exhausting, and dangerous work. The submarine chasers were the sheepdogs of the fleet, circling transports and merchant ships, listening for the telltale sounds of an enemy submarine below. On March 27, 1944, CH-2 depth-charged the water in retaliation after an enemy submarine sank the transport Nichinan Maru. The American submarine escaped without damage. Seven months later, on October 22, 1944, CH-2 joined other vessels in depth-charging a submarine that had attacked Japanese minelayers. The attacker turned out to be a Dutch submarine, and despite reports that the target had been sunk, it too escaped unharmed. The pattern was consistent: CH-2 chased, dropped her depth charges, and claimed results that the ocean refused to confirm.
By mid-1945, the waters of the Indonesian archipelago had become some of the most dangerous in the Pacific for Japanese shipping. Allied submarines roamed with increasing confidence through straits and coastal waters that Japanese forces could no longer effectively patrol. On June 27, 1945, CH-2 was escorting a convoy off Lombok when an American submarine caught her. The torpedo struck the stern -- the worst place for a small vessel, where the propulsion machinery and steering gear are concentrated. The damage was fatal. The American submarine crew watched through their periscope as some of CH-2's men launched a lifeboat and abandoned ship before she went under. How many of the 45-man crew survived is not recorded in the available sources. CH-2 was struck from the Japanese Navy list on August 10, 1945 -- five days before the Emperor's surrender broadcast. She rests somewhere on the seafloor south of Lombok, one more small warship in a war that consumed them by the thousand.
The approximate sinking location is 7.50S, 116.25E, in the waters south of Lombok in the Lesser Sunda Islands of Indonesia. Lombok is clearly visible from altitude, dominated by Mount Rinjani (3,726 m) on its northern end. The nearest major airport is Lombok International Airport (WADL/LOP). Bali and its Ngurah Rai International Airport (WADD/DPS) lie to the west across the Lombok Strait. The waters around Lombok hosted significant submarine activity in the final months of the Pacific War, and multiple Japanese vessels were sunk in this area during 1945.