SS Coast Trader

After the Attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy sent five submarines — I-17, I-19, I-23, I-25, and I-26 — to attack ships off West Coast of the United States. In early June 1942, I-26 took part in the opening stages of the Aleutian Islands campaign. I-26 then sailed off Washington state.[6]

On June 7, 1942 the Coast Trader departed Port Angeles, Washington for San Francisco with a cargo of blank newsprint. The Coast Trader had just passed through the Strait of Juan de Fuca at 2:10 pm, when she was found and torpedoed by I-26. The Coast Trader sank in just 40 minutes. Coast Trader had lookouts watching for Japanese submarines, but I-26, had been following the ship for 4 miles (6.4 km), since Neah Bay, Washington, at periscope depth. The torpedo put a six-foot (1.8 m) hole in the starboard side of the ship just below cargo hatch #4 in the stern, allowing water to rush in. The torpedo explosion tossed cargo hatch #4's cover, as well as part the 2,000 pounds (910 kg) of rolls of newsprint stowed in hold #4, into the air. The engine room flooded and the engines stopped. Captain Lyle G. Havens gave crew the order to abandon ship. The crew disembarked the sinking vessel in a lifeboat and two life rafts. The radio was damaged and the radio operator did not get out an SOS. All the crew made it safely into the lifeboat and rafts, but one crew member died of exposure. The lifeboat tried to row to land with the rafts in tow, but in the night a storm came in with 60-knot (110 km/h; 69 mph) winds and heavy seas. The raft's rope line came off in the night. In the morning the lifeboat raised her sail and continued, not able to find the rafts. Two days later at 4:00 pm, the lifeboat crew was rescued after being spotted by the Virginia I a fishing vessel from San Francisco. Virginia I called in an SOS, and a United States Coast Guard aircraft found the rafts from a flare they put up. The aircraft sent HMCS Edmundston, a Canadian corvette, that found the two rafts on June 9, 1942. The raft crews were cold and wet after spending 40 hours on the rafts. The Coast Trader had a crew of 56: nine officers, 28 seamen and 19 United States Army armed guards that manned the deck guns. The crewmen that were suffering from injuries and exposure were hospitalized at Port Angeles. The Coast Trader was the first American vessel the Imperial Japanese Navy sank off the coast of Washington State during World War II.

The United States Navy did not, a first, want to acknowledge that Japanese submarines were active off the US West Coast due to the U-boat's Second Happy Time. Thus, they at first attributed the sinking of Coast Trader to an internal explosion.[7][8]

The commander of I-26, Minoru Yokota, reported torpedoing a merchant vessel on the date and at the location where the Coast Trader sank, when he returned to Yokosuka, Japan on July 7, 1942. He also reported shelling Estevan Point lighthouse on June 20, 1942 and sinking the SS Cynthia Olson on December 7, 1941. I-26 was sunk by USS Richard M. Rowell, a destroyer escort, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf on October 25, 1944.[9]