OSAKA CARGO-LINER ARGENTINA MARU

Argentina Maru was a Japanese passenger ship from the beginning of World War II. The unit entered service in 1939. The total length of the ship at the time of launching was 155 meters, with a width of 21.9 meters and a draft of 8.04 meters. Standard displacement was about 13,500 tons, and the maximum speed was about 21-22 knots. Argentina Maru was built as a luxury high-speed passenger ship at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries shipyard in Nagasaki city. The first shipowner was the Osaka Sosen Kaisha shipping lines. It is worth adding, however, that a large part of the costs of building the unit was covered by the Imperial Navy, which assumed from the very beginning that the ship would be converted into a light carrier at the outbreak of the war. Such assumptions, of course, significantly influenced the design and construction of Argentina Maru. The civilian service history of the unit is very short, because from the end of 1941 this ocean-going passenger ship was used for transporting troops, and already in December 1942 it was confiscated by the Navy and converted into an aircraft carrier. Finally, Argentina Maru was rebuilt into the Kaiyo light carrier by the end of 1943.