Japanese cruiser Tone (1937)

Tone (利根) was the lead ship in the two-vessel Tone class of heavy cruisers in the Imperial Japanese Navy. The ship was named after the Tone River, in the Kantō region of Japan and was completed on 20 November 1938 at Mitsubishi's Nagasaki shipyards. Tone was designed for long-range scouting missions and had a large seaplane capacity. She was extensively employed during World War II usually providing scouting services to their aircraft carrier task forces. She almost always operated in this capacity in conjunction with her sister ship Chikuma. She was involved in sinking the destroyer USS Edsall in the Java Sea, before escorting aircraft carriers at the Indian Ocean Raid and battles of Midway, Eastern Solomons, and Santa Cruz throughout 1942.

In 1944, Tone sank the British steamship Behar, and committed a war crime when anywhere between 60 and 80 civilians were murdered aboard the ship. At the battle of Leyte Gulf, Tone survived several bomb hits from US aircraft and in turn fought Taffy 3 where she mostly operated alongside the heavy cruiser Haguro, together crippling the escort carrier USS Kalinin Bay and damaging the escort carrier USS Fanshaw Bay. Near the end of the war, Tone was sunk in port by US carrier aircraft and scrapped post war.