IJN

Captain Tagami

Wartime History
The I-25 continued to operate off the United States West Coast, with Commander Tagami sinking two American freighters and damaging another. With one torpedo remaining, Tagami was preparing to conclude his patrol when, on 11 October, he detected two submarines traveling on the surface some 500 miles west of Seattle, Washington. Tagami fired his last torpedo and one of the submarines exploded. He thought that he had sunk and American submarine. His victim, however, was the Soviet submarine L-16. At that time the US was at war with Japan and Germany while the Soviet Union was at war with Germany but not Japan. The Soviets decided to send the submarines L-15 and L-16 from Vladivostok on the Siberian coast to the Baltic Sea where they could be used against the Germans. The craft were making the voyage via the Aleutians, San Francisco, and the Panama Canal. There were no survivors from the sunken L-16.

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