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Hiyō (Flying Hawk) was the name ship of her class of two aircraft carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Begun as the ocean liner Izumo Maru in 1939, she was purchased by the Navy Ministry in 1941 for conversion to an aircraft carrier. Completed shortly after the Battle of Midway in June 1942, she participated in the Guadalcanal campaign, but missed the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands in October because of an electrical generator fire. The carrier's aircraft were disembarked several times and used from land bases in battles in the South West Pacific. Hiyō was torpedoed in mid-1943 and spent three months under repair. She spent most of the next six months training and ferrying aircraft before returning to combat. She was sunk by a gasoline-vapour explosion caused by an American torpedo hit during the Battle of the Philippine Sea on 20 June 1944 with the loss of 247 officers and ratings, about a fifth of her complement. (This article is part of a featured topic: Hiyō class aircraft carrier.)

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Did you know ...

1930s Nabisco Shredded Wheat advertisement

... that the Nabisco Shredded Wheat Factory was used as a marketing tool, with an image of the factory (pictured) on every cereal packet it produced until 1960?
... that the sprinter Peter Norman requested that he be left off the Olympic Black Power Statue so that others could stand in his place?
... that a Japanese samurai was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI, nearly 400 years after his execution during the Great Martyrdom of Edo?
... that the Picts disappeared from the historical record after the devastation suffered following the Battle of Dollar?
... that the operators of a Wisconsin radio station received unsolicited checks and food deliveries?
... that the classicist Adam Parry said that he had only ever considered three careers: academia, law and beachcombing?
... that Isaac Watts, the "father of English hymnody", described one of Charles Wesley's hymns as "worth all the verses he himself had written"?
... that a Buddhist android preacher regularly gives sermons on the Heart Sutra?
... that Bills plays for the Bills?

In the news

Willie Mays in 1961

American baseball player Willie Mays (pictured) dies at the age of 93.
In basketball, the Boston Celtics defeat the Dallas Mavericks to win the NBA Finals.
A fire in a residential building in Mangaf, south of Kuwait City, kills fifty people.
A plane crash near Chikangawa, Malawi, kills nine people, including Vice President Saulos Chilima.

On this day

June 20: World Refugee Day

Queen Victoria

1837 – Queen Victoria (pictured) acceded to the British throne, beginning a 63-year reign.
1921 – British Army officer Thomas Stanton Lambert was assassinated by the Irish Republican Army near Moydrum, Ireland.
1959 – The extratropical remnants of an Atlantic hurricane reached the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada, causing 22 fishing boats to capsize and killing 35 people.
1979 – Bill Stewart, an American journalist, was executed by Nicaraguan Guardia forces.
1982 – The International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, the first major conference in genocide studies, opened despite Turkish attempts to cancel it due to the inclusion of presentations on the Armenian genocide.

John of Lancaster (b. 1389)
Fritz Koenig (b. 1924)
Edith Windsor (b. 1929)
Ulf Merbold (b. 1941)

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Today's featured picture

The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II is an American family of single-seat, single-engine, stealth multirole combat aircraft designed for air superiority and strike missions; it also has electronic warfare and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. The aircraft descends from the Lockheed Martin X-35, with development funded principally by the United States, with additional funding from program partner countries from NATO. Its first flight took place in 2006 and it entered service with the United States Air Force in 2015. Its first combat operation was in the 2018 Operation House of Cards by the Israeli Air Force. The F-35 Lightning II has three main variants: the conventional takeoff and landing F-35A, the short take-off and vertical-landing F-35B, and the carrier-based F-35C. This photograph shows an F-35C conducting a test flight over Chesapeake Bay in 2011.

Photograph credit: Andy Wolfe

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