USS Guam (CB-2) (Alternity)

USS Guam (CB-2) was an Alaska-class large cruiser of the United States Navy, commissioned in September 1944. She served as a fast carrier escort for much of her wartime service, as well as a shore bombardment platform for amphibious landings, namely the Marianas Campaign and the Operation Downfall landings on southern Kyushu in November 1945. Aside from a single kamikaze strike a month into the Kyushu invasion, Guam escaped major damage through war's end in April 1946, and following repairs and refit at the Bremerton Navy Yard in the late fall of 1946, she was assigned to patrol duties around Japan and the Marianas, a role in which she remained for the next several years, until again serving as a shore bombardment platform, for US and UN troops in the Korean War, from 1950-52.

Following this, Guam returned to patrol duties around the Marianas, and after a second refit in which she was equipped with batteries of rockets and a fully modern radar system, the ship was reassigned to perform exercises with the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) from 1953 to 1962. This all changed on April 18, 1962, when on an exercise with JMSDF destroyers, one of her escorts, the guided missile destroyer Mahan sighted a Philippine Imperial Navy destroyer, the IPNS Corregidor, an ex-IJN destroyer captained by a radical anti-American. Corregidor was equipped with a pair of imported Russian anti-ship missiles, which she fired at Guam's taskforce; both struck home and punched through the cruiser's deck armor with relative ease, blowing out sections of her keel. She ground to a halt and quickly settled low in the water, engines crippled. For a time, as Mahan and the rest of the taskforce took off as much of the crew as possible, secondary explosions from aviation fuel and 5" ammunition wracked the ship. At 5:47 p.m. WPST (West Pacific Standard Time), twenty minutes after she was struck, Guam rolled onto her port side and sank in 22,000 feet of water at 14°22' N 141°25' E.