THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 24, 1996 TAG: 9603210586
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines
That the Japanese submariner possessed will and character was evident from the outset.
In April 1910, an induction valve failed to close on experimental Boat No. 6, allowing sudden waves of water into the vessel. It sank to the bottom.
``Crew members recognized that they faced certain death as the boat filled with the sea and isolated pockets of air vanished,'' reports historian Carl Boyd. ``The next day the boat was located and raised. Apparently, all members of the crew died serenely at their stations.''
Self-sacrifice was a watchword for the Imperial Japanese sub force, which included human suicide torpedoes among its armament. But so was failure, often in the face of inflated expectations during World War II.
Japanese subs sank few ships off the American West Coast. When 20 minutes of shelling by the first-line I-17 off Santa Barbara, Calif., damaged a pier and an oil derrick, the Imperial Navy promptly pronounced the minor action a ``bombardment'' that inflicted ``heavy damage in California'' and ``unnerved the entire Pacific coast.''
Maintained Radio Tokyo, March 3, 1942: ``Sensible Americans know that submarine shelling of the Pacific coast was a warning to the nation that the Paradise created by George Washington is on the verge of destruction.''
Well, we didn't and it wasn't.
Americans - and Germans - were much better with subs, notes Boyd, the Louis I. Jaffe Professor of History at Old Dominion University and former submarine yeoman first-class aboard the diesel-electric USS Pickerel.
With Akihito Yoshida, who works for the National Institute for Defense Studies and the Maritime Staff College in Tokyo, Boyd has plainly rendered Japanese shortcomings and the reasons for them in an illuminating new history based on recently declassified material, The Japanese Submarine Force and World War II (Naval Institute Press, 272 pp., $35).
``As it turned out,'' Boyd writes, ``Japan's submarine force never had a chance to prove itself as a strategic arm, but was always subordinated to local needs and tactical situations.''
How does he know? From official Japanese sources and American wartime intercepts of secret Japanese radio messages. These in part form the substance of another Boyd book just out, American Command of the Sea through Carriers, Codes and the Silent Service: World War II and Beyond (The Mariner's Museum, 80 pp., $13.95).
``Now,'' Boyd says, ``more than 50 years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, historians are systematically investigating perhaps the greatest secret of the war - the relationship between the Allies' ability to read enemy codes and their ability to bring the war to an end in 1945. Signal intelligence brought greater precision to the war and saved lives and shortened the struggle. It also changed the future of warfare by emphasizing the links among intelligence, submarines and aircraft carriers in the most comprehensive war of the 20th century.''
The illustrated text documents clandestine work of cryptanalyst ``magicians'' who obtained intelligence from breaking Japanese high-grade, wireless-enciphered messages and other foreign codes.
They made it possible for P-38s to intercept Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto's plane over Bougainville and shoot down Japan's most capable naval leader.
They enabled convoys to evade German U-boat patrol lines and, eventually, destroy 783 of the 842-vessel U-boat fleet, a spectacular 93-percent success record.
In making it possible for Allies to ``read the enemy's mail,'' Boyd shows, they helped shorten the war by perhaps two years. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communications professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Carl Boyd
by CNB