With Leyte over, this chapter was always going to be smaller and less impressive, covering a campaign forgotten in the shadow of that great naval battle. But it’s a good reminder of the early days of the kamikaze campaign, and we encounter a mention of our friend the proximity fuze. Also, it’s worth pointing out that by this point in the war, US air defenses were strong enough that the kamikazes were actually more effective in terms of lives lost per bomb hit than conventional bombing, even if it takes a uniquely Japanese mindset to actually implement the plan.
There’s also an interesting reappearance of “current politics c.1963″ when Morison starts talking about how it’s a problem that the Allies didn’t move more swiftly into Indonesia. 1963 was the start of the Indonesian confrontation, basically an undeclared war between Britain and Indonesia over the creation of Malaysia, and I suspect Morison talks about that mostly because it was in the news at the time.
And this was going to be a short chapter, so operations in the Philippines got combined with Morison’s account of the war against Japanese commerce fought by American submarines. It’s a rather lurching shift to go back to 1942, and the necessity to cover a campaign of this scale means that almost all individual elements are lost in the early years, except for an admittedly amusing story about carrying Muslims to the Philippines (although I still can’t figure out why they wouldn’t be able to eat ice cream). This is better in 1944, although the rapid-fire recounting of actions (some of which I’ve read about at much greater length) is a lot to take in all at once.
Also, I should point out that ″Shinano″ did not have a 30 cm flight deck. That’s a full foot of armor, and I’m not sure any ship ever built had a deck that thick. It was a more normal 3″/7.5 cm, and ″Shinano″ is the canonical example of progressive flooding caused by insufficient watertightness, although the complacency of the crew didn’t help much. I am also sad that the coolest submarine of the war, ″Barb″, was only mentioned briefly once, and didn’t receive recognition for blowing up a train, sneaking in absurdly close to the enemy coast and setting a speed record on the way out, or using rockets to pioneer the modern submarine mission of land attack.
Comments
"more more", I understand that Indonesian doubles words for plural but that still doesn't make sense.
That aside a lot of things that look like a big deal at the time turn out to be pretty much irrelevant when you look back.
Typo. It should have been "move more".
Barb did not blow up a train, that's ridiculous. Barb was a submarine. She SANK a train.
If "that the Allies didn’t more more swiftly into Indonesia" refers to WWII it's because the Dutch (and French) lacked the military resources to reclaim their colonies toward the end of WWII and immediately after.
FDR and later Truman made it clear that the US was not going to help the Europeans reclaim their colonies. Combine that with the most of British Army soldiers being brought back home as a condition of their enlistment which stated that after 5 years overseas, Great Britain was required to bring them home. That left the British Indian Army as the only major force in the region and they were stretched pretty thin trying to cover all the demands made on them: reoccupying British, French & Dutch colonies and deal with internal dissent in India.
I finally got around to reading this chapter, since real life has been kicking my ass lately.
I was very interested to read about the submarine war, but unfortunately, it seemed at times that the need for brevity reduced interesting stories to Boat insert fish name here (Capt. Sinkum Maru) got X tonnage in Y patrols.
The details about sinking destroyers was interesting as well, and very telling about the destruction of the Japanese merchant marine. Shifting the destroyers to the second priority of targets for subs effectively meant that the submarines had won the war against merchant shipping, since rather than prioritizing shipping, they prioritized the ESCORTS for the merchant shipping.
I think it was in this chapter that they talked about the lifeboat duties for subs picking up downed aviators. This was a very large morale booster for aircrew, because before this if you had to ditch, you were highly unlikely to survive long enough for some random ship or plane to see you and get you rescued.