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Yet to say this is to ignore the fact that in every campaign in every war, sacrifices are routinely made that are out of all proportion to the significance of objectives. Unless Nimitz had made an implausible decision, to forgo land engagement while the army fought for the Philippines, to await the collapse of the enemy through bombing, blockade, industrial and human starvation, the assault on Iwo Jima was almost inevitable. Whether wisely or no, the enemy valued the island, and took great pains for its defence. It would have required a strategic judgement of remarkable forbearance to resist the urge to destroy the garrison of the rock, a rare solid foothold in the midst of the ocean. If some historians judge that America’s warlords erred in taking Iwo Jima, the commitment seemed natural in the context of the grand design for America’s assault on the Japanese homeland.

ELEVEN

Blockade: War Underwater

BY EARLY 1945, Japan’s ability to provide raw materials for its industries, and even to feed itself, was fatally crippled. The nation could import by sea no more than a fraction of its requirements. An invisible ring of steel extended around the waters of the home islands, created by the submarines of the U.S. Navy. In the course of 1944, a large part of Japan’s merchant shipping, and especially of its tanker fleet, was dispatched to the sea bottom by a force which gained less contemporary prominence, and indeed subsequent historical attention, than the Marines on Iwo Jima or Nimitz’s carrier task groups. Yet it imposed economic strangulation on Japan in a fashion Germany’s U-boats had been unable to inflict on Britain. An April report by MacArthur’s staff concluded: “The entire question of Japanese524 merchant shipping requirements may soon be academic, if losses continue at anything like the present rate. That this possibility has occurred to the Japanese is indicated by a Tokyo broadcast on 17 February, in which the Japanese forces in China and other overseas garrisons were warned that they might have to operate without help from the homeland.” Only 1.6 percent of the U.S. Navy’s wartime strength—16,000 men—served in its submarines. Yet these accounted for 55 percent of all Japan’s wartime shipping losses, 1,300 vessels including a battleship, eight carriers and eleven cruisers, a total of 6.1 million tons. The achievement of America’s submarines reached its apogee in October 1944, when they sank 322,265 tons of enemy vessels.

For those who manned the navy’s crowded, stinking underwater torpedo platforms, the exhilaration of hunting prey was matched by the terrors experienced when they themselves became the hunted. Cmdr. Richard O’Kane’s experience of forty-eight hours off the Philippines in October 1944 was not untypical. His submarine, Tang, on its fifth war patrol, was operating alone in the Formosa Channel. Off Turnabout Island in the early hours of the twenty-fourth, first day of the Leyte Gulf battle and fourth after MacArthur’s landing, he spotted a Japanese reinforcement convoy: four freighters with planes on deck, a transport, a destroyer and some smaller escorts. In a few devastating minutes, O’Kane fired torpedoes which sank three freighters. The surviving freighter and destroyer closed on the surfaced submarine in an attempt to ram. Tang slipped between them—and the two Japanese ships collided. O’Kane fired four more torpedoes from his stern tubes, which missed, then cleared the area at full speed.

The next night, in the same hunting ground, he encountered the largest convoy he had ever seen, “a solid line of pips across the screen.” An escort rashly switched on its searchlight, illuminating a transport. O’Kane sank this, together with a tanker which blew up, leaving the surviving vessels milling in chaos. Two hours after midnight, however, Tang’s luck changed drastically. One of its torpedoes fired at a transport ran amok, circled, and by fantastic ill-luck struck the surfaced submarine abreast of the aft torpedo room. Following the explosion, O’Kane himself and