Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [185]
For the next four hours, Japanese escorts depth-charged ineffectually. At 0600, some men began to escape using Momsen Lung breathing apparatus, of whom eight reached the surface. Five were still clinging to a buoy when a Japanese ship picked them up four hours later. The surviving Americans were trussed and laid on deck, then kicked and clubbed by burnt and injured enemy sailors who had suffered grievously from their torpedoes. Statistics may help to explain such behaviour: in the course of the war 116,000 of 122,000 seamen serving Japan’s pre-war merchant fleet were killed or wounded, most by American submarines. Yoshio Otsu, a survivor of a stricken merchantman, was enraged to find himself under fire from American planes: “Seeing no one on board525, they strafed those in the water. The swine! Not satisfied with sinking the ship, they must kill those swimming in the sea! Was this being done by human beings? We were utterly helpless.” Seven officers and seventy-one men were lost with Tang, which had accounted for 22,000 tons of Japanese shipping.
EVERY NATION’S soldiers instinctively believe that wars are won by engaging the armies of the enemy and seizing terrain. Yet the most critical single contribution to the American defeat of Japan was made far out of sight of any general, or indeed admiral. The Japanese empire was uniquely vulnerable to blockade. Its economy was dependent upon fuel and raw materials shipped from China, Malaya, Burma and the Netherlands East Indies. Yet, unlike the British, who faced a similar threat to their Atlantic lifeline, the Japanese failed to equip themselves with a credible anti-submarine force to defend their commerce. Here was one of the major causes of Japan’s downfall. The admirals of the Imperial Navy fixed their minds almost exclusively upon power projection by surface and air forces. Vice-Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi was one of the few pre-war Japanese naval officers who urged dismissing the concept of “decisive battle” between surface warships. Instead, he proposed planning for a submarine war against commerce, together with a long amphibious and air campaign in the central Pacific. His views were thrust aside. With extraordinary myopia, the Japanese failed to address the obvious likelihood that their enemies might also project naval power through a submarine offensive. Japan possessed only a tiny force of anti-submarine escorts, whose technology and tactics remained primitive.
At the outbreak of war, the United States possessed the finest submarines in the world, the 1,500-ton Tambor class, later refined as the Gato and Balao classes. These had air-conditioning—a priceless virtue in the tropics—a top speed close to twenty-one knots, a range of 10,000 miles, and the ability to crash-dive in thirty-five seconds. Yet for almost two torrid years their effectiveness was crippled: first, by chronic torpedo technical failure; second, by over-cautious commanders—30 percent were removed by the end of 1942; and third, by a doctrinal preoccupation with sinking enemy warships which almost matched that of the Japanese. Ronald Spector has remarked526 on the irony that the U.S., which joined World War I in large measure out of revulsion towards Germany’s policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, entered World War II committed to wage such a campaign. Yet while the U.S. Navy had no moral scruple about sinking unarmed merchant ships, until relatively late in the war it regarded these as a lesser target priority than the Japanese fleet.
In February 1944, the U.S. Navy’s submarine operational textbook Current Doctrine was extensively rewritten. The new manual devoted much more attention