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By Root 1144 0

—of the same class as Yamato and Musashi—which had been commissioned only ten days earlier. The most successful of all Pacific submarines was Flasher, which achieved twenty-one sinkings, totalling over 100,000 tons. On its fifth war patrol in December 1944, it accounted for four tankers and two destroyers between the Philippines and Indochina. Each carried 100,000 barrels of oil. Only 300,000 barrels finally reached Japan that month. Thus, this one action by Flasher cut December’s Japanese oil imports by two-thirds. On the same patrol, off Indochina on the night of 22 December, the submarine dispatched three more tankers. Such was the extraordinary impact of blockade.

Yet the campaign was now tailing off. This was not due to any decline in the intensity of submarine effort, but because the Japanese merchant fleet had shrunk so dramatically. Japan’s commanders were unwilling to expose their remaining tonnage on suicidal deep-sea passages. “It had become an aviator’s539 not a submariner’s war,” said Cmdr. Pete Galantin. The submarines had almost completed the isolation of Japan’s home islands from her shrinking empire. Undersea craft could not operate in the shallow waters of the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan. Long-range Liberators and carrier aircraft took over the task of attacking Japanese shipping beyond reach of the submarines. The USAAF devoted only a small number of B-29 sorties to mining Japanese inshore waters, but these made an extraordinary impact. January 1945 became the first month for more than two years in which American planes sank more Japanese ships than did submarines.

It was the strong opinion of submarine officers that in the last months of the war the carrier armadas devoted excessive attention to impotent or immobilised Japanese warships, when they could more usefully have completed the destruction of the enemy’s merchant fleet. Here was the U.S. Navy’s old problem—an instinctive perception of a battle fleet as the foremost objective of any dashing commander, rather than dirty old coasters and tramp steamers, plying their frightened courses around the shores of Japan.

The Imperial Navy now lacked ability to influence the course of the war. The duration of Japan’s resistance would be far more importantly affected by deprivation of fuel, food and raw materials. Only 4 percent of American naval air sorties were directed against merchant shipping, yet these destroyed 16 percent of Japanese merchant tonnage—an average of just nine sorties and four tons of bombs per thousand tons sunk. If American carriers had cruised south of Java and Sumatra, they might have achieved extraordinary results. That they did not do so reflected the preoccupation of Nimitz’s commanders with engaging enemy warships and—in the last months of the war—hitting the Japanese home islands. It does not diminish the extraordinary wartime achievement of the U.S. Navy to assert that some of its admirals should have studied economics as well as tactics.

There were never more than fifty boats on operational duty in the Pacific at any one moment, of which twenty-two were on passage to or from their patrol areas. By comparison, the German navy at its zenith deployed over a hundred U-boats, and achieved peak sinkings in November 1942 of 636,907 tons of Allied shipping—106 vessels. This was far higher than the best American performance against the Japanese, yet the Allies were better able to sustain their losses. When the war was over, Japan’s ruined cities constituted a more conspicuous testament to Allied destructive power than did the mass of her shipping invisible on the ocean floor. Yet maritime losses brought the Japanese economy to the brink of collapse even before the USAAF’s bomber armadas began their work in earnest. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which was unlikely to reach conclusions biased in favour of the navy, declared in its 1946 report: “The war against shipping was the most decisive single factor in the collapse of the Japanese economy and logistic support of Japanese military and naval power. Submarines accounted for