Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [199]
It was not that way in the beginning. The Japanese were the equals of the Americans and in one important way their superiors. They possessed an infinitely better torpedo, the famous “Long Lance”—bigger, faster, farther ranging than anything the Americans had. For the first two years of the war the Americans were plagued by faulty torpedoes that more often than not failed to detonate when they hit a target. Submarine captains would sail thousands of dangerous miles, fire their torpedoes at sure targets, and watch in frustration as the torpedoes either exploded prematurely or did not explode at all. It was late in 1943 before the faults were finally remedied and after that the American score mounted rapidly.
One of the ironies of the submarine war in the Pacific was that while the Japanese concentrated their submarines as adjuncts to their surface fleet and made relatively few attacks against the great support train or the amphibious fleets, the Americans almost immediately went after Japanese merchant shipping. The United States had entered World War I largely in protest over German unrestricted submarine warfare and she had approached war in the Atlantic over the same problem; but after Pearl Harbor, Americans immediately discovered the vital nature—and the vulnerability—of the Japanese merchant fleet.
At that time the Japanese possessed about eight million tons of merchant shipping. They had not organized their navy for a convoy system or provided escort vessels as the British had; they anticipated no need for them in east Asian waters. The result was a sinking rate that grew slowly but steadily until late 1943, and then dramatically after that. American submarines sank more than a thousand vessels—nearly five million tons of shipping. Air and surface action disposed of more than another thousand vessels—usually smaller coasters and trawlers—for another three million tons. New construction could not hope to replace the losses. By 1944 the Japanese Empire was starving for imports. The most significant losses were in oil tankers; ships could not put to sea for lack of fuel, planes could not fly, pilots could not be trained. The Americans, and the British submarines that operated out of Ceylon around the East Indies, were doing to Japan what the Germans had failed to do to Britain: they were strangling her. By the start of 1945 there were less than two million tons of merchant shipping left, far less than Japan required for the most minimal peacetime uses. Her distant garrisons in China and the north withered, and could not even be transported home. Paralysis gripped the empire.
Death came from the air as well as the water. By late 1944 the Americans were able to begin bombing the home islands. Their new long-range bomber, the B-29 Superfortress, son of the B-17, was designed specifically for the distances of the Pacific. Based on Saipan and Guam and in southern China, the Army Air Force reached out to hit Japan itself. This led to considerable strategic argument among the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The U. S. Navy had all but destroyed the Japanese fleet, and its job was virtually done. The navy ranged at will in the waters off Japan, searching vainly for further targets. The army believed that to defeat Japan it would be necessary to mount an invasion and overrun the entire country. The air force leaders, however—though officially they were still part of the army, they were acknowledged as all but independent—maintained that Japan could be defeated by bombing alone.
After the problems encountered over Germany, such a view might have seemed illusory. There were, however, significant differences in the Japanese situation: Japan’s cities were much more vulnerable than Germany’s, being largely built of highly flammable materials;