1-29-11
There were two distinct phases of naval action in the Pacific War. In the aftermath of the Japanese attack on the ships and facilities of the US Navy in Pearl Harbor, Phase One was played out in the South Pacific – mostly between the Equator and the islands north of Australia. During that time, the United States was bogged down in aiding the British Government’s desperate fight against the relentless aggression of Nazi Germany.
When the heavy cruiser USS Boston arrived in Pearl Harbor on December 6, 1943, one day short of two years after the Attack, Phase Two was ushered in with the creation of Task Force 58. The Boston was a unit of this one hundred-warship fleet that systematically and aggressively took the fight to the enemy. The combination of carrier fighter planes and the heavy artillery of American warships reduced the Japanese Navy one ship at a time for a year and a half. When Japan surrendered in August of 1945, all that was left of her Navy was the hulks of a few destroyed ships sticking up in the shallow harbors of her Inland Sea.
I have recently read two amazing books about the War, No Ordinary Joes (2010 by Larry Colton) and Japanese Destroyer Captain (1961 by Tameichi Hara) – both essentially about the War in the South Pacific.
I don’t want to spill the beans, so I won’t go into much detail. No Ordinary Joes is the remarkable account of four submarine sailors whose sub (USS Grenadier) was torpedoed by a fighter plane and sunk in the Java Sea. Survivors were rescued (captured) by a Japanese merchant ship. The book chronicles their hellish survival as POWs through the balance of the War, and follows their post-war lives.
The first-hand account of a Japanese Naval Officer’s experiences during World War II was so compelling, I could not put it down. In Japanese Destroyer Captain, intelligent, dedicated and operationally-successful Captain Tameichi Hara recounts his bird’s-eye-view of the great Naval Battles of the South Pacific of which his ships participated in and was on the receiving end and “giving end” of ship destroying torpedo attacks. (Of great interest to me was his first hand account as a ship commander of the Final Japanese Sortie of the War, in which the Super Battleship, Yamato, Mara’s cruiser and a handful of destroyers were sent on a suicide run against the US invasion of Okinawa.)
This book is awesome! My hats-off to Captain Mara for having written this insightful, honest account of the War from viewpoint of a Japanese Officer. His revelations of the workings of the decision-makers in command of the Japanese Army and Navy were in line with everything I have already read. What was fascinating to me was realizing that the turning of the tide in favor of the Americans came much earlier than I had realized. By the time Task Force 58 assembled off Oahu in January 1944, Japan’s capacity to wage war was pretty much done. It took another year and a half of countless bombs, blood and casualties on both sides to finally bring the devastated Empire of Japan to her knees.
Oh, the book is long out of print, but can be found in used book stores and online at places like Amazon and Ebay. WORTH THE HUNT!
Oh yeah, the Ballantine paperback (1965 edition) cost 75 cents. . .