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Title: Shinano: The Sinking of Japan's Secret Supership (Shinano!) by Joseph F. Enright, James W. Ryan ISBN: 0-312-90967-5 Publisher: St Martins Pr (Mm) Pub. Date: 01 April, 1988 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $3.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.44 (9 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Bushido means that you never learn from your mistakes
Comment: This book was a good read. Not the best ever war story told, like some of the reviews would have you believe, but good enough to hold my attention for one entire night of reading.
The main annoying part with this book was the fictionalized thoughts and conversations given to the Japanese who perished on the Shinano. Obviously, there's no way to ever know what these people actually said or thought. It makes it all so less real, and more like a novel, to try to animate them with artificial conversations and thought processes.
The most fascinating aspect of this tale for me was the stark contrast between the military cultures that gave rise to the success of Captain Enright and the failure of Captain Abe.
One might expect that the Japanese code of bushido, designed for a warrior culture, would enhance the fighting abilities of a military. Perhaps bushido worked great in the ancient days of quick and decisive sword battles, but as this book makes so very clear, bushido fails miserably in a prolonged modern war.
One big flaw in bushido was that very time a leader failed at a major assignment, he was expected to commit suicide to atone for his shameful failure. The book presents a parable-like contrast between Abe's career and the career of Captain Enright. Enright started off as a big failure, missing an attack with a Japanese aircraft carrier because he failed to trust the consensus opinion of his crew (that the changing ocean currents which they discovered would carry the Japanese carrier they were chasing off course) and instead went with the by-the book headquarters prediction of the location of the carrier.
Sending himself to the back lines in shame, Enright, unlike the Japanese ship captains, did not commit suicide, but was instead eventually given a second chance at commanding a submarine again. The second time around, he learned to go fully with his own instincts, and also that of his crew, in the process of tracking and sinking the Shinano. One big payoff in particular was his decision to set the running depth of his torpedoes to 10 feet instead of the official 30 feet. This ended up putting the torpedoes right at the upper joint of the anti-torpedo blister carried on the underwater hull of the Shinano. This joint area turned out to be a defective weak point in the anti-torpedo shielding, and it was this defect (along with incompletely finished watertight compartments that leaked) that allowed the Shinano to be sunk with only four torpedoes.
A second big failing of bushido was that the subordinates were supposed to follow the orders of the leader unquestioningly. This works great in a military if the leader makes wise decisions all the time, but basically gets all the subordinates killed if the leader is wrong. As WWII progressed, and its initial victories faded, the Japanese military culture clearly suffered severely from an inflexible top-down decision making process that was incapable of taking advantage of information or experience accumulated by the lower ranks.
In contrast, Captain Enright learned from his early failures to trust the advice of his subordinates, which proved invaluable as they stalked the Shinano.
In the end, the sinking of the Shinano was not as dramatic of an achievement as one might think, and was due as much to Japanese military stupidiy as anything else. It was sunk basically on a short trip to another dock where it was to be fully outfitted for war. As such, the ship was unfinished and its mechanical integrity untested. Despite the enormous amount of armor, the ship's supposedly watertight compartments were not fully sealed when it set off on the trip, and so leaked horribly when the torpedoes struck - which was why it sank with only four holes in its side (in contrast, the Shinano's sister ships, the Yamato and Musashi, each took some 15-20 torpedo hits and uncounted numbers of bombs before sinking). The boilers were not all installed, and so the ship's speed was barely greater than that of the submarine initially, and dropped to below the submarine's speed when an overheating bearing forced one of the propellar shafts to be slowed down. The ship was given no aircraft to cover this trip.
The code of bushido made it impossible for any subordinates to point out the many flaws in the construction of the ship, or to question the wisdom of sending the Shinano on its maiden voyage, unfinished and unprotected, right into waters that were known to be infested with American submarines.
Captain Abe also made some horribly bad decisions - mainly in ignoring Enright's submarine rather than trying to sink it or run away from it when they first discovered the sub. I definitely got the feeling that Abe was appointed ship's captain only because he was a known quantity who diligently followed orders, and was one of the few ranking Naval captains who had managed to survive this late into the war. By this time in the war, bushido had taken the lives of many more capable captains than he.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Largest Warship in History to be Sunk by a Submarine
Comment: During the years before the outbreak of World War II, the Japanese navy constructed two super-battleships, the Yamato and Musashi. There was a secret third ship, the Shinano, that was to be included in this class. However, with the rise of the aircraft carrier, it was decided to convert the Shinano from a battleship to a carrier. Measuring almost 900 feet in length, Shinano was the largest aircraft carrier in the world, and she held that distinction until the United States launched the USS Enterprise in the 1960s. Cloaked in secrecy, the conversion took place. Crewmembers were threatened with imprisonment or execution if they muttered even the slightest words about the existance of Shinano. Due to the extreme secrecy of her construction, many essential tests, which would later prove to be fatal, were not conducted on Shinano. For example, the watertight integrity of the bulkheads and seals were never tested properly.
An ocean away, Captain Joseph F. Enright and his submarine Archer-fish, were leaving for the boat's fifth war patrol. Captain Enright had been haunted by the memory of failing to sink an enemy carrier earlier in the war while serving as commander of the submarine Dace. Feeling inadequate as a commander, he asked to be relieved of command. After serving at the American submarine base on Midway island as a relief crewman, he finally got his chance to command his own boat again, and he was determined to make sure that he didn't repeat his earlier mistakes this time around. Taking up his patrol station along the main Japanese island of Honshu, Archer-fish awaited action. This particular area of ocean had become known as the "hit parade", due to the large number of sinkings by American submarines. On Tuesday, November 28, 1944, Archer-fish sighted a large enemy vessel with four escorts. This proved to be Shinano. Unable to run at maximum speed due to only eight of her twelve boilers being lit, and also suffering from a problem with her propellers, Shinano was limited to a speed of approximately eighteen knots. What ensued over the next several hours could only be described as a classic game of cat and mouse. Enright and Archer-fish desperately tried to keep up with the Shinano while trying to anticipate any course changes she might make. Finally, at 0300 hours on Wednesday, November 29, 1944, the Archer-fish was ready to fire.
A spread of six torpedoes leapt from her torpedo tubes, each being fired at eight second intervals. Four explosions rocked the Japanese carrier while Archer-fish dove for the safety of the depths. The ship was mortally wounded. Her protective bladder had failed to stop the torpedoes, and, in the words of Enright, they cut through the bladder "like a sword through butter". Later that morning, the Shinano, with her bow raised high out of the water, slipped below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Her maiden voyage had lasted all of seventeen hours.
This is a very exciting book. The format is excellent, with the chapters alternating between the action on the Archer-fish to the action on the Shinano. The first-hand account of the action by Captain Enright leaps off the pages and places the reader directly at the conning tower during the attack. Loaded with action and adventure, this book is a must for submarine readers.
Rating: 4
Summary: The sinking of a Japanese super carrier in 1944.
Comment: I disgree with some of the previous reviewers. This is a great read for adventure and it is true. It competes well with fictional Tom Clancy novels. A small U.S. submarine under an unlucky Captain sinks the largest ship in the Japanese Navy.
Shinano was the sister ship to the battleship Yamato (A Glorious Way to Die) and converted into a carrier, the size of one of our nuclear carriers today. The Japanese intended to confront the U.S. Navy with the tremendous firepower of the Shinano. Instead a lowly submarine sinks the Shinano on her maiden voyage.
Regardless of whether the submarine captain Enright or Ryan wrote the story, it is great adventure. Enright is certainly frank in his views, even about his own shortcomings. Both the Japanese and American sides are presented here and this makes it good reading. One understands the fog of battle, after reading about the pursuit of the carrier. A good quick read which is not fiction.
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