For me
modeling is about experiencing history. Having a context for those kits
makes the hobby worthwhile.
I was lucky to work with historian Dr. David Evans during my first years teaching at The University of Richmond. Dave, a talented teacher who mentored so many young historians, was known for his scholarship about the Imperial Japanese Navy, working in their archives and interviewing surviving veterans. As a former Navy man himself who spoke Japanese, Dave brought a perspective to the field of study that makes his work memorable today, and he’s known most for his and Mark Peattie’s authoritative history of the interwar Japanese fleet, Kaigun.
Before that book, in 1986 Dave edited a second edition of collected essays from Japanese officers who had seen firsthand the events of what they called The Great Pacific War. This important work was begun by Professor Emeritus Herman O. Werner and Professor Robert M. Landon of the US Naval Academy. Both academics had passed away before the work could be finished, though The Naval Institute Press published a first edition in 1969. In the honored tradition of academic work that builds upon a good start, and to be of service to future scholars and students, Evans’ second edition provides new insights and details.
The collection offers something rare to the amateur historian or modeler: well-edited work by another nation’s warfighters, translated expertly. Each essay proves riveting. Other than Mitsuo Fuchida, I did not know the names of most of the contributors, many of them junior officers who found themselves amid life-changing, historic events from Pearl Harbor to the sinking of Yamato. In one case, however, Admiral Mikawa added an afterword praising the accuracy of Captain Toshikazu Ohmae’s account of the Savo Island action. Readers see what the authors experienced in that battle, the Aleutians, Philippines, and the Indian-Ocean raids. These are perspectives that I’d never encountered.
The final essay by Toshiyuki Yokoi, “Thoughts on Japan’s Naval Defeat,” adds nuance to our ideas about Japanese planning. Readers will not be surprised by the Imperial Navy’s emphasis on forcing an enemy into one great surface action, but we also now see in detail why the Admiralty refused to plan for other options. Of great interest to Evans and me was Japan’s failure to understand submarine warfare, despite their navy’s deadly torpedoes and fleet of long-range subs. The lack of a submarine-warfare campaign like Germany’s crippled any chance for severing American and Allied supply lines. As Evans explained to me years ago, the Imperial submarine force was considered an adjunct to naval battles, used to run picket lines and pick off stragglers.
In a few terrible instances those tactics destroyed an Allied warship, but luckily for the Allies, Japanese subs never lurked in numbers off the West Coast or Panama, to bag shipping that kept the lifeline open to Australia and beyond.
In terms of antisubmarine warfare, as Atsushi Oi explains, concepts of Samurai pride crippled policy. The Navy only tried a convoy system a couple of times, partly out of a belief by officers that escort duty was beneath a warrior’s dignity.
This book may be of great use to naval modelers who want the story behind the kit. My own build of Yamato’s last voyage changed as a result of Mitsuru Yoshida’s experience during the battleship’s hellish final hours and his own remarkable survival, despite being on the bridge. I realized how pristine the battleship was when it left port, still the pride of the Imperial Navy, to be thrown away without any results.
This book is at its best when historical figures come to life; Admiral Ozawa, for instance, does so in one essay, while working with author Minoru Nomura on the flag deck of a warship. “What is glass made of?” Ozawa asked. The dutiful but confused author said he would provide a comprehensive answer, studied a few days, then reported to the Admiral on the chemistry of glass. Ozawa smiled and noted that lookouts can be fooled by imperfections in the glass of a ship’s bridge. The Admiral suggested raising windows to see better, later issuing an order to that effect.
That sort of gemlike but realistic moment captures much about the precision that went into the man’s planning and mentoring of his crews, even when odds and luck had turned forever against his nation. Nomura’s account of the meticulous, rather than often-portrayed haphazard, rebuilding the carrier air-groups after Midway proved new to me. Ozawa might have completed the work had he another six months and not lost so many pilots diverted to the Solomons, until the invasion of Saipan meant sailing immediately. A lack of cooperation with land-based units, as well as botched searches and bad luck, plus the numbers and skill of US aviators, meant devastation to the newly trained pilots and the loss of two fleet carriers. Japan’s surviving carrier force would henceforth be a hollow one.
Dave once told me that he greatly respected modelers. We were discussing Seversky’s sale of aircraft to Japan as tensions escalated, a transaction that ran the aviation firm afoul of Uncle Sam. Dave said he’d first heard of this from a model-builder. Most of us are not academics, but we are experts in tiny details, and that, to an historian as meticulous as Evans, can mean recovering lost events or connections between them.
I spent many hours over lunch or coffee with this historian, discussing navy doctrine that shaped the war in the Pacific. It’s a pity that Dave did not live to finish his next work, a study of naval aviation in prewar Japan. His writing partner, Mark Peattie, did complete it as Sunburst: the Rise of Japanese Naval Airpower 1909-1941.
Luckily, you can still find used hardback, paperback, and eBook versions of all these works. They will provide many hours of rewarding reading.
April 2023