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30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Number Two Battleship, November 2, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Battleship Musashi: The Making and Sinking of the Worlds Biggest Battleship (Paperback)
If you are interested in the detailed minutiae of how battleships were designed and built in the Second World War, this is not the book to buy. Actual technical description is quite sparse and that's not really what this book is about. What it does, very well indeed, is to detail the appalling human cost that went into the creation of this beautiful, useless ship. The story is one of occasional horror and frequent farce. Musashi was built in the Mitsubishi shipyard at Nagasaki, a town which in the late 1930s had a substantial Chinese community. When it was decided to award the construction contract to the Mitsubishi yard, the Japanese secret police's paranoia was so great that they moved into Nagasaki's Chinatown and more or less destroyed it in a night. They arrested almost every inhabitant and - while they were about it, so to speak - beat several of them to death for being suspiciously Chinese. The shipyard was overlooked by hills; Japanese secret police would hide in those hills arresting and torturing any hill-walkers or ramblers thought to be paying too much attention to the view towards the shipyard below. Anyone hillwalking around Nagasaki had to face the land at all times, or else. The police did this even though nothing could actually be seen of the shipyard - because the shipbuilders, as well as building the world's largest battleship, were doing so behind the world's largest sisal-rope curtain. This weighed 400 tons and used up almost the entire sisal-rope output of Japan, driving the price to ludicrous heights and creating another security problem in that people might start asking what the Navy needed all that sisal-rope for.... At one point in the construction, a blueprint of part of the turret ring was accidentally incinerated; assumed stolen, the builders were facing liquidation as spies by the secret police when its true fate came to light. And so it goes on. The ship itself feels like a metaphor rather than a real entity; one has little impression of her other than as a vast, brooding presence, doomed by our foreknowledge of her fate. The ship is oddly anonymous, not least because the builders were not allowed even to know her name. Farcically, when she was launched, the dignitary involved mumbled it inaudibly into his hand so the people building her would not find out the real name of "Number Two Battleship"! Nor were they allowed to pool experience with the builders of Number One or Number Three Battleship, although they did learn the ominous news that the latter was to be completed as an aircraft carrier. No such useful fate for Musashi. The launch itself was a fraught operation; never having launched anything so huge before, there was concern that she might go careering uncontrollably across the channel and beach herself catastrophically on the opposite shore, so a raft had to be specially built and moored opposite the slipway. This way, Number Two Battleship would have something softer than the shore to crash into if such a thing happened. It didn't, of course, and off went Musashi to battle - or rather to war, to idle at Truk, to Lingga Roads, and other anchorages, for she only ever saw one battle. And even that was a battle against aircraft, to be sunk with contemptuous ease. She absorbed tremendous damage, but her anti-aircraft armament - 251 weapons, according to Januscz Skulski (in "The Battleship Yamato") - proved pitifully ineffective. Japan was always, after all, going to run out of battleships before America ran out of torpedoes. This book tells the story of perhaps the only unequivocally successful aspect of Musashi's career - the effort to keep her secret. The Americans never suspected Musashi's existence until they sank her; the point of her existence, arguably, remains a mystery to this day. Unputdownable!
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31 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Battleship Musashi, a book with the spirit of Musashi, November 22, 1999
This review is from: Battleship Musashi: The Making and Sinking of the Worlds Biggest Battleship (Paperback)
History is presented in many forms. I still remember my 6th grade history class test, with a list of dates on the right, and historical events on the left. My task was to draw lines between the two. I succeeded in drawing the lines, but I didn't make the connection. Battleship Musashi transends a "list of dates"; launch, displacement, number of guns (it's all there too). I am presented with the flesh and blood of the ship and it's crew, in a way that I have not experienced before from historical essays. The writer shows me the minds of the people and government involved with the ship, and though I know the final outcome for Musashi, I was rivited to the account. In my opinion, this is a must-read book for those interested in history, Japan, political science, or simply want a good spy story to curl up with!
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Interesting, if Nearly Irrelevant, Chapter of WWII in the Pacific, January 6, 2006
This review is from: Battleship Musashi: The Making and Sinking of the Worlds Biggest Battleship (Paperback)
This is a short book that chronicles the amazing construction and the practically useless battle experience of the 2nd Yamato class battleship, the HIJMS Musashi.
It is basically split up into two quite distinct sections. The first two thirds or so of the book is concerned with the construction of the Musashi in the Nagasaki shipyards and is told from the point of view of the senior engineers and shipyard leadership, and their Navy overseers. The story of the Musashi's construction and launch is rather amazing, especially because of the security paranoia of the Japanese during the late '30's. What struck me as an engineer in industry was just how familiar the organization and methods of the Nagasaki shipyard design offices were back then, with the notable exception that workers who made mistakes or gossiped about their job simply "disappeared" of course. How the engineers and the Japanese Navy managed to upgrade the Nagasaki facilities to build and launch the Musashi, to prevent it from careening across Nagasaki bay and beaching itself on the nearby opposite shore, and keep the construction and launching a complete secret even though it took place in the heart of major city made for some pretty absorbing reading at times. It's also filled with interesting little facts, such as the explanation of how the caliber of a battleship's main gun determines its necessary width. Based on this the Japanese planned to beat American battleships by mounting 9 x 18.1 inch guns on the Musashi and Yamato, while the need to traverse the Panama Canal limited their American counterparts to 9 x 16 inch guns.
The last third of the book was a little less strong, following the Musashi along its completely undistinguished operational career and told from the viewpoint of no one in particular. Nonetheless you get a clear picture of the highly paradoxical and at times anachronistic thinking of the Imperial Japanese Navy during WWII, a fighting force that is normally cited for being extremely efficient, effective, and innovative. Yet the nation that showed the world how to fight with aircraft carriers in the first part of the war showed none of these qualities when it came to using their giant super-battleships, ships made useless by their own early operational innovations. For the majority of the war the Yamato and Musashi sat in Truk Lagoon and then Palau doing not much of anything. Officially they were waiting for a giant decisive gun battle with the U.S. Navy, but other than occasionally running away from air raids or briefly chasing false leads about the location of the U.S. Fleet they pretty much sat around, trying not to waste fuel. At one point the Musashi was even used as a freighter with bombs, fuel and equipment lashed to the deck, making it surely their worst designed freighter in history. This unsurprisingly came to nothing however as heavy seas started moving the cargo and it had to be thrown overboard. Nearing a couple years of service in the midst of the largest theater in the largest war of human history, the largest battleship in human history had basically consumed some fuel and thrown equipment over the sides.
Finally during the battle of the Philippine Seas the Yamato and Musashi get to at least try to take part in the long awaited massive gun to gun battle with the U.S. Navy. Unfortunately the Musashi gets picked off by American carrier aircraft. The ordeal of the survivors, like any group of men on a warship battered and sunk, is indeed truly harrowing. Their treatment at the hands of the Japanese government which wanted to hide the loss of the ship from the public was particularly shameful.
A quick and interesting read for people who want to know about the Japanese Yamato class battleships. Due to the extreme secrecy surrounding these vessels only limited information exists and you'll have to be satisfied with mere glimpses of what the full story must have been. Expectations should also be tempered by the fact that this book is a translation from a language with zero root connection to English, so don't expect Ernest Hemingway caliber prose either. Nonetheless highly enjoyable if taken for what it is.
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