Japanese Destroyer Captain: Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Midway - The Great Naval Battles As Seen Through Japanese Eyes [Hardcover]

Tameichi Hara (Author), Fred Saito (Author), Roger Pineau (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2, 2007

The Naval Institute Press is pleased to make available for the first time this cloth edition of a now-classic war memoir that was a best seller in both Japan and the United States during the 1960s. Originally published as a paperback in 1961, it has long been treasured by World War II buffs and professional historians for its insights into the Japanese side of the surface war in the Pacific. The book has been credited with correcting errors in U.S. accounts of various battles and with revealing details of high-level Imperial Japanese Navy strategy meetings. The author, Captain Tameichi Hara, was a survivor of more than one hundred sorties against the Allies and was known throughout Japan as the Unsinkable Captain. Called the workhorses of the navy, Japanese destroyers shouldered the heaviest burden of the surface war and took part in scores of intense sea battles, many of which Captain Hara describes here. In the early days of the war victories were common, but by 1943, the lack of proper maintenance of the destroyers and sufficient supplies, along with Allied development of scientific equipment and superior aircraft, took its toll. On April 7, 1945, during the Japanese navy s last sortie, Captain Hara managed to survive the sinking of his own ship only to witness the demise of the famed Japanese battleship Yamato off Okinawa. A hero to his countrymen, Captain Hara exemplified the best in Japanese surface commanders: highly skilled (he wrote the manual on torpedo warfare), hard driving, and aggressive. Moreover, he maintained a code of honor worthy of his samurai grandfather, and, as readers of this book have come to appreciate, he was as free with praise for American courage and resourcefulness as he was critical of himself and his senior commanders. The book s popularity over the past forty-six years testifies to the author s success at writing an objective account of what happened that provides not only a fascinating eyewitness record of the war, but also an honest and dispassionate assessment of Japan s high command. Captain Hara s sage advice on leadership is as applicable today as it was when written. For readers new to this book and for those who have read and re-read their paperback editions until they have fallen apart, this new hardcover edition assures them a permanent source of reference and enjoyment.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Fred Saito translated and expanded the original manuscript, after spending more than eight hundred hours interviewing Captain Hara, to make the book as full and accurate an account as possible. Saito was a journalist with the Tokyo office of the Associated Press from 1948 to 1960 and later served on the staff of the Japan Broadcasting Company. He also translated Samurai!, the story of one of Japan s greatest fighter pilots by Saburo Sakai and Martin Caidin. Roger Pineau served in the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War II. After the war, he became a member of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in Japan and later assisted Adm. Samuel Eliot Morison in preparing the authoritative History of the United States Naval Operations in World War II. Pineau added the footnotes to Captain Hara s memoir, including the names of U.S. ships and commanders that engaged the captain s forces, and checked the accuracy of the battle accounts. He also assisted with the writing and fact checking of two other books by Japanese authors about the war, The Divine Wind and Midway.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press; First Edition edition (April 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591143543
• ISBN-13: 978-1591143543
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #594,013 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

76 of 76 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Japanese Destroyer WWII, April 8, 2007

By 

William Garrison Jr. (Bellevue, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Japanese Destroyer Captain: Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Midway - The Great Naval Battles As Seen Through Japanese Eyes (Hardcover)

Captain Hara discusses how he commanded a Japanese destroyer in all of the major Pacific sea conflicts during World War II: Empress Augusta Bay, Coral Sea, the invasion of the Philippines, Guadalcanal, Savo Island, and Midway. While on a re-supply mission through Blackett Straight in August 1943, upon noticing a fire-ball explosion near the destroyer "Amagiri" in front of his destroyer "Shigure", he ordered for his ship's crew to shoot at Lt. John F. Kennedy's sinking PT-109. He provides a most harrowing description -- as commander of cruiser Yahagi -- how he barely survied its sinking alongside the ill-fated battleship Yamato on their suicide mission to attack the U.S. forces invaiding Okinawa. He details his training of the pilots of suicide motorboats (Shinyo: "ocean shaker") that were designed to ram Allied warships approaching Japan. After I wrote to him, he sent me an autographed photograph of himself in 1968 -- a fine keepsake from one of the luckiest Japanese destroyer commanders to have survived so many desperately fought WWII sea battles. His 312-page book was initially published by Ballantine Books in 1961.

47 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Rare Naval Officer, May 22, 2007

By 

James Hercules Sutton (Des Moines, IA (USA)) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Japanese Destroyer Captain: Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Midway - The Great Naval Battles As Seen Through Japanese Eyes (Hardcover)

Hara is the last samurai. He objected to compulsory suicide as official doctrine, because he saw this as a violation of bushido values. He turned pacifist BEFORE the Bomb. His personal doctrines demonstrate why the Japanese lost the war--they were inflexible; he wasn't. His doctrines were "Never ever do the same thing twice" and "If he hits you high, then hit him low; if he hits you low, then hit him high," the latter a maxim of MacArthur's, too. Hara criticizes superiors for using cavalry tactics to fight naval battles; never understanding the implications of air power; dividing their forces in the face of enemy forces of unknown strength; basing tactics on what they thought their enemy would do; and acceping a war of attrition with a foe more capable of maintaining it. His technical discussions are superb. What gives the book significance is his explication of strategy/tactics and their implications. Hara is a brave man who knew WHY he did what he did. This puts him in a minority, in any navy.

54 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent view from the other side, February 25, 2008

By 

Eric Husher "The Searat" (Portsmouth, RI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Japanese Destroyer Captain: Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Midway - The Great Naval Battles As Seen Through Japanese Eyes (Hardcover)

Probably one of the two books anyone interested in the Pacific naval war simply MUST have in his libraray (the other the brilliant 'Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy' by the unfortunately named Paul S. Dull). True experts and affecionados should overlook the occasional mis-identification of ship types (undoubtedly a result of either negligent editing or translation problems), but otherwise a superb recollection of the Pacific war from the point of view of a famous Japanese destroyer captain.

Having studied this war and its naval campaigns, one thing that always struck me was the peculiar paradox of the near-deification of Admiral Yamamoto (engineer of the Pearl Harbor attack) by the Japanese at the time, and many foreign historians as well. Frankly, from any objective point of view, it was Yamamoto who almost single-handedly ensured the disasterous defeat of the Japanese navy, first, by not in fact taking out the most important targets at Pearl Harbor (the enormous fuel tank farm, and the even more important ship-repair facilities and machine shops), and secondly, by repeatedly committing vastly insufficient forces at the places of most importance, and invariably sending these elements through the most convoluted and tortuous separate routes to get there (each element could be easily defeated one at a time).

Further, it appears that at no time during the war did the Japanese have the slightest interest in obtaining or using intelligence, by either method or desire, and this led them into one catastrophe after another. Guadalcanal is probably the best exemplar of this failed strategy, where neither the Japanes Navy, nor the Japanese Army had any idea of the strength of the American presence there, apparently weren't even interested, and instead committed and lost battalions, regiments, whole divisions of troops and squadrons of ships again, and again, and again, until both the Army, and Navy were bled white.

The Japanese submarine fleet was even more useless, not because of any real defect in the subs themselves, but the ridiculous manner in which they were used. This is even more stunning when you consider that not only was the Japanese submarine fleet largely founded by German engineers and specialist after the First World War, but the Japanese maintained close communications with the Germans throughout the war, even sending submarines to Germany and back several times, as well as German U-Boats sailing to Japan and being used by the Japanese Navy. Yet despite the continued availability of the very finest in submarine expertise, the Japanese apparently never bothered to discuss the topic of strategy and/or tactics with the Germans. Incredible!

With all my various studies of this war, I never came across any real recognition of these fundamental flaws, until I read this book, and it is apparent that not only were these flaws as real as i thought, but that many members of the Japanese Navy itself were fully cognisant of these same mistakes, and yet, were unable to convince their own senior command of the need for changes, and so went down together. Starting to sound familiar?