I-19: JAPAN’S MOST LETHAL SUBMARINE: THE TORPEDO THAT CHANGED PACIFIC WAR

On the morning of September 15, 1942, a Japanese submarine fired six torpedoes at an American carrier task force south of Guadalcanal. Three of them found targets. The carrier USS Wasp absorbed two hits and burned to the waterline before her commanding officer ordered the ship abandoned. A third torpedo continued past the carrier and struck the battleship USS North Carolina. A fourth struck the destroyer USS O'Brien, which survived the hit long enough to begin the voyage home before the structural damage the torpedo had started progressed to the point of no return. One submarine. One firing spread. Three warships removed from the Pacific war's most contested naval campaign at the moment of its maximum strategic instability.No single torpedo spread in the recorded history of naval warfare has simultaneously struck three warships of comparable combined significance. The attack was not designed to produce a three-vessel result - it was designed to hit one carrier, and the geometry that sent the outer weapons of the spread beyond Wasp's hull to find North Carolina and O'Brien was the geometry of a task force formation that the firing solution had not been constructed to exploit but that the Pacific's physics exploited regardless of what the plan had specified. The result was produced. The result was real. And the submarine that produced it - I-19, the Imperial Japanese Navy's Type B1 fleet submarine - continued operating for fourteen months after the most consequential morning of its career before USS Radford's depth charges found it north of Tarawa in November 1943 and the Pacific received it into the permanent custody that the warm deep water maintains without condition of return.This book is the complete examination of I-19's career - from the keel laid at Mitsubishi's Kobe shipyard in 1939 through the Pearl Harbor deployment, the eastern Pacific patrols, the September 15 attack, the Guadalcanal theater operations, and the final patrol whose departure in November 1943 the boat did not survive. It is a book about what the career reveals beyond the tactical achievement that the September 15 attack represents - about the Imperial Japanese Navy's submarine doctrine whose strategic failure was simultaneously employing and wasting the force that produced the Pacific war's most destructive single torpedo spread, about the American anti-submarine campaign whose development from the Guadalcanal period's reactive inadequacy to the 1943 systematic effectiveness the I-19's career arc documents from the target's perspective, and about the human cost distributed across both sides of the torpedo's path through the Pacific's warm water. The attack was real. The doctrine that surrounded it was wrong. The men who served in the boat were neither the doctrine nor the attack - they were the human contents of a career that the Pacific holds in the deep water north of Tarawa, waiting for the confirmation that the ocean has not yet offered and may never provide.

Pages: 192, Paperback, Independently published