The Elusive Enemy: U.S. Naval Intelligence and the Imperial Japanese Fleet [ハードカバー]

This book deals with American naval intelligence other than signals intelligence in the Pacific War. It remains a truism that intelligence from every source needs to be assembled for best results. For example, in this modern era ships other than submarines can be and no doubt are waatched from above. Economic intelligence is also relevant. For example it was quite possible in 1941 for the American government to work out that Japan was running out of foreign exchange and oil. Captured military equipment is frequently available and may well yield information about enemy capacity. And so there is a story to tell: how an increasingly professional USN intelligence unit obtained and assembled information about the Japanese Navy (IJN). The American naval aviator needed to be informed about weak points in Japanese naval aircraft. The maximum speed of IJN ships was clearly of great interest. So the book does usefully fill a gap in the literature about the naval war in the Pacific 1941-1945.

This reviewer was rather disappointed with the brief treatment of the American failure to take precautions to defend the ships at Pearl Harbor and the warplanes in the Philippines in
early December 1941. The issue is not whether diplomatic and/or naval signals intelligence would have given away the date and time of the attacks that brought the United States into war with Japan. Instead, the question is whether overall intelligence should have convinced enough people in the command structure of the extreme risk of something happening. Here even those whose sole source of information was the November 1941 issues of the New York Times would have concluded that Japan was very likely to attack British interests (Malaya, Singapore) and Dutch interests (the modern Indonesia) and rather less likely to attack American interests (the Philippines, Hawaii). Having fully armed planes in the air at dawn each day over the key American bases would have been fully justified yet not provocative.

Peter W Donovan.

I am a student of World War II history and I did not at all find this book to be helpful or enlightening. In truth I was totally frustrated by this book and its skipping about in the chronology and did not finish reading it. This tome seems more oriented to the fact that the author wants his academic credentials burnished with a published book than to present new information or research.

This may be the most complete analysis of intelligence gathered by the United States before and during World War II regarding how to fight Japan in a great Pacific campaign.

The book is filled with details showing how hard the task was. The book describes efforts to understand captured Japanese torpedoes and airplanes that were ahead of anything available to the Americans or to the British at the start of the war. It also covers all the efforts - many successful - to break Japanese codes and exploit signal intelligence.

Japanese secrecy before the war made it almost impossible to gather even basic knowledge of Japanese warship numbers, combat capabilities, training, and building schedules for new ships. The Japanese super battleships were vague rumors which nobody in the US - or Britain - could obtain firm information down to the size of the caliber of the main armament. Sixteen inch guns or 18 inch guns? Nobody could do more than guess.

Of course there was racial prejudice on the part of the intelligence officers in the United States and Britain that led them to believe that the Japanese could not match western technology.

Once the war started and the initial Japanese conquests took place so quickly and competently there was a tendency to bias opinion in the other direction and suspect that the United States navy was not up the task of fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. In fact, this was the true situation in early 1942. And continued at least until the necessary logistics were in place, new carrier fighters became available, the use of radar at sea had been brought to a high level of proficiency, and the American ship building program started to turn out massive numbers of combat ships in 1943.

Even after the tide turned at Midway and the Guadalcanal, the United States intelligence still had little understanding of Japanese navel doctrine and the Japanese responses to major United States offensives in the Marianas and the Philippines came as a surprise to the American commanders fighting those battles
.
If you want to know all about the uncertain lines of authority in American intelligence throughout the war this book will provide the details. Along with many intelligence finding that tried to keep up with the lessons learned in actually fighting battles with the Japanese and often being defeated by them. This is presented in much detail, down to exact citations of too many intelligence documents for the average reader to remember.

That above paragraphs brings now me to write about my problem with this book: Thousands of people on both sides died in the war in the Pacific. Drowned, blown to pieces, burned, or even killed by American aircraft sinking Japanese transports carrying American prisoners to the Japanese home islands. There is no passion in this book. One could read it without ever thinking about these horrors.

The book seems designed for an academic presentation at a war college, not for your average amateur navel historian. But hiding the vicious nature of war from our highest level thinkers is not, it think, a good idea.