World: Knock at the Door

In the rough Tsushima Straits, where two-decker, train-carrying ferries ply between Japan and Korea, an Allied submarine up-periscoped, unleashed a torpedo. The missile stabbed the flank of a Jap steamer. Said the Tokyo radio: the steamer went down in “seconds,” with loss of 544 persons aboard.

Fifty miles across at their narrowest, the Tsushima Straits are Japan’s historic doors to the Asiatic mainland. Over them centuries ago Regent Hideyoshi’s armada sailed to battle the Koreans and send home 38,000 enemy ears pickled in wine. Upon them in 1905 crusty Admiral Togo smashed the Russian fleet. Presumably the submarine knocking on the door last week was American. It had achieved one of World War IPs most daring submarine penetrations of enemy waters, a feat ranking with German Günther Prien’s entry at Scapa Flow, the Jap invasion of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. raid in Tokyo Bay.

To the question, Where is the Jap fleet?, Naval Expert Alexander Kiralfy, writing in the October issue of Foreign Affairs, made an illuminating answer: The Jap theory of sea power differs radically from the U.S. or British theory as classically defined by Admiral Mahan.

The Japs have never believed in seeking out the enemy fleet for decisive battle. The mission of their navy has not been to gain “command of the seas” but to transport troops and protect the Imperial Army’s supply lines. Mr. Kiralfy suggests that this goes back to Japan’s origins, the Japs being a nation of “island-hoppers” who surged up from the south and established “beachheads” on what is now called Japan. In 1592, Hideyoshi, founder of the navy, used his ships to land troops in Korea, to victual their beachheads. In 1904-05, Togo aimed to reinforce the Jap beachhead in Manchuria; his brilliant destruction of the Russian fleet was incidental to the main strategy. Similarly, in 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor by naval aircraft and a few midget submarines was incidental to the main blows in Southeast Asia. Since then, from Midway to the Coral Sea, Jap admirals have risked their craft only to protect or extend beachheads.

Comments Mr. Kiralfy: “The main [Jap] battle force [is] to be withheld as a last reliance, and then to engage only under highly favorable circumstances.”