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Rating: 
Summary: Battleship Musashi, a book with the spirit of Musashi
Review: 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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Summary: Number Two Battleship
Review: I purchased the book with great enthusiasm for I am fanatically interested in the design and construction of the Musashi.Unfortunately the book didn`t satisfy any of my interests..Rather than detail the making of the Musashi it wandered off into the problems associated in keeping the construction hidden.. I am no more enlightened than I was before I read the book. If you are interested enough in the making of the Musashi that this book would appeal to you, then you probably already know more than the book offers..
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Summary: Number Two Battleship
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: OK by me
Review: Since I am not interested in technical engineering details of the construction of ships, I did not mind that almost all the information on this subject was confined to a few diagrams. I enjoyed the discussion of the secrecy aspects of the construction. The only negatives for me were the rather brief summary of the sinking, and the failure to put the Musashi's mission at that time into a broader strategic framework.
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Summary: Life in a Police State
Review: This excellent little book pulls together many first hand accounts about the building and operation of the Musashi. It's best at describing the conditions and activities during the construction. Where Yamato was built at the Kure Navy yard, Musashi was constructed at the Mitshubishi yard in Nagasaki. There was an enormous effort to maintain secrecy during construction, made more complicated because the yard was not government run and was surrounded by hills and a bustling city. This book gives a fascinating look at the conditions imposed on the managers, the workers, and the citizens of Nagasaki. On the other hand, the design process is not covered at all -- see Garzke's book on Axis battleships for a much better account of that -- and the operational career was very short. Granted there's not a lot to say, the Musashi sat in Truk harbor most of its short life. Still, the story of the sinking is mostly summary, with very few eyewitness accounts. With over 1300 survivors, I would have hoped for more. Then again, the fact that these men were treated like prisoners and exiled (to perserve the secret of the sinking) may have made them reluctant to come forward. That part of the story gets only a few paragraphs and just served to whet my curiousity. Definitely worth reading if the subject appeals to you.
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Summary: What is the subject of this book?
Review: This is an awful book; after reading it I kept wondering what it is supposed to be about. It is for sure not about the building of the Musashi, nor about the fighting and sinking of the ship, nor about her design, nor about her crew, nor about anything else; the only way I can describe it is a chronological collection of random unexplained details. One even wonders why the Musashi: according to the book itself the identical Yamato was build first and better records exist. I particularly enjojed the "technical drawings": the best is 5, I am not kidding, 5 plan views of a 700 odd feet of battleship reduced to one 5x8 inch page, with legends in Japanese! (actually I am not sure, but they look to me like Japanese). Maybe the title of the book should have been "Musashi still in hiding". The consistent effort made by the Imperial Japanese Navy to hide the existence of the ship - which is the only is coherent message that comes from the book - cannot be an excuse; the technique for writing non-fiction about something that is not known is well established: one writes about similar, parallel, or otherwise related facts that are known. "Into the wild" and "The perfect storm" are examples that come to mind. One could at least speculate about the secrecy: it seems to me that the normal thing is to hide one's own weak points, and exaggerate the strong ones: so why hide the existence of the ship(s)? Was everything in pre-war Japan kept secret? only ships? why? was it good or bad in retrospect? Maybe the author is planning a sequel, "Everything you wanted to ask after reading my previous book about the Musashi".
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