Mark Lardas, USN Submarine v IJN Aircraft Carrier (Osprey, 2025)
It sounds improbable, like something out of a sensational war movie; a US submarine sinking an Imperial Japanese aircraft carrier. Yet, even with all the protection offered to carriers by escorting warships and air cover, this remarkable feat happened ten times in World War II. In this book in Osprey’s Duel series, Mark Lardas tracks the paths of two very different types of warships to their fateful destinations on the high seas.
Lardas takes turns in describing the design and development of US Navy fleet submarines and Imperial Japanese carriers. Both were vulnerable in their own ways with almost every aspect planned out for maximum combat efficiency. Lardas considers their respective structure, propulsion, and weaponry, including the American failure to recognise the deficiencies in their early war torpedoes. The men who operated these machines also come under Lardas’s scrutiny. Here too, he notes that almost everything was honed to winning in combat, but the Japanese were notably more so to the detriment of their damage control functions. That would play a critical role in the survivability of the carriers when struck by US torpedoes. Lardas selects five brief case studies to demonstrate his points, of which two stand out: the Nautilus’s problems with dud torpedoes in 1942 when attacking the Naga, and the Albacore’s sinking of the Taiho in 1944 when the latter’s failed damage control operations could not save the carrier. In his analysis of 67 combats between USN submarines and IJN carriers, Lardas highlights the procedure for a successful attack, particularly after 1943 when the US resolved it dud torpedo problem. Conversely, there were no submarines lost to Japanese carriers in the war. Lardas concludes that the USN submarines ultimately won the fight against the carriers.
There is always something useful to learn from Osprey books; the condensed nature of the shorter format effectively highlights the main points under discussion. That is the case too with Lardas’s latest contribution. I am not sure, though, that the structured format for the Duel series works well for combat between submarines and carriers, with the case studies almost squeezed out by technical aspects that sometimes seem tangential to the events. I would have liked to have read more on the combat, but that is a quibble more than a complaint. Nevertheless, as an introduction to this aspect of the war in the Pacific, Lardas’s book works well enough, and Osprey’s graphic artwork illustrates his text to the usual high standard.
