Book Review

Comparative/World

On the night of April 1, 1945, the USS Queenfish sank the Awa maru, a Japanese passenger-cargo ship homeward bound after transporting relief materials to American and Allied prisoners of war held in Asia. This submarine attack, which took the lives of more than two thousand Japanese men, women, and children, occurred despite the U.S. government's guarantee of safe passage. Based on extensive bilingual research and interviews, Roger Dingman has crafted a richly textured tale of the tragic incident and its impact on U.S.-Japanese relations. He tackles issues of universal interest to practitioners of history, unraveling the moral ambiguities of choices states and individuals make in both war and peacetime and the ways in which they construct—and sometimes manipulate—historical memories to come to terms with the past, embrace the present, and direct the future.

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With copious evidence drawn from both American and Japanese sources, Dingman convincingly argues that this tragic event was set off by a chain of human errors and poor judgments made by both sides of the maritime encounter. In this evenhanded analysis, neither side emerges as a blameless victim or an unblemished hero. The Japanese government, taking advantage of the safe passage agreement, used the civilian vessel to transport contraband and resupply Japanese forces in China and the southern reaches of its overextended empire, and it used repatriating noncombatants as a human shield against the unrestricted U.S. submarine warfare in the Pacific. Families of the victims received paltry compensation from their government, which renounced their right to indemnity in exchange for a peace with its new postwar alliance partner.

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