The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Finest Hour

by James D. Hornfischer

Capt. Haruo Mayuzumi, the skipper of the Tone, was among his nation’s foremost experts on battleship gunnery. As the executive officer on the Yamato when that great ship was put into commission, he had overseen the installation of her massive 18.1-inch guns, whose bore size was so secret that even Admiral Kurita did not know it. As a tactical instructor at the naval gunnery school at Yokusuka in the years leading up to Pearl Harbor, Mayuzumi had studied intercepts of the radio chatter exchanged between U.S. battleship commanders and seaplane spotters during gunnery drills off the California coast. Japanese submarines and merchant ships readily eavesdropped on the plain-language play-by-play, and the Imperial Japanese Navy tallied the statistics as diligently as their counterparts did. At a range of 22,000 yards, the Japanese learned, American battleships hit their targets just seven percent of the time. Japanese heavies scored at a rate three times that. Mayuzumi led the effort to open that performance gap still further. He knew that if the shells were fired at flat enough angles to the water, they need not actually “hit” a ship at all. A near miss that struck the water close aboard, continuing on an underwater path, could land the most devastating blow of all: a hit below the waterline. Fired from 22,000 yards, a sixteen-inch battleship shell entering the water at a seventeen-degree angle to the surface could penetrate seventy-six millimeters of face-hardened armor even i...