Word: shima
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...club does not have long-ball hitters, and it will have to depend on several players who have a high average because of singles. Bob Forbush, the left fielder, had a batting average in the 300's last year. Bill Rodgers, at shortstop, and Dick Shima, the centerfielder, are also expected to hit well...
Wrote Admiral Shima, in English: "I am deeply impressed by your spirit of study in the war history, and am glad to answer your question. It is happy for me to think if my explanations written on the attached papers would be useful to you." The admiral went on testily to assert that "little information concerning actions of Shima fleet during the battle are found in the U.S., and many reports . . . were written neither with ample knowledge nor facts of actual features." He defended himself against Critic James A. Field Jr., who wrote in The Japanese at Leyte Gulf that...
Buffoon or not, Shima has a lot to explain. On Oct. 25, 1944, the second day of the historic sea fight, Shima steamed toward Surigao Strait, south of Leyte Gulf, with two heavy cruisers, a light cruiser and four destroyers, still distant from the main battle. He hoped to reach Leyte Gulf in time to harass U.S. landing forces there, but his entire contribution to the battle, as Historian Morison observes, was to ram his flagship into a crippled heavy cruiser of another Japanese force, after firing 16 torpedoes at two islands he mistook for U.S. ships...
...Ready Trap." As the Japanese admiral recalls it, there was tragedy, but no buffoonery. In late 1944, he explains to Student Frazer, the imperial navy was still strong, but it had been pushed back so fast that it was badly disorganized. Just before the Leyte Gulf battle, Shima's force had wild-goose-chased after a supposedly crippled U.S. force. Shima steamed for the fringes of the vast Leyte engagement after other Japanese naval forces had set out, and the necessity for radio silence, he explains, meant that he could not coordinate his strategy or tactics with theirs. Faced...
Bill Frazer hopes for more letters. A reply from Admiral Kurita would be particularly valuable; he has been criticized for turning back into San Bernardino Strait, north of Samar when he might have dealt a telling blow to a U.S. force inferior in speed and firepower. But Shima offers the schoolboy historian an understandable summing up of Japanese hesitancy at Leyte: "A further defeat meant to Japan no longer incidental losses but loss of life itself...