"Japanese sink Soviet submarine L-16 off Washington" Topic

…, October 1942

"In 1942, the Soviet Union decided to reinforce the Northern Fleet with submarines stationed in the Pacific as it was neutral in the war with Japan. Submarines L-15 and L-16 were dispatched from Vladivostok on September 24th with orders to transit the Panama Canal and link up with the Northern Fleet. Onboard L-16 was US Navy Chief Photographer's Mate Sergei Andreevich Mihailoff of Arcadia, California to act as an interpreter. After refueling at Dutch Harbour, the two submarines cruised down the coast when on October 11th, about 800 miles of the coast of Washington they crossed into the sights of the Japanese submarine I-25, which had just conducted the famous Lookout air raids. I-25, mistaking L-16 for an American submarine, fired a torpedo which sank L-16 with all hands.

This incident doesn't seem well documented despite it's significance and doesn't seem to have provoked any tensions between Japan and the USSR, who were not at war. Why is that so? Were the Soviets, considering their precarious situation on the Eastern Front, eager to avoid further escalation with the Japanese?…"

From here

link

Armand

The Russians prized their neutrality in the Pacific. They were importing a lot of stuff from the US and shipping it in their own vessels from the West Coast to Vladivostock and the Japanese let them sail unmolested.

Thanks.

Armand

Another rumor in a war (like all wars and events) filled with rumors. Many are simply hilarious, some produce junk like the so called fact that Hitler retired to South America.
One of my favorites, reported in the US Army's Green Book, The Fall of the Philippines, is the one involving a Japanese
Mata Hari with a powerful radio,
But so what.
Intelligence failures, successes, pratfalls and jokes, to include those involving logistics were and are not any part of our so called historical wargaming. To have a game in which the precision bombing is not precise, that a certain Japanese battlecruiser was sunk by an intrepid American pilot of a B 17 (all invention), or the usual exaggerations by pilots and naval officers and infantrymen of all nations would require a sophisticated set of umpire driven rules that would discomfit the gamers--after all, the gamers could, with some justification, but only a little, claim the game was run by the umpire in its most decisive aspects.
So we have no battle reports in which "Mr Rico, there are a Million of Them!) or we sank two BBs, two CVs and three CAs (when there was only one AO and one DD) or we have destroyed the enemy armies (only to see another set of the enemy emerge)
Chess, with no chance of reinforcements, bluffing or cheating.
If your interest is in the paper strength OOBs and the painted figures, then the hobby is for you. But as a tool to understand the events reported from Thucydides to Richard Frank, the games are total failures.