The error went undetected until last year, when an amateur researcher, Yutaka Iwasaki, was going through the wartime records of the Imperial Japanese Navy base at Sasebo. The files included daily reports received by radio from the naval air base at Naha, Okinawa — and the entry for Feb. 27, 1944, contained a promising lead. “In that radio record, there is a longitude and a latitude of the attack, very clearly,” Mr. Iwasaki said. And it did not match what was in the 1949 Navy history, not by a hundred miles. Uncovering the history of those ships necessarily brought him into contact with records on submarines.

Source: New York Times November 11, 2019 00:01 UTC