Sure, on paper. I would submit, however, that there were ways of doing that which didn't involve actually destroying them in such a flagrantly pointless way. It isn't as though the War Department had never bullshitted the Russians before. Hell, in 1946 the Army was still semi-seriously kicking around the idea of bombing them. I doubt the Navy brass really cared that much about plausible deniability.

Also, a note: the I in Japanese submarine designations like I-401, I-19 et al. was just a size classification. I-designated subs displaced a thousand tons or more; Ro subs displaced between 500 and 999 tons; and Ha subs displaced fewer than 500 tons. The Sentoku-class submarines were much, much larger than that (~6,700 tons submerged displacement), but the scheme was devised with no upper bound, so they and submarines like the Type B1 I-19 (~3,600 tons) were both I boats, despite being radically different classes.

There was some slop in the way these codes were assigned—for instance, the German Type IXC U-boat U-511 was designated Ro-500 by the IJN when they acquired her, despite the fact that she displaced around 1,100 tons submerged and so, by rights, should've been an I boat—but those were the general guidelines, anyway.

As an aside to the aside, I, Ro, and Ha are just the first three syllables in the Japanese syllabary, as it is traditionally ordered for memorization—functionally the same as if the US Navy had grouped its subs by size categories A, B, and C.

As an aside to that aside, Iroha ordering also shows up in Kantai Collection in the names of Abyssal ship classes (such as Battleship Re-class and Standard Carrier Wo-class); the conceit is that their proper names are not known to the human side, so they're given designations based on the order in which they were first spotted. Compare Allied wartime codenames for Japanese aircraft (Zeke, Val, Betty etc.), or NATO reporting names for Soviet hardware of the Cold War (Fulcrum, Backfire, Guideline and so on).

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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