WWII research kit

Ship tracks, battles and map grids rebuilt from the original records: US submarine war patrol reports and war diaries, Army morning reports and unit journals, and the Imperial Japanese Navy's own records of the same days. Every mark on every page links to the page of the record it came from.

Pages

• Ship tracksEvery position a boat or ship reported, patrol by patrol, with torpedo attacks and contacts. Choose the vessel above the map.
• Dive profileUSS BANG's depth through every dive and depth-charge attack, with the seafloor, the weather and the moon.
• BattlesOne convoy engagement at a time on one map and one GMT clock, beside the Japanese records of the same minutes.
• Time zonesWhat the letters after every time mean (2256 K, 0330 Z), and how to put two reports on one clock.
• Japanese position codesThe Imperial Navy's kana grid (メキ三ツ), rebuilt key by key from positions known some other way.
• Army map gridsReading a grid reference (V-044572) on the six grids the Army used between Sicily and Bavaria.
• Recognition silhouettesJapanese and US aircraft traced from the 1943–45 recognition plates, and US warships drawn to their ONI 54 plates.

Doing this yourself

The tools that fetched, transcribed and checked these records are in tools/, with a guide to each archive and method in guides/. They are written to be run by a person or by an AI agent such as Claude Code: CLAUDE.md holds the rules an agent follows, starting with the first one, cite every source.

The records themselves (positions, attacks, depth logs, unit stations, Japanese-side entries) are in records/, where inventory.yml lists what has been transcribed and SOURCES.yml cites every archive, collection and book they come from.