Yamato: The Ship, The Myth, The Legend with Alex Wooley – Episode 619

Seth Paridon (0:40)

Hello, and welcome to Episode 619 of The Unauthorized History of the Pacific War Podcast. My name is Seth Paridon, historian and deputy director of the Mississippi Armed Forces Museum, and with me as always is my co-host, author, historian, good buddy. And I again almost forgot the name of our show, Jon Parshall.

Jon Parshall (0:55)

How are you?

I'm living the dream, man. Just living the dream. But at least you've got your Godzilla shirt on, you know, you're rocking the Godzilla. Yeah, we're properly thematic today. We are delighted to be joined today by Alexander Wooley, who is the author of a brand new book on the coolest battleship in the world entitled Battleship Yamato, The Ship, The Myth, and The Legend. Alex, how are you?

Alex Wooley (1:24)

Good. Thank you for having me guys.

Jon Parshall (1:26)

Yeah, absolutely. Now I'm looking forward to getting into this one.

Before we do that, I do want to give a brief shout out. I was doing a talk on the dropping of the Atomic Bomb out at Wings of the North Museum here in the Twin Cities. And they were very lovely. And there were some of the Nerderati out there. And one of them, Mike, hit me up with, yes, yes. So thank you, Wings of the North. And I'd love to come back, you know, if more Woodford is on offer. So anyway, they're lovely, lovely crew there. So Alex, you were just sharing with us before we started recording, that you are actually a Brit who now lives in Virginia. And you used to be a member of the Royal Navy. Is that right?

Alex Wooley (2:17)

Yeah, that's right. And so it was an early obsession from childhood. I love British naval history and sort of from an early age, was determined to join the Navy, spent a lot of time as a kid thinking over which fleet I would elect to join, Pacific fleet, Far East fleet, Mediterranean, et cetera, not realizing by the time I did join in the 1980s, there were no fleets. And so I had this inflated sense of patch Britannica that was a little bit sort of undermined. But still, eventually I joined when I turned 18, I went to Britain and did the 3-day interview, then joined the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, did my training there, and then became what's called a seaman officer. So basically, I think it would be the equivalent of a deck officer in the US Navy, did gunnery, navigation, that type of thing, a series of ships around the world. It was a great experience.

And yeah, I mean, I loved it as sort of a young sort of person. It was like a great career to have to get started.

Jon Parshall (3:30)

Cool. And how did you end up getting dragged back over to this side of the pond? There's probably a woman involved in it, isn't there?

Alex Wooley (3:37)

Well, it is, probably it's my mother.

My parents had emigrated from Britain to Canada. Okay. And so I went back to Canada, did my undergrad in history at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, sort of worked in journalism and communications for a lot of years. Then went down to Georgetown University in Washington, DC to do my master's in security studies, at the School of Foreign Service. And from there, basically never left sort of DC, sort of worked there for a number of years, sort of at the intersection of defense and diplomacy and development. And now I'm at the College of William and Mary, where I've been for a dozen years, where I'm a director of a lab that studies international development.

Jon Parshall (4:27)

Okay. Very cool. And this is your first book project, and we should flash up a cover of the book here, because it's super cool. I think it's just absolutely the right stylistic approach. But how did you get into this project?

Alex Wooley (4:45)

Well, I've done a lot of journalism around naval history, maritime affairs, et cetera. I've written for different publications. I do some writing for foreign policy on naval issues. In my day job, I actually write about and do research with a team of co-authors on Chinese-funded ports overseas. And so we construct this massive data set and do this analysis, looking at what China is funding in terms of overseas ports and harbors. So I've always sort of kept one foot or one hand in the naval and maritime issue.

And I think probably was a few years ago when I sort of came across this whole phenomenon of Space Battleship Yamato, which has been quite huge in Japan for more than 50 years now. I'd never heard of it and I thought, well, this must be a different Yamato because you're thinking sort of like Star Trek is not the real enterprise World War II CD6.