Ancient Web: Combined Fleet Tracked the Japanese Navy’s Ships Voyage by Voyage

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Warship histories often end with a dramatic sinking. CombinedFleet.com wants to know everything that happened before it: which harbor a ship left, what it carried, whom it met, and where it went next.

Visit the Imperial Japanese Navy Page.

Founder Jonathan Parshall built the site around his lifelong interest in Japan's navy. His personal account recalls building ship models as a child, studying defense matters in college, and spending time in Hiroshima near the former Kure naval base. His hobby became a website, then a collaboration with researchers around the world.

Its central resources are Tabular Records of Movement, usually shortened to TROMs. These reconstruct ship-by-ship operational histories for submarines, destroyers, cruisers, battleships, carriers, auxiliaries, and merchant vessels. The Sensuikan submarine section, for example, separates I-, RO-, and HA-class boats and links individual careers.

A research team grows around the links

The site's credits name Bob Hackett, Sander Kingsepp, Anthony Tully, Peter Cundall, Gilbert Casse, Allyn Nevitt, and many others. Parshall says readers from numerous countries contributed corrections and material. Kingsepp's translation of Japanese sources and Cundall's research into merchant shipping expanded the archive well beyond Parshall's initial interests.

Anthony Tully's biography describes the research connecting carrier wreckage found near Midway to the Kaga, and notes his 1997 involvement with the site. The main page also contains essays on shipwreck identification, the Pacific War in maps, weapon systems, wartime oil facilities, and obscure naval incidents.

Dates on the index show that this is not a dormant archive. Different ship sections were updated between 2020 and October 2026. Its documents are historical reconstructions and should be distinguished from original wartime records; citations and interpretations deserve checking where important.

Another Ancient Web article discusses this host's fictional Admiral Furashita fleet, a playful alternate-history project. This entry covers the separate factual research archive, whose rigor and scale grew through contributors' sustained work.

A personal homepage about ships became a reference where readers can follow not only a famous battle but the quieter logistics, movements, and losses that made it possible.

Explore the warship index and the submarine movement records.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.