Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/June 2020/Book reviews




 * By Nick-D

This book covers the naval attacks on the Japanese home islands which formed part of the 1945 Japan campaign. Its author is a librarian with a history degree who appears to only have written for Osprey Publishing.

I was very interested when this book appeared on Osprey's list of upcoming releases. While the Japan campaign was one of the largest naval operations of World War II and is a topic I find fascinating, curiously little has been written about it. This blog post by Herder makes a good case for the campaign's obscurity being attributable to official historian Samuel E. Morison covering it in insufficient detail as he didn't personally take part. However, I'd suggest that the lack of attention to the campaign forms part of the larger neglect of the final Allied operations of the war.

Turning to the book itself, it's a very impressive piece of work. While Herder is a journeyman historian rather than a specialist, he has squeezed a surprisingly comprehensive history of this campaign into Osprey's 96-page confines. The book starts with Operation Kita, the final significant convoy to reach Japan, and covers the subsequent naval air attacks, minelaying, surface bombardments and submarine patrols. The focus, rightly, is on the naval air attacks and most are covered in some detail. I'm familiar with the literature on these topics, such as it is, and still learnt quite a bit from the book while not spotting any errors.

I do have two qualms. Firstly, when I followed up on the book's coverage of the bizarre scare over a Japanese attack on the San Francisco conference which led to the formation of the Mid-Pacific Striking Force in March 1945 I was concerned to see it was fairly lightly paraphrased from the two other works that cover this topic (Admiral William Halsey Jr.'s memoirs and a very-similarly worded passage in Clark G. Reynolds' somewhat eccentric The Fast Carriers: The Forging of an Air Navy). I didn't spot any other issues along this line in the book, but it illustrates the limitations of Osprey's style. My second qualm is that the book only seems to draw on the English-language literature, and doesn't discuss Japanese perspectives on the campaign in much detail. At times this leads to unconvincing claims about the effectiveness of Allied attacks, though Herder is generally appropriately sceptical of the claims US Navy pilots made about the number of aircraft they believed they had destroyed.

Overall, this book is a very useful addition to the literature on World War II in the Pacific, and will hopefully encourage more in-depth treatments of the campaign. It also makes for a very useful reference.

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Multiple recent military history books