Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/June 2020/Book reviews
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The Naval Siege of Japan 1945 - Brian Lane Herder |
- 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.
Publishing details: Herder, Brian Lane (2020). The Naval Siege of Japan 1945: War Plan Orange Triumphant. Oxford: Osprey Publishing. ISBN 9781472840363.
Recent external reviews |
McManus, John C. (2019). Fire and Fortitude: The US Army in the Pacific War, 1941-1943. New York City: Dutton. ISBN 9780451475046.
- Long, John (23 May 2020). "Book review: 'Fire and Fortitude' challenges assumptions on Pacific War". The Roanoke Times.
Chang, David Cheng (2019). The Hijacked War: The Story of Chinese POWs in the Korean War. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-1-5036-0460-5.
- Turcotte, Jean-Michel (May 2020). "Review of Chang, David Cheng, The Hijacked War: The Story of Chinese POWs in the Korean War". H-War, H-Net Reviews.
Khalidi, Rashid (2020). The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. New York City: Metropolitan Books. ISBN 9781627798556.
- Hughes, Matthew (7 May 2020). "The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi review – conquest and resistance". The Guardian.
Multiple recent military history books
- Ricks, Thomas E. (22 May 2020). "Looking at War Across 2,500 Years". The New York Times.
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