A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy

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The great naval battles that raged across the blue curve of the Pacific during the Second World War locked millions of men and thousands of ships and aircraft into a shifting saga of victory and defeat. The fiercely nationalistic Japanese entered into the war with a deeply rooted conviction that they were invincible, and would be swept to victory by a "divine wind." By the war's end, however, the Imperial Japanese Navy had been decimated by a series of crushing defeats, and a proud people had been brought to their knees. Japan's fate was sealed by a few decisive battles—and as Napoleon remarked over a century before, "Between a battle lost and a battle won, the distance is immense, and there stand empires." This unique book based on hitherto unused Japanese sources tells the story of the Pacific War from the viewpoint of the Japanese themselves, focusing on both the celebrated and lesser-known sea battles. The author has traced the development of the war back to its first causes—the economic, political, and cultural forces that led, step by step, to the devastating surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the quick establishment of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Then the account turns to the slow disintegration of the Imperial Japanese Navy, no longer invincible once its original defense perimeter was extended beyond the range of land-based air cover. The author has focused his efforts on the major surface engagements of the war—Coral Sea, Midway, the crucial Solomons campaign, and the last-ditch battles in the Marianas and Philippines. The account is supplemented by detailed track charts, also derived from Japanese sources, and by a selection of Japanese photographs of major vessels and actions. This unusual volume, several years in the making, fills a void in the story of the naval war in the Pacific, corrects errors of previous writers, and furnishes a wealth of new information for the readers of this generation and for the historians of the future.