BLURBS
JAPAN'S WAR AT SEA
Pearl Harbor to the Coral Sea
The months between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the decisive Battle of Midway in June 1942 were a period of virtually uninterrupted success for the Imperial Japanese Navy. In this book David Thomas follows the career of the Striking Force of Japanese aircraft carriers under Admiral Nagumo in a series of campaigns which demonstrated once and for all that the day of the carrier as a capital ship had arrived.
When, in January 1942, the Japanese forces began the lightning series of campaigns with which they consolidated their hold on East Asia, they were able to move in the knowledge that at Pearl Harbor they had destroyed the only force that could seriously challenge them — a confidence that was reinforced when the British capital ships Repulse and Prince of Wales were sunk in the Gulf of Siam.
Admiral Nagumo's carriers cleared the way for these campaigns with a series of devastating strikes which removed any remaining sources of opposition. First, an attack on the port of Rabaul on the island of New Britain, followed by the bombing of the Australian port of Darwin, effectively prevented any naval opposition to the occupation of the islands north of Australia.
Moving eastwards, Nagumo's carriers helped to mop up the few remaining Allied warships in the East Indies and then struck across the Indian Ocean to Ceylon and the Bay of Bengal. They bombed the British naval bases at Colombo and Trincomalee, sank two British cruisers and the carrier Hermes, and threw communications into chaos and panic. Eluding Admiral Somerville's makeshift Far Eastern fleet with ease, Nagumo turned back for the Pacific. It is Mr Thomas's argument, however, that this strike eastwards was a fatal mistake. It allowed the American navy — most vitally, its carriers which had so miraculously escaped — time to recover from the blow of Pearl Harbor and prepare for the battles to come.
The first of those battles, the Coral Sea, took place in May 1942. It was, perhaps, a tactical victory for Japan but for the first time Nagumo's force suffered serious loss, and a Japanese invasion force was repulsed. Moreover, it gave the American pilots confidence and experience which they were to put to such devastating use at Midway a month later.
David Thomas's book is the first thorough and authoritative account of a campaign unequalled in naval history.' In a period of five months Nagumo's planes struck at targets separated by izo degrees of longitude; his ships effectively gave Japan control of the sea from the Hawaiian islands to the East African coast, and they came within an ace of extending that control to the western coast of America. All this was achieved with the loss of scarcely more equipment or lives than might have been expected in routine training. It was a devastating and dramatic demonstration that a new era of naval warfare had arrived.
DAVID THOMAS has published four previous books, The Battle of the Java Sea, Crete 1941 The Battle at Sea, With Ensigns Flying and Submarine Victory and has firmly established himself as a naval historian of the Second World War. Mr Thomas is married and lives in East London.
|
