Pacific Campaign: The U.S.-Japanese Naval War 1941-1945 Review

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(More customer reviews)The most interesting and useful part of this book for most people may be the first 113 pages that describe events preceding Pearl Harbor as Japan, starting with their annexation of Formosa in 1895, maneuvered for two generations toward war with the United States.
Published in 1991, author van der Vat pays no homage to "the greatest generation" who fought the war in the lower ranks but focuses on their parents' generation, men largely born before 1895, who, sometimes wisely and sometimes not, actually strategized the war and lead the U.S. to Victory (Roosevelt, King, Nimitz, Halsey, MacAuthur, et al). The profiles of significant senior Japanese officers will be new to many Americans. Also, the author makes a good case that the two pronged assault toward Japan, MacArthur through the Solomons and Philippines and Nimitz through the Marshalls, Marianas, etc., was a poor strategy that needlessly prolonged the war by dividing Allied resources.
Another interesting aspect is the fanatical, even suicidal, attitude of so many Japanese both before the war and during pitched battles. This lead the U.S. to conclude that the only way to get them to stop fighting, either on a remote atoll or on their home islands, was to apply ever greater firepower. It sounds in some ways like the philosophy and practice of the Islamic supremacists the U.S. is fighting in recent and current times.
A few interesting tidbits were new to me. For example, the famous Normandy D-Day landing was not the largest or even the second largest single-day U.S. amphibious assault of the war; the largest was on Luzon in the Philippines and the second largest was on Okinawa. The first B-29 raid of the war was against Japanese forces in Bangkok. The Japanese killed 250,000 Chinese civilians in reprisal for (very little) Chinese support of the 1942 Doolittle (Thirty Second Over Tokyo) air raid. And, things never change, a U.S. congressman blabbed in a press conference that during a "fact finding trip" to the Pacific Theater he learned that the Japanese were failing to sink U.S. submarines because they were setting their depth charges to explode at too shallow a depth; the Japanese picked this up and thereafter improved their ability to sink our subs... Finally the Japanese had a significant atomic weapons program dating from before 1942 and one of their principal development sites, captured and dismantled by the Russians, was in what is now North Korea (!?).
This 429-page book is recommended as a "refresher" for someone who is familiar with the general facts of WWII in the Pacific but is vague on the specifics or someone with no prior knowledge who wants to learn the details (units, ships, commanders) of the principal campaigns and battles.
The maps could be better and the photos are mostly well know from elsewhere.


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Dan van der Vat's naval histories have been acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic as "definitive," "extraordinary," and "vivid and harrowing." Now he turns to the greatest naval conflict in history: the Pacific campaign of World War II. Drawing on neglected archives of firsthand accounts from both sides, van der Vat interweaves eyewitness testimony with sharp, analytical narration to provide a penetrating reappraisal of the strategic and political background of both the Japanese and American forces, as well as a major reassessment of the role of intelligence on both sides. A comprehensive evaluation of all aspects of the war in the Pacific, The Pacific Campaign promises to be the standard work on the U.S.-Japanese war for years to come.

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