Opinionated and insulting to the memory of Gen MacArthur. I burned this piece of trash and used the ashes as mulch in my garden, that was all it was good for.

In the movie "In Harm's Way" Kirk Douglas's character Commander Paul Eddington tells John Wayne's Captain Rockwell Torrey: "Old Rock of Ages, we've got ourselves another war. A gut bustin', mother-lovin' Navy war." This book is the literary equivalent.

A British military/naval affairs journalist who grew up in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation, van der Vat brings experience and knowledge to the telling of this story. This book is significantly different from Ronald H. Spector's "Eagle Against the Sun" in that van der Vat focuses exclusively on the naval aspects of the war. As a result, he ignores air force air power, the use of ground power, and developments on the continent of Asia. Spector was much more "purple" or "joint" in that he looked at air, land, and sea power. Unlike Spector, who focused just on the American side of the conflict, van der Vat does a much better job of exploring the allied and the Japanese perspectives. Australians provided significant manpower against Japan in 1942 and 1943.

With those points made, what van der Vat knows, he knows very well. A couple of examples: he offers a very different take on the Battle of Savo Island. A major Japanese naval victory during the Guadalcanal campaign, van der Vat convincingly argues that the defeated Americans performed their mission despite losing more ships than the Japanese because they forced their enemy to retreat. He also has harsh words for Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet. At the strategic level, Yamamoto's brilliant opening moves had turned into a number of inept decisions that worked against Japanese interests. The Americans might have been mistaken in killing Yamamoto, given how many mistakes he was making. Van der Vat's heroes are the American naval commanders. He does skimp on looking at the actions of junior officers and the lower ranks, but the focus of his book tends to favor the high ranking.

There are shortcomings. He offers more maps than Spector, but their quality leaves a lot to be desired. Van der Vat is primarily a specialist in European history and he makes a number of references back to the campaigns with which he is more familiar and his understanding of the events that brought the U.S.-Japan to war are rather thin. Finally, he skips through the ending of the war rather quickly.

Still, this is an informative book and makes for interesting reading.

This highly derivative account of the Naval war of 1941-45 in the Pacific never gets free of its "Boys' Own" view of history as clear and unambiguous choices for right or wrong, good or evil. Cultural difference is consistently conflated with moral value, almost always to the advantage of the Allied (i.e. American) side. So, for instance, the systematic strafing of defenceless combatants is an "unseemly" "incident" when perpetrated by the Allies (e.g. after the Battle of the Bismarck Sea) but the killing of prisoners is "routine" "barbarism" when carried out by the Japanese. The triumphalism that runs throughout this account is anachronistic and tedious. The author includes no notes on sources to, he says, spare the reader. The comparatively meagre bibliography suggests otherwise. Some discussion (e.g. regarding submarine warfare) is worthwhile, but in its final dash of 50 or 60 pages - rushing past the Philippines, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Hiroshima, etc. - the increasingly skimpy text suggests that even van der Vat was tiring of a story reduced to platitudes.

This is a very good book for someone unfamiliar with the war in the Pacific, or for someone wishing to tie together all the bits and pieces they've picked up. There are more comprehensive books, or series of books, on this subject, but this is about as complete as I would like to read in one general book.

Author should not write on any subject other than British or Australian soldiers. He could have won WW11 much more rapidly on his own.

Author should not write on any subject other than British or Australian soldiers. He could have won WW11 much more rapidly on his own.

The book gives a good overview of the pacific war and with a
touch of good writing. The only bad thing you could say is
that it's to short and for the sake of shortness lacks
some details. I recomend this book to anyone that is interested
in the pacific campaign during second world war.

/Martin

The book gives a good overview of the pacific war and with a
touch of good writing. The only bad thing you could say is
that it's to short and for the sake of shortness lacks
some details. I recomend this book to anyone that is interested
in the pacific campaign during second world war.

/Martin

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.

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.

The Pacific Campaign offers a very good overview of the complexities, personalities and actions in the Pacific. It does not break any new ground in what it offers to readers and, as a hefty primer, there is lots left out of its 400 pages.
Having said all of that, if you are looking for a good long overview of the sea campaign, then Van der Vat offers one of the best. Main themes in this book include:

- an appreciation of the role of intelligence in both the Navy and Army in winning the war.

- an American distain for concentrating their forces and going for a single defeat of the Japanese Navy close to home. Instead Van der Vat maintains that the US unneccesarily lengthened the war by splitting forces into two: one for an island hopping drive across the central Pacific; the other to assuage the vanity of a prima donna Douglas MacArthur in his New Guinea, Philippines campaign.

- a readiness to call into fault some popular icons on both side of the war, looking at Admiral Yamamoto as morally culpable in the expansion of Japanese seapower and, by definition, the criminal regime of Militaristic Japan. His feelings on MacArthur have already been noted.

- the American shunning of all other allies in this crusade in the Pacific and their sometimes utter disdain for her allies, especially the wastage of the Australian Army, tying up some of the finest infantry in the Pacific in useless rear area campaigns.

The narrative read well and fast at times. It does lack detail on some very important aspects of the campaign that I found a little annoying: a cursory look at the effectiveness of the Kamikaze, a lack of the detail on the carrier-based operations against Japan and by extension, the actions of the tactically significant British Carrier group in the Pacific.

This is a narrative of sea and not land battles, but there appears to be no real formula for deciding which land battles to decribe and those not to describe.

I enjoyed the read, I would probably read one of Van der Vat's other books in the future. But if you are looking for something new in Military History you are unlikely to find it here.

The Pacific Campaign offers a very good overview of the complexities, personalities and actions in the Pacific. It does not break any new ground in what it offers to readers and, as a hefty primer, there is lots left out of its 400 pages.

Having said all of that, if you are looking for a good long overview of the sea campaign, then Van der Vat offers one of the best. Main themes in this book include:

- an appreciation of the role of intelligence in both the Navy and Army in winning the war.

- an American distain for concentrating their forces and going for a single defeat of the Japanese Navy close to home. Instead Van der Vat maintains that the US unneccesarily lengthened the war by splitting forces into two: one for an island hopping drive across the central Pacific; the other to assuage the vanity of a prima donna Douglas MacArthur in his New Guinea, Philippines campaign.

- a readiness to call into fault some popular icons on both side of the war, looking at Admiral Yamamoto as morally culpable in the expansion of Japanese seapower and, by definition, the criminal regime of Militaristic Japan. His feelings on MacArthur have already been noted.

- the American shunning of all other allies in this crusade in the Pacific and their sometimes utter disdain for her allies, especially the wastage of the Australian Army, tying up some of the finest infantry in the Pacific in useless rear area campaigns.

The narrative read well and fast at times. It does lack detail on some very important aspects of the campaign that I found a little annoying: a cursory look at the effectiveness of the Kamikaze, a lack of the detail on the carrier-based operations against Japan and by extension, the actions of the tactically significant British Carrier group in the Pacific.

This is a narrative of sea and not land battles, but there appears to be no real formula for deciding which land battles to decribe and those not to describe.

I enjoyed the read, I would probably read one of Van der Vat's other books in the future. But if you are looking for something new in Military History you are unlikely to find it here.