Reviewed by John Grady The weeks long gruesome land battle by Marines and soldiers to take mountainous Saipan included a doomed but deadly Banzai charge of Japanese soldiers followed by mass civilian suicides rather than surrender to the Americans. Those two events are often what is remembered most in the struggle to control the most
Reviewed by LCDR Brian Hayes, USNR (Ret.) The Indestructible Man tells the story of Dixie Kiefer, a naval officer and aviator who served in several of the legendary battles of World War II’s Pacific Theater. Kiefer has been the subject of profiles by the Naval History and Heritage Command and other Internet and print publications,
Reviewed by Charles C. Kolb, Ph.D. 80 years after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, new books are being published on topics leading up to that event, the attack itself, and its aftermath. A volume titled Avenging Pearl Harbor: The Saga of America’s Battleships in the Pacific War has been written by U.S. Navy veteran
Reviewed By Dr. Diana Ahmad Stationed at Ft. McKinley Hospital Clinic in the Philippines on the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Henry “Hank” T. Chamberlain became a prisoner of war (POW) of the Japanese by April 1942. Trained as an Army Medic and surgical technician prior to the start of the war, Chamberlain used
Reviewed by Charles C. Kolb, PhD Charles Stephenson is the author of previous works on naval and siege warfare and the history of fortifications, with four volumes in print: The Fortifications of Malta 1530-1945 (Fortress 16, Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2004, 2010); The Admiral’s Secret Weapon: Lord Dundonald and the Origins of Chemical Warfare (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006);
Reviewed by Diana L. Ahmad, Ph.D. Jon Diamond, a physician and author of over a dozen books about World War II, has produced yet another photo collection about the battle to beat the Japanese in the Pacific. While the United States won the two-month long campaign in the Palau Islands, the conflict proved deadly to
Reviewed by Jeff Schultz Michael Claringbould’s Operation I-Go: Yamamoto’s Last Offensive — New Guinea and the Solomons, April 1943 skillfully utilizes Japanese and Allied sources to thoroughly investigate Operation I-Go, an aerial operation set against the backdrop of the March-April 1943 Pacific War. While this ambitious operation employed a large number of Imperial Japanese Navy
Reviewed by Diana L. Ahmad, Ph.D. The Kamikaze, a well-known unit of the Japanese military in World War II, still fascinates many students of war history. Having just read Rain of Steel: Mitscher’s Task Force 58, Ugaki’s Thunder Gods, and the Kamikaze War off Okinawa, by Stephen L. Moore, I found Stewart’s book a good
Reviewed by Diana L. Ahmad, Ph.D. Author of over a dozen books about World War II, Stephen L. Moore adds to his bibliography with a wonderful analysis of the Spring 1945 Pacific Campaign for Okinawa. As expected by the title of the work, the first chapters are devoted to telling readers who Vice Admiral Marc
Reviewed by Tyler Robinson Vengeance Strikes the Blow is a remarkably vivid and grounded read, particularly given that it is such a departure from G. Alvin Simons’ prior historical-fiction novel, Odin-Son: The Berserk Saga. Much of the text reads as Socratic dialogue on the subject of tactics, not unlike Niccolo Macchiavelli’s The Art of War. The tone is also
Reviewed by LCDR Brian Hayes, USN (Ret.) Michael Claringbould has authored or co-authored more than a dozen works on World War II Pacific aviation, and as the title suggests, he previously produced two similar collections focused on New Guinea and the Solomons. This book is a collection of fifteen accounts of aviation operations in the
Reviewed by David F. Winkler, Ph.D. Earlier this year I had the pleasure of reviewing The Silver Waterfall: A Novel of the Battle of Midway by retired Captain Kevin Miller, I praised the value of well researched historical fiction as an effective means to convey past events to the reader. In The Expendable, author John
Reviewed by Dr. Richard H. Gribling Leyte 1944: The Soldiers’ Battle was written by Nathan N. Prefer, a military historian with graduate degrees in military history. His prior books include The Battle for Tinian: Vital Stepping Stone in America’s War Against Japan, Eisenhower’s Thorn on the Rhine: The Battles for the Colmar Pocket, 1944-45 and
By Ian W. Toll, W.W. Norton, New York, NY (2016) Reviewed by John Grady Ian Toll’s Conquering Tide is the middle piece of his Pacific War history, and it is a superb fit with the first volume, Pacific Crucible. Now available in paperback, Conquering Tide tells the story of the fight after the Battle of
