Customer Reviews

Aces of the Rising Sun 1937-1945 (General Aviation)

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This is a very good books which lists out all the aces in the Japanese army and navy, and it is organized based on the story of each individual pilot. It also has lots of photos to tie the faces to the stories.

There is one caution, however. This book is a reprint of Sakaida's two prior books on the Japanese Army Aces and Japanese Navy Aces book also published by Osprey, so there really no need to get it unless you don't have those books already.

Henry Sakaida have complied a very good coverage to Japanese flying aces during the Second World War. The contained mini-biographies of all the Japanese pilots who achieved the "ace" status as well as background material of Japanese air efforts during the war from 1937. There are exhausting amount of photographs of the pilots, their planes, medals and other supporting elements which make this book a very useful source of reference to anyone interested in the understanding the Pacific War. There are also series of colorful illustrations and nice Order of the Battle. Also of interest is the list of all the Japanese aces of the war since 1937.

As previous reviewer have noted, this book is a combination of two previous books already published by Osprey by the author so if you owned them already, this book shouldn't interest you. However, if you don't havem them, then this book should interest almost anyone who got a causal interesting in the Pacific War. Its well written, researched and give a very complete picture of the men who flew for the Rising Sun of Imperial Japan. My only real gripe is that it don't have any maps.

Book come highly recommended for anyone with interest in the Pacific War.

I'm delighted that Osprey chose to re-release Sakaida's two books into this one package. (While the Osprey titles are excellent, they do have a tendency to produce books with a rather small page counts and this 208 page book is welcome.)

Perhaps what is strongest here is that this book provides extensive coverage about the men and their experiences in battle AND about WWII fighting technology. Often military history books tend to focus on one area or the other.

The 26 color plates (mostly of aircraft but also of uniforms) are beautiful.

All in all, I found this to be an impressive piece of work.