Customer Reviews

I-400 Japan's Secret Aircraft-Carrying Strike Submarine - Objective Panama Canal

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is one for all WWII history buffs. It is well detailed, plenty of pictures, and does a fantastic job of explaining a little-known segment of Japanese military operations. We can't say enough good things about this publication. It belongs on everyone's shelf.

I recently purchased a copy of this book and it is simply superb. It covers an important part of Japanese navy history about the immense I-400 class submarines and their mission to do suicide strikes on the Panama Canal. This book is loaded with rare photos, excellent veteran accounts and drawings.

I enjoyed reading it a great deal and would gladly read future works from authors Henry Sakaida, Gary Nila and Koji Takaki.

This book was oustanding. The graphics were high quality stuff and the never-before seen photos were extremely intriguing. The book was filled with both.

I especially liked the numerous accounts given by the American and Japanese veterans who were there. Most historians summarize and generalize the experiences and opinions of veterans. Sakaida, Nila and Takaki printed what each man said and thought. This is what sets these authors apart from the rest.

I highly recommend this book. Reading it was like having a conversation about this historical submarine with the men who were there. It was not a cold book filled with historical data and technical specifications.

I purchased this book to have a reference for the Tamiya 1/350 scale I-400 scale model. I was not disappointed. The book gives a detailed history of the development and operations of this unique submarine. Many photos of the hangar bay, plus the details of the Seiran aircraft, including markings, etc. are very detailed and well executed. There are also many detail shots of major features, like conning tower, radar, snorkle, etc. The photos of the boat in dry-dock in Pearl Harbor are invaluable for a modeler. I found the personal interviews with the surviving Japanese members of the crew to be especially interesting. Highly recommended.

AS A SUBMARINE VETERAN, I FOUND THE INFORMATION VALUABLE.
IT WAS AMAZING THAT A VESSEL OF THAT TYPE WAS BUILT AT THAT TIME, AND
FOR THAT PURPOSE. I ENJOYED IT VERY MUCH. I WOULD THINK THAT ALL
SUBMARINER'S WOULD ENJOY THIS BOOK.

What a fantastic book. So interesting I could not put it down.Mr. Nila and Mr. Sakaida do an excellent job shedding light on a little known piece of Pacific War history. This machine is absolutly incredible, especially given the time period in which it was created. I-400 was totally innavative, and way ahead of its time. It is too bad that we had to destroy she and her sister ships. This is the stuff movies are made from!
GREAT book. I highly recommend this to the historian as well as the finescale modeler.

Very disappointed that there is no schematic cross section. Aside from that, the photos are quite good. With addition of schematics and additional interior photos, I would rate this a '5'.

I have been researching WWII submarines for over 20 years and found this book to be one of the best on this subject. Very little was known about Japanese aircraft-carrying subs and this book gives detailed information. It is very readable and the photos are excellent. I highly recommend this book to any reader who wants to learn more about this fascinating sub.

This is a great book for anyone who likes WW2 navel books. It has lots of great pictures and facts on this almost unknown submarine. One of the best parts is the information on the crew.It is difficult to find any info on this sub and this book has it all.

There is virtually nothing available in English on these unique and interesting submarines, so I had high hopes for this book. But the authors mostly fail to deliver the goods. They are long on pretty color pictures of how the subs and their aircraft looked (or might have looked), but short on facts. There isn't even a decent diagram of the subs' interior layout, even though such plans have already been published in books by Shizuo Fukui and Erminio Bagnasco. Some of the technical information in the text is wrong (like degaussing cables protecting the hull from corrosion). Clearly none of the authors knew much about how WWII submarines operated.

The weakest point of the book is that it relies heavily on interviews with former Japanese and American crewmen of I-400. Recollections of veterans are always suspect, and in this case the Japanese submariners and aviators have good reason not to be candid: Many of them were involved in the torture and murder of Allied merchant sailors and narrowly escaped prosecution as war criminals. The authors uncritically repeat a statement that these atrocities were instigated by the German Foreign Ministry. This is totally inconsistent with the Germans' own policy and I have never seen this claim before in the extensive literature on the Pacific War.

The most annoying aspect of the book is that it completely fails to address the issue of whether the I-400 class was intended at one time for biological strikes against Los Angeles and San Francisco. This theory has been widely touted in recent years (even in a History Channel documentary) and is likely to be the main reason many people would want the book -- but to these authors it doesn't even exist!