Customer Reviews

Pacific Air: How Fearless Flyboys, Peerless Aircraft, and Fast Flattops Conquered the Skies in the War with Japan

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

 

 

Pacific Air is a collection of World War II aviation stories from the Pacific, along with some balancing material regarding the design and manufacture of some of the aircraft mentioned in the book. It is in the category of "Popular History," targeted to aviation war buffs who like to read about pilots "yankin' and bankin'" in combat.

In such a book, the author has the responsibility to

1) select representative stories and render them accuratly;
2) write in a fun and engaging manner;
3) provide a well organized presentation;
4) provide accurate background history to place the stories in context;
5) treat the reputations of our veterans with respect.

So, let's grade Sears' work in those categories:
1: some stories are inaccurate and sloppily retold
2: high marks, a well-written book
3: impossible to maintain a coherent thread
4: abysmal
5: he repeats a false story about one of our still-living veterans that is totally inaccurate and shows a shameful lack of research

1: Selecting representative stories and rendering them accurately: Sears introduces stories from a massive number of aviators, mostly culled from other secondary sources. He has original stories from two still-living aviators, but their combat tales are only a fraction of the last 15 pages of the book. As for the recast stories, Sears has done a sloppy job in at least one.

I decided to check on his re-telling of the story of Saburo Sakai's first aerial combat. Sears depicts it as a short battle. Sakai fires one burst, and "in that one prolonged burst, he had expended all his ammunition (57)," entirely different from what is in Sakai's book Samurai, where Sakai depicts an extended engagement with many bursts fired.

With a bit of purple prose, Sears also castigates Sakai's fellow aviators: "They's dangled him as bait only to rescue him from the enemy predator's hungry jaws. It was a cruel initiation rite that easily could have spelled his end" (57). But according to Sakai, "Anticipating that I might fumble with my controls in my first combat - as I did! - the flight leader had assigned one of the veteran pilots to cover my plane from behind" (29-30). Sakai's prescient and considerate leader is transformed by Sears into a nasty prankster.

This also illustrates one of Sear's poorer attributes: he is very willing to re-write history in order to get a more entertaining tale for his readers. We'll see more of that later.

2) write in a fun and engaging manner: that he does. Sears has an excellent writing style, and he brings his topic to life. He has a deft touch in selecting the telling fact or compelling incident that enlives his subject and bring out the color of a colorful group of aviators. Top marks.

But, characteristic of writing for this audience, he often descends into the morass of purple prose, like: "But in this chaotic and darkening day, fate stalked three of the men - theirs was a blood bond deeper than even shared traditions or camaraderie ... in the next months stretching into years ... In the next months stretching into years, it would snuff the lives (to enemy fire, captivity, or torture; to aircraft malfunctions, collisions, and crashes; to darkness, fog or typhoons; to drowning, exposure, starvation, dehydration, hypoxia, hypothermia or vertigo; to hesitation or overconfidence; to uncounted instances of the unknowable) if a third of the men who ventured from aircraft carrier decks over a hostile, pitiless and seemingly boundless Pacific Ocean" (14-15). Sheesh. Well, there is a market for that kind of stuff, and Sears really plays to that market.

3) provide a well organized presentation: well, according to your taste. Sears subdivides his tale in two sections, 20 chapters and about 370 "page breaks" where he changes topics. Most of the book is in short, one-half to one page vignettes, bouncing back and forth between the over 400 people mentioned in the index. The sections are edited like an MTV music video for an attention-deficit disorder audience. I found it impossible to maintain any continuity in the story, as I had to constantly flip back to remember the background for a particular character in his narrative. I don't have a perfect memory. If you don't either, approach the book with care, unless you are just interested in reading the stories uninhibited by context.

4) provide accurate background history to place the stories in context: really, really bad. Sears makes constant errors in fact and in interpretation. A small sampling:

* Germany's blitzkrieg was "unleashed against Northern Europe in August 1939" (80) instead of in September.
* At the beginning of the war, Admiral Ernest King, the Chief of Naval Operations, wanted to advance through the "Solomon Islands, New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago" (112). In truth, King did not support this (partially MacArthur's) route of advance along New Guinea, believing the proper route was via the Central Pacific in accordance with the Navy's long-established Warplan ORANGE.
* The 1942 Lae / Salamaua strikes were "a huge success" (118); in fact they were a severe disappointment, with poor bombing accuracy.
* Relating a carrier battle, Sears writes that aerial torpedo hits at 2:44 PM "sealed Yorktown's fate" although "it would take hours (stretching into days) of indecision and struggle before Yorktown finally sank" (179). The actual time was 4:20 PM. The ship was being salvaged, but was hit the following afternoon by a Japanese submarine, unmentioned by Sears; these follow-on hits sank the ship. The first hits did not "seal her fate."
* Bombs that hit carriers are invariably described as "armor-piercing." The Japanese did not use AP bombs from dive bombers.
* After a Japanese bombardment of Guadalcanal Sears claimed that "Butt plates of fourteen and eighteen-inch rounds lay everywhere" (231). No Japanese ship mounting eighteen-inch guns ever bombarded Guadalcanal.
* Sears claimed that Japanese losses at Guadalcanal of two battleships, one carrier, five cruisers, twelve destroyers, and eight submarines were "equal in scope to the IJN's entire pre-war strength" (257). The IJN's strength on 6 December 1941 was 10 BB, 10 carriers, 38 cruisers, 108 destroyers and 68 submarines. Sears like to exaggerate to make his topic more dramatic.
* He states that 32 Essex class carriers were under construction or on order by August 1942 (263). The actual number was 23. He claimed that the conversion of Cleveland-class cruisers to light carriers was "necessitated by 1942's devastating carrier attrition at Coral Sea, Midway and Guadalcanal." Cleveland-class conversions began in January 1942, and six of the nine were on order prior to the Battle of the Coral Sea.
* Sears gives the deck armor of the battleship California as 14 inches, when it was actually 5.5 inches.
* He speaks of executing fighter tactics without "enemy-alerting radio warnings" (70), in spite of the fact that such transmissions could not possibly alert enemy fighters. Japanese Zeros mostly did not carry radios, and those few that carried them did not use them to monitor US transmissions.

The above are just a sampling of the types of errors that pop up with disconcerting frequency.

As one of his themes, Sears propagates the fable that surface officers - the "Gun Club" - saw aviation's value solely as the scouting eyes of the Battle Force. Previous aviation propagandists have exaggerated the "Aviators v. Gun Club" conflict, a story line overturned by recent research that has revealed a more cooperative, less acrimonious process in developing carrier doctrine. For an example, see American and British Aircraft Carrier Development, 1919 - 1941.

Sears also misinterprets other history. His version of a press conference held by Admiral John Towers, Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics:

Towers said, "It's the aircraft carrier that will spearhead the action in the next war." Sensing both Tower's unease and the sort of firestorm that such a statement might ignite in the Navy's Gun Club ranks and the halls of Congress, one reporter asked him to repeat (72).

Sears' reference for this exchange was Buell's Master of Sea Power: A biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King. From page 343 (not 363, as cited by Sears):

"The reporters at first were silent. Finally one spoke: "Will you repeat that, Admiral."

Sears had NO FACTUAL BASIS to know what the reporter was thinking or sensing. Sears has the reporter sensing "Tower's unease" and a future "firestorm" in the "Gun Club's ranks and the halls of Congress," none of which can be drawn from Buell's text. PURE FABRICATION.

Worse, it is an inaccurate fabrication. Sears presents the statement as an attack by Towers against battleship proponents, in line with his aviators v. Gun Club theme. Such an attack was entirely out of character for Towers and inconsistent with his previous relations with surface officers. Towers was instead reacting to a crisis of an entirely different sort. There was a national shortage of machine tools. The Army Air Forces wanted to speed up the production of heavy bombers, taking priority over naval aviation for critical materials. Tower's statement to the reporters staked a claim for equality with the AAF, and was not an attack on the "Gun Club." See Admiral John H. Towers: The Struggle for Naval Air Supremacy, by Clark G. Reynolds (350 - 357).

In another story, Sears relates a tale about King's alleged dislike for Wilson Brown:

In February, when Lexington's Wilson Brown had communicated his desperate need for re-provisioning, King had been moved to snap: "Carry on as long as you have hardtack, beans, and corn willy. What the hell are you worrying about?" (113-114).

Lundstrom depicts the incident in Black Shoe Carrier Admiral: Frank Jack Fletcher at Coral Sea, Midway, & Guadalcanal (95). Lexington was nearly out of food and Brown wanted to draw on supplies from a forward stores ship before departing on a return voyage to Pearl Harbor. King refused, sending Brown a message to eat "beans and hardtack." King was desperate to build up forward stockpiles for later use. Lexington's crew made the transit subsisting largely on beans and canned spinach.

Sears does not give a source for his version of the incident. It has the sniff of contrivance, of Sears' making things up to make the story more dramatic. But, how could King have "snapped" at Brown, who was half a world away? It is highly doubtful that even crusty King would have written "What the hell are you worrying about?" in a naval message. Sears has King referring to "corn willy," a WW I doughboy dish mixing corn beef, bacon grease, canned tomatoes or potatoes, and canned corn, ingredients the carrier did not have, and a feast compared to beans and spinach. Beans and hardtack would be a hardship; corn willy would not. Its inclusion in the sentence does not make sense; corn willy cannot be found in Lundstrom's account. Corn Willy appears to be a Sears' fabrication.

Sears wrote about Frank Jack Fletcher in the immediately following paragraphs, and Lundstrom's book is in his bibliography, so it is likely he found this incident from those sources. He either decided to juice up the story for his audience of casual readers by inventing a dramatic quotation, or failed to verify his memory before writing. Each is unsatisfactory. Sears turns a justifiable decision by King into a petulant clash of personalities.

5) treat the reputations of our veterans with respect.

The most significant fault is Sears' reprehensible treatment of Alvin Kernan. For this, his book should be pulled off the shelves.

Kernan was the rear gunner aloft in a TBF torpedo bomber the night when Lieutenant Commander Edward "Butch" O'Hare, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, was shot down and killed.

According to Sears:
[Kernan] opened up on the intruder with a long burst. From his vantage point at the starboard window of the TBF, Rand [the belly gunner on Kernan's aircraft], now in some pain from his wounded foot, saw tracers **stream down towards the starboard Hellcat** [my emphasis added]. With his ammunition expended, Kernan watched the intruder break away to port and disappear. Then the starboard Hellcat dropped off to port as well (288).

In other words, according to Sears, Kernan killed O'Hare.

Kernan did not shoot down O'Hare. An official navy inquiry totally exonerated Kernan. Sears could have found information on this famous event from navy records, from O'Hare's biography (which is listed in his bibliography), even Wikipedia has an extensive article on the incident. All exonerate Kernan.

Kernan also wrote Crossing the Line: A Bluejacket's Odyssey in World War II, which includes the engagement, and is not listed in Sears' bibliography. Poor research - he could have gotten the truth directly from the man involved. In his book, one can sense Kernan's pain in being stigmatized as "the man who (might have) killed Butch O'Hare." This honorable veteran, this honorable HERO, is still alive, and does not deserve to be re-accused by a careless author.

Later Sears refers to another pilot's desire to have revenge on the Japanese "after learning of Butch O'Hare's loss to a Betty" (291). This is far short of an unequivocal statement exonerating Kernan. Sears should have immediately made it clear that O'Hare was shot down by the Japanese. Kernan should have been praised for recognizing and engaging the Betty under trying night flying conditions, trying to save O'Hare's life. Sears' haphazard description of the engagement slashes away scar tissue and leads people unfamiliar with the incident, that is, the target audience for which this book is written, to an egregious conclusion. What unwary future historian will take his history from Sears' mistake?

Overall, Pacific Air has all the hallmarks of a book hurriedly manufactured to ride the shirt-tales of the success of the author's previous book on naval aviation in Korea. It is compromised by careless writing, doubtful interpretations of history, mistakes, and historical and technical errors.

For the military buff interested in rousing tales of fighter pilots "yankin' and bankin'" in aerial combat, it is well-written entertainment.

It is not recommended for those who value historical accuracy.

Author David Sears has written a fine book about the air battle waged between the Americans and the Japanese. However, this book is different from others I've read on the subject. Sears starts out with a discussion about early test pilots and the formation of the Grumman Aircraft Company. Grumman produced the F4F, F6F, and TBF aircraft that were mainstays on the decks of American carriers. This part of the book was interesting and informative.

Next, Sears moves the reader into the actual Pacific campaign, including the disastrous loss of American planes shot down by nervous gunners hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As the book goes on, Sears takes the reader through the early American strikes against the Marshall and Gilbert Islands, the pivotal battle of the Coral Sea, the turning of the tide at Midway, the first offensive at Guadalcanal, the taking of the Marshalls, Carolines, and Gilberts, and culminating with the Marianas Turkey Shoot. Throughout, Sears keeps the reader abreast of the changes in the conflict, including the introduction of the Essex and Independence-class carriers. Once these ships started flowing into the Pacific, along with the F6F Hellcat fighter, the Japanese began to see ever-increasing losses of their own planes and ships.

Perhaps the most intersting parts of the book for me dealt with the individual personalities Sears discusses. Men such as Butch O'Hare, Jimmie Thatch, Alex Vraciu, and Saburo Sakai take prominent places in this book. I had heard about Sakai's near-fatal clash over Guadalcanal, but Sears continues with Sakai's story and takes it through the end of the war. He also covers the early Grumman test pilots and the tremendous risks they took flying early prototype aircraft. Many lost their lives.

I give this great book my highest recommendation. This book does a fine job of describing the air war in the Pacific and adds some other interesting tidbits, too.

Best-selling author David Sears delivers a wide-ranging history of the Navy's carrier war in PACIFIC AIR, a 2011 Da Capo Press release. Sub-titled HOW FEARLESS FLYBOYS,PEERLESS AIRCRAFT AND FAST FLATTOPS CONQUERED A VAST OCEAN'S WARTIME SKIES, Sears details how Navy planners, inventive fleet pilots and corporate entities like Grumman combined to produce a war-winning combat force that decimated Japanese air and sea power.

Though PACIFIC AIR encompasses both fighter and bomber ops, its chief focus is on the USN fighter experience. When war broke out, a small but experienced group of Naval aviators went to war flying the stubby, rugged F4F Wildcat manufactured by Grumman Aircraft, a fairly new defense company. Navy fighter tactics were ill-suited to dueling with Japan's main fighter, the superlative Mitsubishi Zero-Sen. Yet not only did the Wildcat 'band of brothers' hold the line against the Japanese, they developed tactics that negated much of the Zero's strong points. Grumman, in turn, became an industrial giant, developing its war-winning successor to the Wildcat, the F6F Hellcat along with the TBF Avenger bomber, which became a fleet workhorse. Likewise, new classes of aircraft carriers were developed and mass-produced. The Navy's training system was refined and ramped up to produce thousands of aviators and so on.

PACIFIC AIR interweaves those complementary plotlines into one narrative. It follows the development and growth of Grumman. It details the experiences of a number of aviators, almost all fighter pilots, such as Thach, Flatley, O'Hare, Vraciu, McCampbell, etc. who were top aces and/or developed tactics that helped defeat the Japanese. As a balance to the American perspective, Sears relates the wartime service of IJN ace Saburo Sakai. PACIFIC AIR also charts the creation and refinement of the Navy's battle strategies and how those strategies played out at Santa Cruz, Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, the Marianas Turkey Shoot, etc.

While I enjoyed the book, I thought it could have used another 50 pages or so. Some events are unevenly covered, others are briefly alluded to, etc. Also there are a fair number of errors, major and minor, in the book, chief of which is the long-discredited version of Butch O'Hare's death from friendly fire. Sears needs to be a better job of fact-checking in the future.

In any case, PACIFIC AIR should prove popular with Sears' fans. It's an often exciting chronicle of the creation of the naval carrier force that, by war's end, ruled the Pacific. Recommended with reservations.

*****
3,400 Helpful Votes!

Students of World War II know that a large part of the war in the Pacific Ocean against the Japanese consisted of huge carrier battles, where enemy ships never saw each other and the war took place among the planes in the sky. These planes were based on aircraft carriers and the war was a back-and-forth battle between these planes to try and sink the enemy carriers before your own were sunk. Pacific Air by David Sears examines the war from the viewpoint of these pilots, and it's a great read.

Sears begins with the aircraft themselves, detailing how before the war, Grumman became one of the mainstays for the building of naval aircraft. He talks about the flight tests, the strengths and weaknesses of some of the first planes to fly off the assembly line. It is important to get a basic understanding regarding what these pilots were actually flying. However, while the first chapter starts with the reaction of the factory higher-ups when the attack on Pearl Harbor was announced (they were opening a new plant on the same day), and the second tells us about the first naval pilot casualties as they attempt to land in Hawaii and were shot at by panicked ground gunners, this does not make a riveting story for those readers just beginning the book.

Once Sears gets back into the war and gives readers the background on the main pilots he is going to be following, such as "Butch" O'Hare (the Chicago airport is named after him), Pacific Air becomes much more interesting. Sears tells the story of many of these pilots chronologically, going back and forth among the various locales, as some were stationed in Hawaii before eventually being shipped out. We get a little more insight into such battles as the Coral Sea and Midway and how they looked from a pilot's point of view. We get to know these personalities; when one of their carriers is sunk, I actually felt it a little bit, too.

Many of these people we are getting to know don't make it through the war, and Sears paints full enough portraits of them to make their losses felt as well. It's interesting seeing the war from their points of view. We often get a detailed history of what happened in the war, the strategy and tactics, why something happened. Pacific Air is a firsthand account on many occasions, with details from war diaries and other sources that bring the war to life, getting down into the fighting itself.

Even more interesting is that we get at least one view from the Japanese side. Sears traces the career of Ensign Saburo Sakai from his training days (the details of the brutality of the Japanese military to even their own members is quite striking) all the way to the end of the war. This adds a good opposite picture to the American carrier pilots. It's intriguing to see the initial elation of the Japanese carrier pilots after Pearl Harbor, the confidence they carried with them as they overran the Pacific Ocean, and the disheartening blows as the Americans slowly rose up and punished them.

Sears also includes an extensive bibliography, a list of carrier pilots with their accomplishments and fates--and a note system that is a major annoyance. I hate endnotes where there are no superscripted numbers. Instead, the notes quote part of a line from a page and tell you more information about that passage. The problem is that you're not alerted to when a note is there. You have to be paying just as much attention to the notes as you do the text itself. After a while, I stopped bothering.

Again, this is not a definitive history of the Pacific War. When the carrier battles are over (the "Marianas Turkey Shoot" in 1944 is where the Japanese naval aviation arm is almost totally destroyed), the book ends. Sears does relate what happened to those pilots who were still alive at the end of the war, a great wrap-up to the book.

Pacific Air may not exactly be gripping reading, but it is a great look at the Pacific War from the air, capturing all the cockiness, drama, and heartbreak as friends are lost, some never to be seen again (such as O'Hare). Anybody with an interest in World War II will find this a valuable addition to their collection.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book © Dave Roy, 2011

Like SUCH MEN AS THESES, David Sears seats you in the cockpit with the Aviators and Air Crew. He brings to life the air war from the "Farmers" to the brave heroes whose only wish was to climb through the clouds to find and destroy the enemy.

Mr. Sears' meticulous research in this book clarified in a way that I have not preciously seen, the step by step progress (and consequences) of each of the major carrier battles.

Like all of David Sears' books, I highly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in modern Naval history and, especially, Naval Aviation.

Sear's book appealed to me when I read through a few passages: individual stories I'd not previously read, instead of the broad histories we've often seen. So I took a copy home.

What a letdown. I have many of the same criticisms brought up in Alan D. Zimm's amazon.com review. Aside from the many factual errors (such as the misleading passage that Zimm notes, which implies USS Yorktown was sunk solely due to air attack), the book is choppy and hard to read.

Some mistakes that Sears makes:
* Regarding the Battle of Midway, Sears never mentions the utter destruction of torpedo squadron VT-8, which lost all 15 of its TBD bombers and 44 of 45 aircrew dead. He also mis-states the overall aircraft losses, putting TBD losses as far less than SBD dive bomber losses.
* Sears states the Allies lost five cruisers and four destroyers at the Battle of Savo Island: the correct numbers are four and one.
* Sears' use of the term "butt plate" to describe the debris left after a Japanese shelling of Guadalcanal. A butt plate is part of a rifle, hardly an item of interest when 14-inch guns have been chewing up the landscape.

There are more errors, but these, plus those mentioned by Zimm, make the point. This is not a book to be trusted. There is also a sad lack of primary references.

I also agree with Zimm that the narrative style chosen by Sears is hard to follow. We'll read a page or so about one person, then a page or so about another, etc. This is a reasonable technique when the stories have a common thread to bring them together, but this isn't the case. It's just a gimmick.

All in all, this book is sloppily researched, incompetently proofread, and poorly written. I give it two stars solely for the new material it presents. I just hope a majority of it is accurate.

I gave this book to a veteran who is an avid reader. He really enjoyed this book and recommended it to others! Great gift for an 'older gent'!

This history book was written in such a reader friendly style that it was like reading a good novel. David Sears has made me want to read more books he has written. Having been a navy airdale, his use of terms (lingo) of the trade was entertaining, but explained to the novice as well.

" Pacific Air is the story of how The United States Navy and Marine combat pilots helped win World War II in this fascinating history. Their F4F Wildcats, F6F Hellcats and TBF Avengers defeated more than 5,000 Japanese planes, won critical battles, and turned the tide of the Pacific Ocean war by 1944. Pacific Air is a remarkable history of pilots, tactics, engineering and brave warriors."