Customer Reviews

Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941

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I'll state right up front that I'm biased because I illustrated this work. On the flip, the reason I illustrated it was because I knew it would be a worthy sequel to Evans and Peattie's earlier "Kaigun", and I was not disappointed. Peattie has traced the development of the Imperial Navy's air arm from its infancy to its peak as perhaps the finest carrier force in the world at the outbreak of the Pacific War. Along the way, he illustrates both the strengths and fatal weaknesses that characterized Japanese naval airpower. A fascinating read. Perhaps not as long or detailed as "Kaigun," but that's understandable considering the smaller topic area. A great book.

The world, and especially Hawaii, was shocked on Dec. 7, 1941, by the number, modernity, skill and audacity of the Japanese navy's fliers.
But until the publication of Mark Peattie's "Sunburst," there has been no non-technical history in English of how the Imperial Japanese Navy created the air force that attacked Oahu.
Although Japan had to play catchup to the west in everything from law to manufacturing, aviation was the one aspect of the 20th century where the Japanese started even with the outside world.
The Japanese navy was the first to use airplanes in combat (against the Germans in China in 1914), and Lt. Chikuhei Nakajima wrote a visionary, if wrongheaded, manifesto on air power years before the better known (and equally wrongheaded) Billy Mitchell in the United States or Giulio Douhet in Italy.
In the 1930s, the Japanese navy was the first air force to use fighter planes to escort bombers on long-range missions (again in China).
And from December 1941 to March 1942, the world marveled at the apparently unstoppable power of the Japanese aviators at they dominated their enemies from Hawaii to Ceylon.
While giving full credit to the Japanese for what they did, again and again Peattie points to "fatal" weaknesses in their technology, personnel policies, resources, tactics and doctrine. Especially doctrine.
Peattie, who wrote an earlier study of Japanese naval strategy, too briefly contrasts the Japanese navy's "hit-and-run" doctrine with the round-the-clock operations mounted by the U.S. Navy against Japan, once it caught its breath.
Peattie also fails to mention that the Japanese navy, for all its success in sneak attacks and against second-line targets, never won a carrier battle.
By contrast, the much-despised (by the Japanese aviators and apparently also by Peattie) "gun club" of the Japanese surface navy won battle after battle against the Americans, even when outnumbered.
The overall incompetence of the Japanese war machine has been documented elsewhere. The Japanese made hardly any effort to protect their seaborne commerce, failed to set strategic goals, fought among themselves as vigorously as against their enemies and overextended in every direction.
In naval aviation, Peattie shows, the situation was as bad as in any other department.
The symbol of the apparent strength and real weakness of the Japanese war machine is the Zero fighter, and Peattie devotes much attention to it.
In myth, the Zero was a technically advanced weapon far beyond the capacity of the United States to match. In fact, the Zero was a bad compromise, obsolete on the drawing board. A pilot-killer, it was a war-losing weapon.
Peattie gives a good description of the doctrinal battles that led to the creation of a fast, light, maneuverable, underarmed and poorly protected interceptor.
The Zero would have been a liability in any navy but in one that deliberately chose to have a small corps of superbly trained pilots, rather than a lot of reasonably skilled ones, the tradeoffs were disastrous.
The fact that few Zero pilots survived the war has, for some reason, failed to tarnish the plane's reputation.
And the impact on public opinion of the brief but gaudy success period of the Japanese naval air arm has not lessened after 60 years. Peattie's balanced and authoritative "Sunburst" fills a gap in the historiography of the modern Pacific and corrects widespread misconceptions, while adding a few of its own.

Peattie is highly critical of the tactics of the Imperial Japanese Navy's air force and its equipment. According to Peattie the Japanese dipsersed their carrier groups and that gave them lack of a concentrated punch against the American carriers. The Japanese fighter pilots also had a tendacy to fight independentally but not in groups and this left bombers undefended. The Japanese also did not invest enough money in either reconnaissance aircraft or training their crews which left the Japanese carriers without eyes. Peattie states that the Japanese made errors in the design of their carries since most of the planes were parked in the hangers and not on the take off and landing strip of the carriers like their American counterparts and this made it difficult for Japanese crews to rearm and refuel aircraft. Moreover Japnese carriers had insecure fuel lines that made them flamable when attacked. The planes that the Japanese Navy operated very highly vulnerable to enemey fighters since armor was sacrifice for speed. Finally the Japanese did not train enough pilots to replace their losses during the Pacific War. I reccomend this book to anyone whose interested in why the Japanese lost the Pacific War.

I spent a year at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base and I used this book to supplement teaching about World War II. To put it simply: this book is great for a whole host of reasons. It is a detailed, but highly readable history of Japanese Naval aviation in the years leading up to World War II. He offers a number of new insights. Despite popular perceptions today about the quality of Japanese products, the Imperial Japanese Navy produced carriers and planes that had fatal technical flaws. This reflected the blind eye they turned to the less than sexy issues that keeps any air force in the air. For example, what really hurt the Japanese after Midway was not the loss of four carriers or the pilots that operated off these ships, but the maintenance crews that died when the dive bombers hit. While the focus of the book is on the prewar years, he includes a chapter explaining how a number of the issues about tactics, and plane design played out in the war.

In addition, to an impressive text, Peattie has provided his readers with a lot of extra bells and whistles with a series of nine appendices at the end. The topics covered in these section range from technical terms, to biographical sketches of key figures in Japanese naval aviation. There are also diagrams of the various carriers and planes, and their technical specifications. Air power history is always difficult to read about, because it requires a good understanding of the three dimensional nature of air combat. Peattie has also given his readers diagrams of Japanese aviation tactics.

It is hard to see this book being surpassed in this century.

Three nations developed carrier aviation prior to World War II. The development of naval aviation in Britain and the United States is very well documented whereas the story of naval aviation in Japan before the war is almost unknown. It is this void that Mark Peattie's book seeks to fill. The book traces the story of Japanese naval aviation from the first interest by naval officers in 1909 through the eve of the Pacific War in 1941. Peattie covers the earliest operations in China prior to the First World War, development through World War I and the 1920s as Japan slowly progressed from dependence upon foreign technology, notably British, to a completely indigenous naval air arm by the end of the 1930s. He details the struggles between the air minded visionaries and the traditional naval "gun club". He examines how strategic thought evolved and how it influenced the composition of the naval air arm and the characteristics of the planes. He provides extensive coverage of the war in China from 1937 onward and shows how it shaped the Japanese naval air arm. About one third of the book is devoted to a series of appendices covering aviation ships, naval aircraft, aircraft engines, combat tactics, aircraft designation systems, shore based naval aviation units and biographical sketches of the key people involved in the development of the Japanese naval air arm. The appendices alone make the book a treasure trove. With so large a subject, the book necessarily leaves the reader longing for even more. For anyone interested in naval aviation or in the Pacific campaigns of World War II, this book is a "must have".

This book is about the history of Japanese naval aviation from its creation in the early twentieth century, to its effective destruction in 1944. Although the subtitle does say, "1909-1941," there is a chapter at the end entitled, "Descending in Flame," that covers the destruction of IJN air power in WW2. The author, Mark Peattie, is also coauthor of Kaigun, the remarkable one-volume study of the history of the IJN. The information in Sunburst was initially to be included in Kaigun, but due to size limitations, was published separately at a later date.

Sunburst can be enjoyed either by the casual Pacific War reader who is interested in the general developments that led up to December, 1941 for IJN airpower, or serve as a reference for the technical aficionado who is more interested in aircraft designs and tactics. For example the "hineri-komi" aerobatic tactic, so skillfully employed by Zero pilots early in the war, is covered in Appendix 9. The appendices fill out the last 150 or so pages of Sunburst and cover biographical sketches, aircraft and aircraft carrier drawings and specifications.

Peattie makes extensive use of various Japanese language sources, enabling him to assemble into a single volume much information on this topic that has never appeared all together in English. The result is a fascinating tale of how the Japanese not only arrived on the eve of WW2 with the best naval aircrews in the world, but also what inherent shortcomings existed to set them on the path to eventual destruction at the hands of the U.S. navy.

Good "Academic" version of the rise of Japanese Naval Air power up the Pacific War. The detail is good. It should be noted that this is an academic book and covers some ground in English that has not been available in translation before. It is not a traditional narrative history and therefore is a little dry in places.

Several points worthy of note are:
- initial influence of the British of Naval Airpower
- Japanese aircraft carrier design, poor, cramped, elevators could not assemble and retreive aircraft, and a lot of half measures such as the hybrid carriers (e.g. Hyuga) that fullfilled no effective role.
- no development of recce planes and low numbers.
- emphasis upon bomber fleets un-related to sea warfare.
- believed that island archipelagos would supplant the need for an in-depth carrier strike force
- dispersal of carrier forces to render them weak and inferior in some battles.
- individual fighting tactics of the Japanese pilot could not compete with the engine power and fire-power of the Americans and British.
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Exceptional training and development of the isshin-denshin model of attack, but this had limitations in a world where radio was of increasing importance.

Most of the results accord with what I have read in Japanese. Some of this information appears in English for the first time.

For those who wanting to learn about Japanese Naval aviation in the interwar period it is indeed fascinating and I have used it on two occassions to find older airfields and remnants of others in Kasumigaura and Tateyama. A good worthy book, but a little dry to read. Read it only if you want to obtain new insights into the Pacific War. If you want a more snappy read, pick another title. I give it four stars for its original content and presentation of new ideas.

a disappointing book for anyone with reasonable knowledge of japanese naval aviation. I was hoping for new information but all info and photos have been seen before.

The Pacific War is a subject which has not led to many new revelations in the last fifty or so years. As Japan was occupied it was possible to obtain access to their side of the conflict. This can be compared to the European Conflict that has been the subject of a large number of revelations. The Soviet Union kept a lot of its secrets close to its chest and with its collapse we now have a greater understanding of its role in the war which has balanced our previous understanding which has been based on German sources. ...This book ...deals with the Japanese development of a naval air force. ...Although the book is clearly written and structured in a logical way it does not say much more than one would get on a Pacific War Internet site. It traces how Japan developed naval aircraft which in 1942 were able to outperform allied aircraft but which became quickly obsolete and were shot out of the skies with ease from 1943 onwards. It also describes the failure of Japan to coordinate its army and naval aviation programs and the failure to train enough pilots to deal with losses suffered during the initial campaigns....