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

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.Read more ›

I own and fly a WWII "warbird," (a small one actually, an L3 recon bird) so all things WWII aviation fascinate me. As an historian and author I wrestled a bit with giving this work four stars or five, based upon the valid points that there were some factual errors and perhaps at times an over reliance on secondary sources, but five stars won out. The battle descriptions, there are numerous works for that, but what I really appreciated was the time the author spent with how Grumman Aviation got its start, what went into research and design pre war, and what were the logistics and effort that took a military aircraft from "we need this now!" to actual end of the assembly line production and into the hands of young pilots going to war. To many works focus on the shock of battle itself, works that explain the efforts of the "man behind the man behind the gun," deserve more study and this book delivers it using an interesting personal story style of writing, rather than just dry facts.

It was intriguing to learn how Grumman, when it turned over "Avenger" manufacturing to General Motors, delivered a dozen such aircraft to a pre-war rival, put together with sheet metal screws so the team at GM could easily disassemble the entire aircraft, study it in detail, and thus more swiftly retool their assembly line and continue mass production without let up. When you contrast that type of cooperation with the "feudalistic" rivalries and "secrets" within the Nazi system of industry it reinforces just how incredibly united we were during that war to see the task through to victory and a "thank God," that in spite of Speer's efforts to create a unified cooperative manufacturing system for Hitler, it was too little too late.Read more ›

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.