Japan’s Blitzkrieg: The Allied Collapse in the East 1941-42 Hardcover – October 3, 2006

This is a highly melodramatic account of Japan's initial surge. It's an entertaining read. I don't think it's particularly good history. And it has some bias. The blitz took over huge areas populated by native peoples, who get almost no mention. The focus is on European and American defeats, with a liberal dose of Japanese brutality. The military aspects are mostly naval, neglecting the landing and land aspects.

It seems based largely on the accounts of people involved, and the sense is that the Japanese were on a rampage. They were not particularly kindly conquerors, but then neither were the Dutch, French, British or American particularly kindly to the colonial lands the Japanese overran. The Japanese are not credited with military competency--they were audacious, sometimes brilliantly led, well trained and competent, not always the case with the allies who were defeated. There is a sense of massive brute force overwhelming nice people. One wonders if the Javanese minded much seeing Dutch soldiers surrender.

As narrative story telling, the book is good. As actual history, supplement it with other material.

According to the publisher, this is an "eminenty readable" book. Perhaps so - it is written in a swashbuckling style with heroic heros and fiercely determine foes and plucky merchant marine crews and ships that are devoured by raging fires, grand fun if you are after entertainment. However, it rapidly becomes clear that the author, a former merchant marine commanding officer, apparently knows little to nothing about navies in World War II in the Pacific. For example, he lists the CA USS Houston as a light cruiser, he arms US four-piper destroyers sometimes with 6 3-inch guns and sometimes with 4.7-inch guns (their actual armament was 4-inch guns, the 4.7-inch was a British weapon on British destroyers), he thinks that the Mitsubishi G3M "Nell" twin-engine land based bomber was stationed on Japanese aircraft carriers as a dive bomber, he puts US destroyers in flotillas instead of squadrons and divisions, he described the Houston's bomb hit as destroying her forward turret (it was the aft), he gives the Hatsuharu class Japanese destroyers 6 torpedo tubes instead of nine, and on and on and on. He talks about USS Langley, a aircraft transport with a flat deck for carrying planes, as if it still had the capability to fly off aircraft. He mis-lables the Kongo class battleships as if one was a battle cruiser and the rest battleships. Too many mistakes, errors, and muddy thinking to list them all.
What makes it very frustrating is that you don't know what is good information and what is bad. There is a short bibliography, mostly the usual suspects, but no footnotes, which makes inmpossible to track down the sources for some of his more surprising assertation, such as that the Japanese were somehow warned of the approach of the USS Langley to Java by spies.
Edwards likes to liven up his writing by attributing emotions to people, mostly on his own hook. Yes, he just makes things up, sometimes laughably so. For example, a boatload of survivors from a sunk merchant ship is machine-gunned by a Japanese destroyer, and Edwards asserts that the merchant crew was "bemused" that they are being gunned down. A few lines later we learn that they all perished. How, then, did Edwards know they were bemused? This kind of thing is repeated throughout the book: in order to make the history more "readable," the author just flat makes things up. Characters in his drama are enraged, dejected, bemused, and heroic, and other such descriptions, without any source other than Edward's imagination.
Given all of the above, why so generous with 2 stars?
There actually is some content to the book. Edwards is at his best when dealing with the actions of merchant shipping during the period of the evacuation of Singapore and Java. Many merchant sailors' accounts are quoted in considerable length, good, primary-source material. Ewards has details on ships lost, tonnages, and casualties that are hard to find from other resources. Edwards doesn't know navy, but he knows merchant marine, and there is much of value if one can filter out of the dross of his purple prose and fabrications. Unfortunately, here too he goes to excess, especially in descriptions of merchant marine actions. For example, a merchant ship that does not take a hit during a bombing attack is described as "masterfully handled" with a paragraph or two of superlatives. A careful reading of the incident yields the fact that this "masterful handling" consisted on one turn, and the attack was over before the ship had even turned through 90 degrees. A bunch of green dive bomber crews blew their attack, but Edwards does not know enough about warfare to discern the difference between poor bombing and "masterful handling."
Well, I own the book, and I've yellow-line some passages for possible use in my own work - that is, if I am not too embarassed to cite this book as a source. Pen & Sword books should be embarassed, too. With all the spelling mistakes in the book and factual errors, it is evident that the publisher did not make the investment in time for a good editor to review the writing and a good historian to review the facts. The book would have been better with about half the adjectives red-lined.
So, buy this book if you are interested in the Merchant Marine in the beginning of World War II in the Pacific; don't trust anything written that is not a direct quote from one of the merchant seamen or a fact that can be verified from another source; for anything else, maintain a healthy level of scepticism, and have a good laugh with some of the goofy mistakes.
Dr. Alan D. Zimm, CDR USN (ret).

This overly popular book has some mistkaes in facts but nevertheless examines the most interesting part of the pacific war, one that is often forgotten, the Japanese victories in 1941 that began after Dec. 7th and culiminated in the surrender of Singapore and the conquest of the Dutch East India, the Phillipines and Burma.

Seth J. Frantzman

This is a wonderful book. I can't put it down. One of the best.