Death of a navy;: Japanese naval action in World War II Review

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(More customer reviews)At first glance, Death of a Navy: Japanese Naval Action in World War II offers potentially unique insights into the Pacific war. Originally published in the U.S. in 1957, it is contemporaneous with works such as S.E. Morison's History of U.S. Naval Operations in World War II (1947-1962) and Mitsuo Fuchida's Midway: the Battle that Doomed Japan (1955) and so documents what would still have been relatively recent events. The author, Andrieu d'Albas, was a Captain in the French Navy and (presumably) wrote from the perspective of an informed non-participant. He also, according to the dust jacket, "...spent many months of duty in postwar Japan, married a Japanese woman, speaks Japanese fluently, and knows intimately many of Japan's former top naval officers and civilian leaders" and was thus able to obtain first-person accounts from the losing side. Taken together, these traits of the book and its author should have combined to make a unique contribution to the World War II history of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Unfortunately they do not. While d'Albas correctly captures the general course of the Pacific War and its major battles, there are so many factual errors in Death of a Navy that their combined effect is to call into question d'Albas overall representation of events. For example, on p. xx of the Author's Foreword D'Albas twice refers to Japanese "two-engine bombers" in describing the attack on Pearl Harbor. (All of the Japanese aircraft involved were single-engine.) D'Albas confuses the Japanese aircraft carriers Ryujo and Ryuho for the first time on p. 47 and then adds to the confusion for the rest of the book. Someone not familiar with these ships would surely wonder how "Ryuho" was sunk at the Battle of the Eastern Solomons only to reappear at the Battle of the Philippine Sea. On p. 116, and again on p. 312, he described the Japanese Battleship Yamato's guns as being 17.9 inches in diameter. That they were 18.1 inches was well known by 1957, and yes, in this context two-tenths of an inch matters.
These errors are especially hard to explain in light of Rear Admiral R.A. Theobald's commentary (again quoting the dust jacket): "To make the picture even more complete, Rear Admiral Robert A. Theobald, USN, Ret., has dovetailed his own annotations into the narrative, giving corroboration and comment from the American naval viewpoint." Reading the book, however, the admiral's comments don't corroborate much. For example, how Theobald--who was Commander, Destroyers Pacific in December 1941 and present at Pearl Harbor during the attack--could have actually read the manuscript and missed the "two-engine bomber" error is hard to understand. Elsewhere, Theobald contradicts d'Albas (as on p. 193 in describing the shelling of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal) and the effect is to suggest carelessness and a real lack of concern for historical accuracy on the Author's part.
Death of a Navy is frequently cited as a reference, presumably because it is a concise history of the Pacific war and easily apprehended. A second edition was published in 1965, and that version may address and remedy the many shortcomings of the first. For my part, I'm not going to read it to find out, and I would not recommend anyone else doing so either. For those interested in a one-volume history of Japanese naval operations in World War II, Paul S. Dull's Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy (1978) is a better choice. Like d'Albas, Dull spoke Japanese and made extensive use of Japanese sources. Unlike d'Albas, Dull's book is well researched, accurate, complete, and worth reading. What is more, A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy is still in print and a bargain compared to almost any used copy of Death of a Navy one can find for sale.


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