Books on the Pacific

Hey, I wanted to make up for my lack of knowledge of the Pacific Theater. Do any of you know of any good books on the Pacific in general you could recommend?

 

A good starting point is Ronald Spector's 'Eagle Against the Sun'

 

"Goodbye Darkness" by William Manchester. A very good acount of the USMC from WWI to Okinawa.

"The Divine Wind" by Rikihei Inoguchi, Tadashi Nakajima and Robert Pineau, the best book about Kamikazes.

Those are two which come to my mind right now. I'll search for more later.

Ah! Also try field marshal Sir William Slim's war diaries.

 

I enjoyed "Death is Lighter than a Feather" by David Westheimer if you're looking for a good "what-if" - it's about the invasion of Japan's home islands (if there was no bomb).

 

There is one book you must read in order to truly understand the pacific war...

its impossible to find to buy, but your library might have it..

BUT NOT IN SHAME: The First Six Months after Pearl Harbor

By John Toland, Random House 1961

best book on the Pacific ever

 

I would also strongly recommend Flyboys by James Bradley.
It may just appear to be about the air campaign over the Pacific but it portrays the Japanese mindset very well!

 

James Bradley's Flyboys is a good read, although I caution readers against viewing the villains in Flyboys as representing a universal Japanese mindset. Bradley makes it clear that not all of the Japanese troops on Chichi Jima approved of what was done to the flyboys.

Another book by James Bradley which I cannot recommend strongly enough is Flags of Our Fathers. The book tells the stories of Bradley's father, a Navy corpsman on Iwo Jima who was one of the men depicted in the Marine Corps Memorial, and his fellow Marine flagraisers. That book should be required reading in US schools in my opinion.

[ 16. July 2004, 04:23 AM: Message edited by: Deep Web Diver ]

 

If you are interested in aircraft a good picture book I have is called "Pacific Aircraft Wrecks and Where to Find Them" by Charles Darby published by Kookaburra. Even has pictures of Adm. Yamamoto's Betty bomber in the jungle. It came down in pretty good condition.

 

Try:

John Lundstrom's The First Team - Naval Air Combat From Pearl Harbor to Midway and The First Team and the Guadalcanal Campaign
Both definitive works on carrier action in the first year of the war.

There's always the classics, Walter Karig's five volume set Battle Report; volumes 1,3, 4, & 5 cover the Pacific. Samuel Morison's 15 volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II; volumes 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14 cover the Pacific. Both of these are pretty dated, Karig was published from 1944 to 1949; Morison, from 1947 to 1962. There's no discussion of code breaking, for example, in either. But for a lot of on the scene descriptions, their both pretty good.

Carrier operations are also covered pretty thoroughly in Clark Reynolds' The Fast Carriers, though he sometimes doesn't have all his facts straight.

These would be good starts for the Naval end of things.

v/r

Rich