JAPANESE CARRIERS AND
VICTORY IN THE PACIFIC
THE YAMAMOTO OPTION
** IN HARDBACK, EPUB OR KINDLE **
One of the first books to focus on the pre-war controversy between
building more big battleships or converting to aircraft carriers as
the ‘capital ships’ of the future.
An Asian power challenges the might of the USA and the colonial
empires and loses the contest but comes out all right in the
Cold War aftermath.
Examines much overlooked intelligence such as the long genesis
of Japan’s so-called shadow fleet that along with the super-battleships
cluttered launch facilities when these could have been devoted to
keel-up fast fleet carrier production.
The first analytical look at what major launch facilities were actually
available in Japan.
Japanese Carriers and Victory in the Pacific focuses on the pre-war debate between
building a new generation of super-battleships or adopting aircraft carriers as the ‘capital
ships’ of the future. An Asian power in particular sees carriers as a way of challenging the
USA and the colonial empires initially losing the contest yet coming out all right in the Cold
War aftermath.
Martin Stansfeld examines the much overlooked genesis of Japan’s so-called shadow
fleet that was a secret attempt to bring about parity with the US in carriers — albeit only
with slower speed conversions of liners and auxiliaries but along with the superbattleships
cluttered launch facilities when these could have been devoted to keel-up fast fleet carrier
production.
This first analytical look at what major launch facilities were available in Japan shows that
the Imperial Japanese Navy could have doubled its fast carrier fleet thereby able to give
sufficient air cover for an invasion of Hawaii rather than just the raid on Pearl Harbor, but
only providing nobody noticed they were building all these carriers. This is shown to have
been entirely possible given the IJN’s extraordinary success at covering up their superbattleship
and shadow fleet production. This secret fast carrier fleet programme is given the name
‘phantom fleet’ by Stansfeld who proceeds to demonstrate how the strategy of the Pacific War
would have been transformed. Weaving through the chapters is an exotic cast of characters
led most notably by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the conceiver of Pearl Harbor and a figure
of mythic status to Japanese today and famous around the world thanks to the movies.
Stansfeld dwells on the ironies of war, notably how, without the ‘day that will live in infamy’,
America might never have become the worldwide super-power it is today.