Java Sea 1942: Japan's conquest of the Netherlands East Indies: 344 (Campaign, 344)

The early surface actions of the Pacific war are fascinating, before carrier aircraft begin to get involved and influence the battle itself beyond just floatplane reconnaissance. The series of defeats in the Java Sea area are extremely interesting to read about, and it is a complex story due to the many nations involved in the allied side, the confusing command chain, shuffling of units around, and hectic combat. This book does a respectable job of covering these series of actions in limited space, managing to cover all the early chapters ( Origins, commanders, fleets, plans ) in 36 pages and have the rest of the book for the campaign chapter. There’s much to cover in these early chapters because of how complex the campaign is, and there’s many photos to show all the various ships involved. The campaign chapter is full to the brim, with lots of great photos, including many action shots that I think should be better known as they are great photos, well written and broken out text, and 3 action plates. The maps are a life saver, each of the 4 actions gets a map devoted to it, and the large Java Sea battle itself actually has it broken down into 5 phases so we don’t get lost in he confusion. This works great for understanding ship movements, although it does remove a few extra pages of text, the only map I will complain about is that of the Sunda Strait action, where there’s so many ships and lines drawn around that it’s very hard to follow any one ships course. The map of the Balikpapan action does have one error where one Japanese ship has one name on the map and another in the text, but it’s a minor vessel and therefore minor detail. One complaint I will have is early on the book does read a bit rough, with short sentences and a lack of flow to the text, something I would expect from Mark Lardas titles, but Mark Stille typically has a far better writing style, which reveals itself further through the book. Great introduction to the beginning of the Pacific war and how the allies were removed from many of their western Pacific holdings.

Informatief boekje over de Slag in de Javazee 1942 en de verloren gegane schepen

Good maps, very useful as primer for the campaign, I kept this handy to one side with the overall theatre map open as I was reading a much more detailed history after reading this volume.

Das Buch erklärt mit vielen Details genau den Grund, wie Japan 1941 und 1942 fähig war die Alliierten Gegner zu schlagen. Zum Beispiel, die Myoko klasse von Kreuzern war so viel besser als alle vergleichbare Schiffe die die Niederländer (De Ruyter), Engländer (Exter) oder Amerikaner (Northampton) in Dienst hatten. Dazu kommen auch noch Flugzeugträger und der Typ 93 Torpedo, All diese Sachen werden in diesem Buch ausführlich (illustriert mit vielen Bildern) behandelt.

Libretto ottimo ed esaustivo consigliato davvero