Content area
Full Text
Evans, David C., and Mark R. Peattie. Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887-1941. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1997. 696pp. $49.95
Like a flare ascending from the dark sea, the Imperial Japanese Navy rose swiftly, burst brilliantly, and then winked out. Like a flare, after it was gone it left almost no evidence that it had ever existed.
The authors of this long-awaited book, David Evans and Mark Peattie, make plain their purpose in their introduction: it is "to explain as far as possible the sources of both the navy's triumphs and its defeat. The perspectives we have chosen are those of strategy, tactics, and technology, or, more precisely, the evolving interrelationship of the three.... We have sought to understand the overriding strategic issues confronting the navy, the synthesis of foreign and indigenous influences in the shaping of its tactics, and how the navy acquired its technology and material assets. We have, at various points, discussed aspects of the navy-intelligence, manning, logistics, naval fuels, to name the most prominent-that relate directly or indirectly to our three main concerns. Finally, as much as anything else, we have attempted to explain how the Japanese navy thought about naval war and how to prepare for it."
To achieve this aim, Evans and Peattie have found and used more evidence on their subject than most people knew existed. They have used it to provide an accurate, clear, concise (even though long), and essentially complete account of a great fighting navy's short but dramatic and, for a time, highly influential life.
The authors began their work long ago, when they could still take advantage of the memories of some of the senior officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy....