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Fire In The Sky: The Air War In The South Pacific
In the first two years of the Pacific War of World War II, air forces from Japan, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand engaged in a ruthless struggle for superiority in the skies over the Solomon Islands and New Guinea. Despite operating under primitive conditions in a largely unknown and malignant physical environment, both sides employed the most sophisticated t
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Paperback, 723 pages
Published
April 13th 2001
by Westview Press
(first published 1999)
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(showing 1-30)
Once again Eric Bergerud has produced an outstanding book, this one covering the air war in the Pacific. This is a great companion volume to his last book covering the land campaign, Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific. This new book offers the reader a great story about air combat in the Pacific and the author's research and passion for the subject shows. It is hard to find a decent one-volume account of this period that covers all combatants, their weapons, tactics and strateg
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This book is a very, very thorough account on the air battle for the South Pacific 1942-44. Describing anything from tactics, strategy, industrial capacity, logistics, training of personnel, the capacity to develop new, second generation fighters and bombers to diseases and the standard of living for the troops. I really enjoyed reading it.
This is fascinating account of the air war in the South Pacific in World War II. Bergerud offers no mere blow-by-blow account of the battle for Guadalcanal, but expands his history to cover the fighting in the rest of the theatre and investigate the conditions in which the conflict was fought. The challenges of geography, distance, climate, and disease are discussed at length, and the author explains their strategic implications a well as their human, personal implications. The personal recollec
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A dense and lengthy volume that ultimately crumples under its own weight. Every single specific you'd want to know, plus dozens more you'd never even thought of, are here. Seriously; when a specific model of warplane gets upgraded to a bigger engine or gun, Bergerud makes sure we know it. He also has compiled an extensive collection of interviews with former pilots, which, in all seriousness, are invaluable as historical records. That is to say, Bergerud has the material; it's just that he doesn
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The information contained is excellent...The writing needed to have a competent editor
This book is very detailed but felt like one run on sentence.
There are too many books in the world that I want to read--more, I'm afraid, than I can read in my lifetime. So it's rare that I read a book more than once. But I recently reread Touched With Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific, and now I've also reread its companion volume, Fire in the Sky: The Air War in the South Pacific. Together, they give a most comprehensive discussion of what warfare was like in the most inhospitable geographical area on the planet, with some of the most savage fight
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The South Pacific, as Eric Bergerud points out at the start of this book, was an unlikely place to develop into a battlefield during the Second World War. Lacking natural resources or any geographic significance in its own right, its proximity to the more important locations of Southeast Asia made it the centerpoint in the war between the Japanese on the one hand and the United States and her allies on the other. And a key aspect of that war was the struggle taking place in the skies between the
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Wow, what an in depth book! This is certainly no book for the light WW II aviation reader. However as a Naval Aviation veteran and big time History Buff, this is the stuff you dig to find. I came across this as a reference source to the book SUNBURST and must say this far surpassed that study of the rise and fall of the Japanese Air arm of 1909 thru 1945.
This is not a book of WWII dogfights nor air stories, although the book does contain numerous first hand veteran accounts as examples offered a ...more
This is not a book of WWII dogfights nor air stories, although the book does contain numerous first hand veteran accounts as examples offered a ...more
This is both a thorough and exhaustive book. The book is very detailed and covers a whole host of aspects of the air war in the South Pacific from the pilots to the aircraft used, tactics, weapons systems, morale and even disease. There are a number of minor factual and spelling mistakes but overall they don't detract from the quality of the research. I did find the book tedious at times, particularly when covering aerodynamics and describing various parts of aircraft.
The aerial war of attrition in the South Pacific. A superb portrait of air combat. Ugly cover, though.
The man knows his airplanes. Good anecdotes from vets. Comprehensive. Very readable, if occasionally a touch prolix. Worth reading for the summation alone. Recommended.
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