Whirlwind

January 25, 2010
This ambitious and successful work comprehensively analyzes the Allied air offensive against Japan that began with ace pilot James Doolittle’s raid of April 1942. The Army Air Corps’s deployment in 1944 of the long-distance B-29 Superfortresses made basing the planes in the Mariana Islands possible. The U.S. Navy argued that its carrier-based planes could mount a better strategic campaign against Japan with less fuss. The results illustrate the two-pronged approach that characterized America’s war in the Pacific. The range and power of land-based bombers combined with the mobility and precision of American and British carrier planes to devastate not merely Japan’s war-making capacity but its entire infrastructure. The air corps abandoned high-altitude precision strikes in favor of low-altitude area bombing, while the fast carriers dominated Japan’s coastal waters. Together, they swamped a long-neglected, now overmatched air defense. U.S. losses were nevertheless high. Tillman (The Dauntless Dive Bomber of WWII
) illustrates that Japan’s civilian leaders finally “acknowledged the primacy of air power in forcing capitulation.” 32 pages of b&w photos, 4 maps.

Barrett Tillman attempts to bring the entire WWII Allied air war against Japan into a single, coherent whole, and boy does he succeed. The book is written like a historical novel--it traces the strategic decision-making that led to the Allied victory without neglecting the human aspects of the conflict. Narrator Mel Foster is up to the task. He inserts a level of tension into the text that both enhances and humanizes it. What was it like, for example, to sit in a cramped, bubble-like gun turret and spot the enemy above and below? Walking a fine line between passion and restraint, Foster delivers the words of those who did just that. It's a complex performance. It works. D.R.W. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine