JAPANESE NAVAL VESSELS AT THE END OF WORLD WAR II
| Author(s) | Shizuo Fukui, Christian W. Beilstein |
| Publisher | Naval Institute Press |
| Date | 1992 |
| Pages | 172 |
| Format | |
| Size | 170 Mb |
| D O W N L O A D | |
In December of the year 1941, when Imperial Japan made war against the Allied forces, she boasted one of the mightiest and finest navies afloat. Its core was ten battleships and nine aircraft carriers of the Combined Fleet, soon to be joined by three more carriers and the Yamato and Musashi, the largest and most heavily armed battleships ever built.
The fleet's principal weapons were superb carrier aircraft, including the famed Zero fighter, big naval guns, and the Type 93 oxygen-powered "Long Lance" torpedo, the finest in the whole world. By August 1945 a desperate Japan, cut off from her overseas possessions, faced imminent invasion. The Combined Fleet no longer had a single warship that would be larger than a light cruiser. The few remaining capital ships were confined to the several large navy yards, and most of them had already sunk into shallow harbor mud.
The combat power of the Japanese Imperial Navy was vested in its suicide-attack forces: aircraft, midget submarines, human torpedoes, explosive motorboats, and, operating from underwater bunkers, a phalanx of frogmen carrying pole charges. It is this much-altered naval force that is examined in Shizuo Fukui's Japanese Naval Vessels at the End of War. This is a truly fantastic work containing numerous detailed and informative drawings and also photographs contained in a separate chapter.
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