"In June 1944, American and Japanese carrier fleets steamed toward each other, seeking battle in the Philippine Sea." "Their clashing objectives: retaining the vital Marianas for Japan versus seizing the islands for American air bases. When the fleets met, they embarked upon a naval engagement that escalated into the most spectacular aircraft carrier battle in history - a battle that would later become known as the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot." "During two days of brutal combat, the American and Japanese carriers dueled, launching wave after wave of fighters and bombers against one another in an all-out fight for supremacy, By day and night, hundreds of planes filled the skies. When it was over, the exhausted pilots of the American Fifth Fleet had claimed more than four hundred aerial c...

While a lot of naval books focus on the 'big' battles of war - Jutland, Midway, The Atlantic - this one is an in-depth study recollecting a US vs. Japan battle in the Philippine Sea in gaining control of the Guam and its island neighbours. The term 'Turkey Shoot' was coined by an airman after one of the dogfights during the week-long fight and is famous for being a totally fought in the air by two battle groups hundreds of miles apart where surface ships never saw sight of each other.

While Midway became the real turning point in the Pacific War for the Americans when Japan lost a lot of its major 'flat tops', Philippine Sea all but sealed the deal as the Japanese, stretched at best, lost not only three more carriers, but somewhere close to 75% of its remaining seaborne aircraft, and more importantly experienced pilots.

The recollection is very good in building up to the battle, the planning and sparring from both sides while putting into layman's terms what was happening, and what the risk was to both sides. Calling on interviews from survivors on both sides it is (almost) balanced in its reporting, however it does tend to lean towards the American side i bias, something which is probably easy to do when the author is a Yank, and the Yanks were deemed the victors.

All in all a fascinating read that doesn't bore one with too much jargon and has a good focus on the thoughts and fears of those who dueled in the air. I have read many a book on war and more often than not I have sometimes wondered how the hell the Allies managed to win, what with poor planning, poor execution, and more often than not inter-service distrust. This book almost has you thinking the same thing, but the underlying tone in this is courage, and risk, and the Americans more than had this with near fatal results. Nothing to take away from the Japanese; hopelessly outnumbered and in inferior hardware, but if one chapter sticks out for me, it comes near the end when the American aircrews are left with no choice but to 'come home' in the dark.

Thrilling stuff that makes it hard to put down... ( )

I rarely abandon a book, but this one I did. In the 50 pages I managed there was much about every aspect of WW2 carrier warfare except the ostensible subject of the book.

Those first 50 pages are written as though by a bad sportswriter, with lots and lots and lots of facts and figures, connected only by being about WW2 naval operations, but presented in a painfully meandering style. It's as if he took his notes, threw them in the air, and wrote about them in the order he picked them up. Consequently there are lots of non sequiturs, un-referenced statements that seem bogus on their face, and an overall lack of clarity as to what point, exactly, he might be trying to make in any given paragraph/page/section/chapter. It doesn't help that he tried never to use the same word twice, or an ordinary one where jargon is available: the text is a mish-mash of four different vocabularies all at once: regular English, official US Navalese, US naval slang, and Japanese. Then there's the editing, which appears to have been performed solely by his word processor's spelling checker.

In an unwonted grant of the benefit of the doubt, I actually gave it two stars because for all I know it gets better after page 50. But if I were you, I wouldn't risk your time on that chance. ( )

Fascinating insite into the circumstances and men behind this WW2 battle. ( )