Brian Lane Herder

I've always had some interest in this campaign since I learned that a member of my extended family served in the USS "Salt Lake City" at the Battle of the Komandorski Islands. That said, it's arguable that never was more effort spent, on less valuable real estate, than this particular fight. While Japanese "Operation AL" was the failed culmination of Tokyo's effort to create a defensive cordon for their new empire, the United States was, of course, going to defend its own territory; General Simon Bolivar Buckner archly noting that by the time that the grandsons of the initial Japanese invasion force reached the "Lower 48," they'd be considered American citizens!

That said, between exploring the intricacies of this campaign, Herder has a keen eye, and a dryly ironic take, for the command failures of both the American and Japanese higher commanders. Whatever else you can say about this campaign, it was a great destroyer of professional reputations on both sides.… (meer)

I found the editorial tone of this particular "Osprey" booklet to be untypical of what one generally sees with the "Campaign" series. Usually, there's an effort to project immediacy. Here, one has a bland, dispassionate, tone that would not be out of place with official history.

Having said that, this work has two particular virtues. One, Herder treats the disparate aerial attacks, naval bombardments, and submarine operations conducted by the American and British naval forces as one campaign to "reduce" Japanese war potential to the point where further organized resistance would be futile, or would break Japanese society. Two, you can see in this whole way of war, that partook equally of blockade and siege, the paradigm of the preferred American operational system ever since, which only recently has the U.S. Navy been forced to reassess the validity of (when confronting the prospects of a war with Beijing in regards to Taiwan).

Herder concludes with a quote from the 1946 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey that, even ignoring all other factors, such as the use of atomic weapons, the firebombing campaign of U.S. 20th Air Force, or the Soviet assault on Manchuria, the U.S. naval siege of Japan was probably sufficient to achieve military victory in and of itself. Perhaps. Nothing I've read negates the seeming impact of the one-two shock affect of Hiroshima, and the Soviet entrance into the war against Japan, in terms of bringing home to Tokyo (particularly the Japanese military) that all reasonable options had been expended, and the chance had to be taken that the Potsdam Declaration offered a semi-honorable exit alternative to national suicide.… (meer)