the imperial japanese navy in the pacific war

This middle path, Evans and Peattie argue, was situated between the extreme options of relying entirely on Western support and the potential pitfalls it entailed or solely emphasizing indigenous design, which would have significantly delayed the maturation of Japan’s navy. In the early chapters of the book, the authors do a thorough job of covering the growth of the early Meiji navy, illustrating that Japan initially followed a two-phase policy in acquiring technology from abroad: first, by relying almost entirely on Western tutelage and second, by beginning licensed production while at the same time continuing the study of foreign technology and purchase of capital ships.

In doing so, Evans and Peattie have written a book that will be of interest not only to military historians and scholars of Japan and East Asia for years to come, but also to world historians interested in the important role played by the transformation and global dissemination of naval technology, the scope of which the world had not seen in over five hundred years, in shaping history between the 1880s and 1941.

Focusing as they do on “strategy, tactics, and technology, or, more precisely, the evolving interrelationship of the three,” as well as the navy’s early attempts to forge a “synthesis of foreign and indigenous influences in the shaping of its tactics, and how the navy acquired its technology and assets,” the authors provide the most comprehensive account to date on the development of Japanese naval power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887–1941, a superbly researched and lucidly written monograph, David Evans and Mark Peattie examine the factors that contributed to the military emergence of the Japanese navy. Thirty-five years later still, on the eve of the Pacific War, Japan possessed a formidable naval force, one that, as the opening months of the war demonstrated, could inflict considerable damage on Allied military units and territorial possessions throughout the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Within thirty-five years, however, Japan would engage and decimate the fleets of two larger naval powers, China in 1894–95 and Russia in 1904–1905. At the beginning of the Meiji period in 1868, the era commonly associated with the starting point of Japan’s modern epoch, the Japanese navy was nothing more than a ragtag collection of mismatched and outdated vessels.

The imperial japanese navy in the pacific war