Rating: 
Summary: A good read, but....
Review: A good read, but nothing new.Why do these British authors dislike Douglas MacArthur so much? What did he do to them? Like Richard Connaughton's recent "MacArthur and Defeat in the Philippines" Alan Schom trashes MacArthur as an incompetant commander for his failure to successfully defend the Phillipines against an overwhelming Japanese invasion force in 1941-42. As I pointed out in my comments on Connaughton's book, MacArthur was following a plan for the defense of the Philippines that had been drafted in Washington: fall back into the Bataan Peninsula and wait for the U.S. Pacific Fleet to fight its way through to the rescue. After Pearl Harbor that plan was no longer feasible. No rescuing fleet was coming. But, the responsibility for the Pearl Harbor disaster lay elsewhere, not with MacArthur. No doubt mistakes were made in the defense of the Philippines, as they were in the opening stages of the war in Europe. The Norway campaign was a British fiasco, Dunkirk was a defeat, however glorious, the French Army collapsed, as did the Russians in June, 1941. But, unlike the defeated Soviet generals who were executed on Stalin's orders, MacArthur was pulled out of the hopeless situation in the Philippines by FDR and given command in the South West Pacific. He went on to become one of America's greatest wartime commanders and a brillliant strategist. It takes a special chutzpah for these British writers to criticize MacArthur's defense of the Philippines when Hong Kong fell to the Japanese in one day (Dec. 25, 1941), and Singapore surrendered in only nine weeks (Feb.15, 1942). After all, the Philippines held out for five months, surrendering at midnight on May 6-7, 1942, the very day of the Battle of the Coral Sea, and one month before the Battle of Midway in which the Japanese fleet suffered the defeat in the Central Pacific envisioned by America's pre-war planners -- allbeit too late to save the defenders of the Philippines. Doesn't MacArthur deserve some credit for those five months of successful resistance to the Japanese invaders by his isolated and abandoned troops in the Philippines? Those brave American and Philippine troops were lost because of the failure of U.S. policy which led to the disaster at Pearl Harbor. And that failure rested primarily on the leadership in Washington to prepare for a Japanese attack that should have been anticipated. I do no subscribe to the conspiacy theories of those who claim that FDR knew in advance that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor. I only say that his administration could and should have known. It is certainly true that the Administration did not know where the Japanese fleet was. They knew it was at sea and that it was up to no good. They also knew that its probable target was American territory. How did they know this? Months earlier they had deciphered the Japanese diplomatic code. From it they had learned that once the Japanese government reached a decision to go to war, either with the U.S., Great Britain or the USSR, and when war was about to commence, their diplomats overseas would be warned with a "winds" message. The message "East Wind Rain" meant that Japan was about to go to war with the U.S. And contrary to all the feigned shock at Japan's "sneak attack" no one really expected the Japanese to declare war before they launched their attack on U.S. territory. We know that the "East Wind Rain" message was intercepted and deciphered on Nov 28, 1941, and that one copy was sent to the War Department and one to FDR at the White House. Shortly after that Japanese embassys and consulates on U.S. terrirory were ordered to burn their code books and secret documents. Was this not sufficient evidence that the Japanese were about to launch an attack on the United States? How clever did one have to be to realize that there were only two possible targets for such an attack that were worth the effort -- the American forces in the Philppines and the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Yet no serious effort was made by the Aministration to warn the commanders at these facitlities or to prepare them for an attack that any reasonable person could have anticipated. Thus, gross incompetence in Washinton made the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor feasible, and the destruction of the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor doomed the isolated defenders in the Philippines. Nothing MacArthur could have done would have prevented their defeat. The fact that under his command, and that of General Wainright, they held out for five months against overwhelming odds, and in the face of certain defeat, is nothing less than a story of heroic self sacrifice and inspiring leadership.
Rating: 
Summary: Worthless - a complete waste of time
Review: According to this book the entire first year of the war was faught on Guadalcanal. While the book claims to cover the pacific theater, it mentions Midway and New Guinea in passing, pays a small amount of attention to the Philippines, and that's it. No mention of anything else. The author thinks very highly of Admiral Turner - but never explains why. In fact, aside from some commanders he doesn't like, he doesn't explain much of anything. Finally, the book was not well edited. Plain instead of plane. Phrases repeated in sentences. Paragraphs repeated in separate chapters. - dave
Rating:
Summary: A Poorly Written and Researched Book
Review: Alan Schom refers to himself as a professional historian. Unfortunately one needs not read very far to discover that The Eagle and The Rising Sun is poorly researched, amateurishly written, poorly laid out and rife with grammatical errors and misspellings. The description of the Battle of Midway is terrible. On top of that Schom attempts to give credence to the value of his work by referring on the back flap to comments in the foreward written by RADM Thomas F. Marfiak, USN (Ret.), CEO and Publisher of the prestigious U.S. Naval Institute. I'm surprised Marfiak would agree to comment on this book. I do not believe the U.S. Naval Institute would publish a history of such poor quality. And to thank Marfiak for his effort, the foreward has a misspelling.
Rating:
Summary: A major disappointment
Review: As a reader of military history with a strong interest in the battles that took place in the southwest Pacific during 1942, I had high hopes for this book. Sad to say that those hopes were dashed rather quickly. The historical inaccuracies in this book are too numerous to mention. Sloppy editing, poor research, this is a good example of how NOT to write history. Some of what Schom has to say about poor American performance during night naval battles off Guadalcanal, Fletcher's poor performance, Ghormley's timidity and MacArthur's abysmal handling of the Philippine campaign may be true, but those points have been stated with much better effect in other works. Schom's accounts of the Bataan and Corregidor battles had me scratching my head in confusion. The gallant stand by the Marines on Wake Island and the Navy's aborted expedition to relieve Wake were largely ignored. Pass this one by.
Rating: 
Summary: A good read
Review: Despite some of the other reviewers' dislike, I enjoyed the book quite a bit. I did find there was somewhat uneven coverage, with Guadalcanal taking up almost half the book. It was a fast, absorbing read.
Rating:
Summary: Stick with Samuel Eliot Morrison
Review: I appreciated the narrative sweep and synthesis of Schom's book as well as his character portraits of individual actors. Even the opinionated language and harsh judgments were bracing up to a point. But the more I read, the more cautious I became about accepting Schom's apparently extensive and heavily documented research. For instance, I wanted to follow-up Schom's necessarily more concise account of the battle of the Java Sea and checked out the appropriate volume in Samuel Eliot Morrison's fifteen volume history of the Navy in WWII. Compare the accounts and you discover that all the dates are off. Schom describes an initial encounter on Feb. 17, Morrison on Feb. 27. Schom later describes an event on the 27th that Morrison says occurred on the 28th. Typos? Faulty note-taking?
Rating:
Summary: DISAPPOINTING BOOK OF THE YEAR
Review: I cannot tell you how excited I was to learn that the author was writing a book about my favorite subject in history: the early days of the Pacific War. Having read Toland, Costello, Schulz, Spector, Falk and others, I was anxious to see what he would do with this topic.
Extreme Disappointment!!!!
The book meanders into areas of little or no significance over and over again. More space was devoted to Admiral King's personality than the battles of Bataan or Singapore.
The editing was poor, ranks were incorrect and words mispelled.
This does not deserve a paperback edition.
Rating:
Summary: Shoddy
Review: I could not finish this book. I had to put it down after finding myself wanting to hurl it across the room at every third page. This book is not "fresh", his opinions and conclusions are hardly "iconoclastic" (let alone having much of a foundation), and the author's tendency to back- and sidetrack is maddening. This book is rife with mistakes, both grammatical and factual. There were enough mistakes, in fact, that I began to doubt the veracity of the few bits of information that I hadn't read before. About the only point on which I agree with Mr. Schom is MacArthur. All due respect to the opinions of other reviewers on this page, but my grandfather knew MacArthur at that time, and had nothing good to say about him. Furthermore, I doubt very much that Mr. Schom intended to, nor do I feel that he did, diminish the heroic efforts of the Battling Bastards of Bataan. That being said, here are a few things that stand out to me as being particularly irksome:
Mr. Schom's apology (to the Japanese, I would imagine) for the use of the word "Jap", by historical figures, in his work. Since when do "historians" apologize for the use of material that they may not agree with? Mr. Schom's unfairly harsh treatment of Lt. Kermit Tyler. Lt. Tyler was the duty officer that took the call from Opana Point about the large air contact approaching Oahu. Tyler's attitude merely reflected the attitude of his command. If this were not so, why wasn't a tracking party assigned around the clock? "And thus was cast the proverbial dye, blood-red, as in the imperial flag"[sic]. Words fail me. If one more author describes the angle of FDR's cigarette holder as "jaunty", I'm going to ....well, you get the idea. If you want to read this book, I'll send you mine.
Rating:
Summary: Avoid it all costs unless you like to laugh
Review: I had high hopes for this work - I specialize on the Pacific campaign and the period covered by Schom is the most vital and interesting of the war. Unfortunately, the book not only fails to deliver anything new, it fails to deliver the old information accurately. Despite the rather impressive footnote section, the massive number of errors (historical and grammatical) call the veracity of the entire work into question. Schom's attempts to offer something new and exciting lead to him focus on ADM Turner, a highly under-rated actor in the Pacific War and someone deserving of far more attention in historiography than he has yet received. But the work's massive flaws dilute even this impact. The errors range from minor to gigantic. Many are small things or even editorial errors; i.e. the statement that the 1922 Naval Treaty limited the USN to 100 million tons of shipping - a rather astonishing amount - or reflecting on ADM Yamamoto eagerly awaiting word of the outcome of the attacks on Pearl aboard his flagship YAMATO - a peculiar statement when the YAMATO was not even formally commissioned until mid December 1941 and did not become the Combined Fleet flagship until Feb 1942. Other issues cause problems for the work as well. Schom takes continual personal asides to discuss the upbringings or backgrounds of actors in the events he covers, but they are constantly distracting from the narrative. Other items, like his constant minor snipes at the French performance in the war, are puzzling at best. He tosses in glib comments about the Vichy French using American planes to bomb Allied troops in Syria and North Africa without mentioning the little fact that both areas were being invaded by British or American forces. Likewise, he somewhat snidely comments on the Vichy government's decision to break diplomatic relations with England in July 1940, but again fails to mention the minor detail that it followed the British attacks against the French naval forces at Oran. None of these are central to his work, but all call into question the balance and research of the views provided to the reader. While all historians (myself included) have axes to grind, care needs to be taken to present more balance and background - particularly if authors wish to take time away from their topic to address tangential issues. Overall, I had high hopes for the book that were invariably dashed. Though the book appears well-researched from the extensive notes section, the glaring and continual errors and sidetracking editorials call all of the author's conclusions and balance into serious question and eliminates any utility to this work. So approach with caution...
Rating:
Summary: Review of the Reviews
Review: I read this book before I read the reviews and am at a loss to explain why they are so negative. The book is not only very good, it's background material leading up to the war is worth the price of admission. The background material on the admirals, generals and Hirohito gives an added dimension to the characters that shaped the early war years in the Pacific. Not many other historians have so honestly indicted Hirohito for his part in starting the conflict. It's about time that story was told. Some may be disturbed by the holes poked in the McArthur mystique but his conduct certainly deserves it. The man should have been court-martialed for the Philippines debacle, not revered. The comments on the sloppy tactics of the USN and the steep learning curve are disturbing but deserved. Did they never train for night action? I can only hope this author writes another volume, I'd buy it.
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