Islands of Destiny: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun

The subtitle of Islands of Destiny - The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun - tells the reader what he needs to know about this book. Mr. Prados' thesis is that Midway was not quite the turning point in the Pacific War that many causal historians believe. He makes a compelling and insightful case that anyone interested in this period of history will find worthwhile. Unfortunately, his penetrating analysis is handicapped by an uneven and occasionally jarring narrative style.Prados joins several other authors of recent books in arguing that after Midway the Pacific War hovered on a knife's edge - the Japanese had just about lost the ability to pursue offensive operations, but the United States did not yet have that ability. Midway, of course, came almost six months to the day after Pearl Harbor - the period Yamamoto had predicted he could run wild in the Pacific. The second half of 1942 and the Guadalcanal campaign witnessed the slow but inevitable shift of momentum to the United States.Prados explains that this outcome was not a forgone conclusion. There were opportunities for Japan to regain the initiative. Using recently available sources, he offers new perspectives of how the Japanese perceived these events and acted upon them. He provides a good comparison of how the USN used intelligence to its advantage and how the IJN failed to do so. In particular, his final chapter comes as close as most historians can to identifying the smoking gun in the mystery of why the Japanese failed to exploit their opportunities to crush their opponents.The Japanese strategy of seeking a "decisive battle" like Trafalgar or Tsushima after wearing down the larger United States Navy through attrition has been the subject of numerous authors. Prados argues persuasively that the Japanese failed to commit their superior resources at Truk when they could have made a difference in the Solomons because they were holding them in reserve for that decisive battle. Their unwillingness to risk them allowed the USN to hang on and ultimately prevail. Prados does not say it, but he implies that the Japanese failed to recognize that the decisive battle was in fact the series of battles already being fought in the waters around Guadalcanal.Unlike some other recent authors, Prados covers the entire Solomons campaign instead of just the crucial first six months when the control of Guadalcanal hung in the balance. This treatment is useful history, but it necessarily results in a less dramatic denouement. It also becomes diffuse. Some of the decisive naval battles in the last few months of 1942 receive less coverage than the adventures of Lt. John F. Kennedy in 1943. JFK became president, but his contributions in the Solomons are magnified while others of equal or greater significance are either ignored or mentioned in passing.I also found Prados' writing style a challenge. He bounces back and forth between terminology for men, ships, and events one would expect in a history and slang expressions that seemed awkward in this context. At one time he appeared to confuse "the Slot" with "Ironbottom Sound." Referring to a Japanese admiral as "the old salt" came across as contrived. I grew tired of Halsey being referred to as "Bull Halsey" or "the Bull." An historian should beware of hagiography; Halsey was at his best during this period, but this forced familiarity 70 years later did not work for me.Writing history in a purely linear fashion is often impossible, but on page 336, Prados describes the US carriers available on November 4, 1943 as Saratoga and Princeton. Then, on page 339, when describing an important attack on Japanese cruisers the following day, he mentions the participation of a pilot from Independence - like Princeton a new light carrier. On page 343, he states that after the success on November 5, 1943, Nimitz dispatched a task force of two Essex class carriers and the aforementioned Independence to the Solomons. A mistake has been made; Independence was either there on November 5 or she was awaiting assignment to go there. There are other errors. For example, HMAS Canberra (p. 58) and USS Wichita (p. 225) were heavy cruisers, not light cruisers.In spite of these glitches and the sometimes off-putting writing, this is a good history. Its merit comes from its thoughtful analysis. This history is not a revisionist view of Midway; indeed, it is impossible to conceive of what was achieved in the Solomons without the triumph at Midway coming first. Perhaps the complete judgment of what happened in 1942 is that after Midway, the USN stopped losing the war; after Guadalcanal, it started winning the war. Read this book and find out why.

The first book of military history I ever read was Tregaskis'"Guadalcanal Diary". While the Pacific is not my main field of interest, I have read more than a few books on Guadalcanal, and books that included considerable discussion of the whole Solomons campaign. Many of them give good and detailed descriptions of the land, naval, and air battles that took place around "The Canal" or "Cactus" or "Starvation Island" as the island was called.John Prados book was different, and added a dimension sorely lacking in many of the otherwise excellent descriptions of bayonet charges in the jungle, torpedo hits in the night in Ironbottom Sound, and air battles between Wildcats and Zeros you can find in other author's books. Four things distinguish this book from other treatments of the subject. For one thing, Dr. Prados has a thesis, insisting that it was the Solomons campaign, not Midway, that turned the conflict in the Pacific from one where the Japanese had the whiphand to one in which their doom was sealed. I think he very sucessfully supported his thesis, demolishing the "decisive battle" fascination that too many western historians have shared with Japanese strategists. After Midway, while hurt badly, the Imperial Japanese Navy was still far stronger than the USN and, had it effectively exploited that advantage, could have produced a far different outcome, at least in the short and middle run (Japan had no chance at any time of gaining a victory unless the US government decided to throw in the towel, and there was simply no way that was going to happen).The second strong point of the book is that it quite naturally emphasizes the role intelligence played in the US victory. The effects of Allied code-breaking in all aspects of WWII has only gradually come out, just how tactically the data was put to use. The Japanese could hardly sortie ships without the US knowing the details. Prados, with his background in intelligence studies, is well suited to explore this dimension. He also gives us a fascinating look at Japanese efforts to track the American moves, and the unfortunate (for the Empire) tendency for the Japanese military to downplay intelligence work.A third aspect is very refreshing. Doing military historical research gets very difficult and costly when you are faced with a conflict in which at least one side's language is really hard to access. You must either learn the language, or pay for translation, which, given what historians receive for their efforts, is prohibitive for all but the very wealthy. However, the US military faced the same problem fighting Japan, and did enormous work translating captured documents both during and after the war, and with intercepted radio messages. Post war POW interrogation also added to the piles of paper available, in English, to the researcher who is willing to do the work to dig it out and make sense of it. John has done a good job of this. There is only one caveat, and maybe its just me, but... Japanese names are organized the opposite way American ones are. In English, the surname comes last, and given name comes first, so John Prados. But in Japanese it is the other way around, Prados John. Almost all authors writing in English have used the convention of writing the names in the English style, so Isoroku Yamamoto. Dr. Prados decided to make that Yamamoto Isoroku, and given that there enough Japanese personages in the book's pages to populate a good sized Russian novel, for my eyes at least it was a bit of a chore to have to repeatedly reverse the order of names to remember who was who.The fourth way the book really succeeds is that rather than looking in detail at the individual actions on land, sea, and air, the focus is pulled back, and we get not just Guadalcanal, but the entire Solomons fight, which allows us to see the changes in the balance of forces, the strategies, and the personalities driving the fight. This larger picture is appropriate for the central theme of the book, the original thesis, and shows well how the Solomons campaign fit into both the Japanese and the US strategies for the war.I think the book does a fairly good job covering an aspect of Japanese operations I have previously noted but could never exactly explain to myself, namely that for a military based on the code of Bushido, the willingness to die for one's Emperor, it seems to me that every time the Japanese had landed a potentially deadly blow, from Pearl Harbor to Santa Cruz to Leyte Gulf, they jellied on the pivot at the last moment, and were not, in the Irish expression, willing to "throw the handle after the hatchet." So the carriers depart for fear of a counterstrike at Pearl Harbor, when a third strike against the oil storage and repair facilities might have crippled the US for another year, at Santa Cruz without a functioning US carrier left in the Pacific, the Japanese pulled back instead of pushing on to annihilate the survivors. And even at Leyte, when the Japanese have their battleships in position to annihilate the US transports, they turn around and head home. By Leyte it was too late, it would not have set things back too badly for the US; we had that much surplus strength available. But earlier it was a very different picture. And yet the IJN held its hand at the decisive moment. Why? The book gives a very interesting discussion of Japanese strategic thinking that had the effect of pulling the reins just when a full gallop might have been more appropriate. Such chances as they had before US industrial production swamped them were thrown away, saving for the decisive battle. And by the time that happened (in the Philippines as expected by both sides through the whole pre-war period), it was way too late already. The attrition wrought in the Solomons had already determined that.

I too was a victim of the cult of the flattops, and as a result I believed after decades of reading conventional military history that WW2 in the Pacific was basically a mopping-up operation after Midway. John Prados' superb account of the Solomons campaign set me straight, based on the astonishing fact that by the end of October 1942 the US Navy did not possess a single battleworthy fleet carrier in the entire theatre of operations, and this as a result of combat losses inflicted by the IJN, particularly during the battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. Yet the Allies prevailed, for every other reason, such as survivability of their naval aircraft, much more effective shipborne AA, the incredible boldness and tenacity of the Henderson Field operation, and perhaps most of all, superior intelligence courtesy of Ultra. Mr. Prados' muscular and dense style conveys all of the foregoing in just enough detail that when it comes time to draw the strategic conclusions, we have enough operational savvy, in the book-learning sense, that we can only agree with the author that the failure to align warfighting resources with the strategic necessity for victory in the South Pacific cost the Japanese their only realistic hope of concluding their war with a reasonably favourable settlement.

Well researched details of events. I have thoroughly enjoyed how the author presents facts and keeps me interested in the battle for Guadalcanal, eventhough I know some of the historical events already. Great book!

I have become a fan of this author based on his previous books and now this excellent addition.It is a different view of the South sea campaign based on intelligence and a review of available information.

Good book

Islands of Destiny behandelt den Zeitraum von der Schlacht um die Coral Sea bis zum Amerikanischen Sieg in der Solomonen Insel-Gruppe wobei Rabaul "nur" eingeschlossen ist. Das Buch schildert diesen Zeitraum als den wahren Wendepunkt im Pazifik-Krieg, da Japan auch nach der Schlacht um Midway noch der Überlegene war. Das Buch zeigt wie die Amerikaner das Blatt wenden konnten und es beleuchtet dabei die wichtige Rolle der Aufklärung und der Spionage. Die Coastwatcher die in den von den Japanern besetzten Gebieten geblieben waren und die japanischen Bewegungen per Funk meldeten, der Code-Breaker und der Funkpeiler die zusammen die Informationen lieferten die zum Sieg verhalfen. Die Zähigkeit der Marines war eben nicht Alles. Das Buch ist fair zu beiden Seiten und beleuchtet diese gleichermaßen gut, etwas das man sonst so nur selten findet.Das Englisch ist gut zu lesen und sollte niemanden überfordernd der beruflich oder aus Interesse mit Englisch zutun hat.Viel Spaß für weitere LeserJTK