Book overview
During World War II, navies developed camouflage for their ships. Applying it to both vertical and horizontal surfaces, they reduced visibility and confused the identities of their ships to the enemy. Maritime artist Malcolm Wright, author of popular books on British naval camouflage schemes in World War II, now turns his attention to the ships and aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army from 1932 to 1945. Many schemes included in this volume are difficult to find without intensive research, making this a unique and valuable resource. The book covers every ship type from battleship to the smallest auxiliary, including the riverine craft that fought in China, all the ships in the separate fleet operated by the Imperial Japanese Army, and three special bonus pages describing camouflage schemes for selected hard-to-research ships from other navies. The timespan covered actually goes beyond 1932-45 and includes developmental milestones for each ship and class, from the 1914 construction of the battlecruiser KONGO to the 1946-47 repatriation service of the surviving vessels and their subsequent transfer to victorious navies.
At 288 11" x 8.5" pages with half-inch margins and 9-point type, this book offers almost double the content area of the previous volumes in the series, which were 196 10" x 8" pages each, with a somewhat challenging 7-point font. This expansive and reader-friendly layout allows for numerous full-page spotlight views of important and interesting ships and planes, for a total of 952 images and captions. The durable case laminate jacket and 70-pound premium paper assure a long-lasting and pleasant physical experience.
The captions combine construction, refit and service histories with sharp personal assessments of ship performance, accompanied by plank-level illustrations of the color schemes applied to ships and planes. Since sadly most pictures of World War II are in black and white, this book is a delight for anyone who wants to visualize the war as it actually occurred, in color. With its unparalled depth of technical detail and breadth of coverage, it is a must-have for students of naval history, the war in the Pacific, wargaming, and ship and aircraft modelling.
The highly readable captions combine construction, refit and service histories with sharp personal assessments of ship performance, accompanied by plank-level illustrations of the color schemes applied to ships and planes. Since sadly most pictures of World War II are in black and white, this book is a delight for anyone who wants to visualize the war as it actually occurred, in color. With its unparalleled depth of technical detail and breadth of coverage, it is a must-have for students of naval history, the war in the Pacific, wargaming, and ship and aircraft modeling.
The current printing includes fixes to several issues reported by reviewers, including making the ship scales consistent on page 7, cleaning up images on page 49 and 67, increasing image size on page 123, and removing a duplicate paragraph on page 187.
