The prisoners of Rabaul (Was: P-39's, zeros, etc.)

From: Cub Driver look@

be the material from Japanese sources. That would be completely new.

I guess. I don't know.

Oh, it is. My Flying Tigers book was published in 1991, and it was the
first to identify the Japanese units and airmen who fought in Burma
and China. The Bloody Shambles books came out in 1992, so of course we
didn't have the advantage of one another's work. Hata & Izawa's book
on the JAAF in English translation only came out this year!
www.danford.net/jaaface.htm

The Japanese navy fared better. John Lundstrom's First Team 1984 was
the first to do this kind of research for the navy carrier pilots. The
Hata & Izawa volume on the JNAF came out in English translation in
1989.

The pace has picked up more recently, with a bunch of Osprey books
using Japanese sources, and the Buffaloes Over Singapore book just
published by Grub Street.

There were a few articles published in places like the AAHS Journal
and the British air magazines, but nobody paid any attention to them.

Once information has become accepted, we think it's been around
forever. It's hard to believe that up to October 1991 everyone
accepted without question that the AVG Flying Tigers had fought the
A6M Zero in Burma and China, and most people believed that Japan had
only one (presumably independent) air force.

I picked up a recent book on the war in the Solomons and New Guinea, which was
okay as far as it went. But i stopped reading it because the author did not
have even one Japanese source. In the intro he made some excuse about how hard
it was to get Japanese sources. So what the japs did, how allied actions
affected them, etc., were speculation or based on war-era allied intelligence
estimates. So, for example, the fact that the Japanese military had better maps
of the Solomons than the allies is, according to this author "a mystery." Such
a piece of crap I won't even mention the author or title. He should be
ashamed.
But it's not a lot better with the Med. Everybody knows, for example, about
Omaha Beach, or even Guadalcanal, for that matter. But who knows about the US
Army Ranger units--1st and 3rd Ranger Battalions--that were massacred at
Cisterna. Of 767 men, only 6 escaped. Mention this and get only blank stares
or straight-out disbelief.
It is simply amazing to me that six decades after the war, aside from what
happened in northwest Europe, much of the war remains obscure, what little
written about it all too often riddled with myth, error and nonsense.
I'm glad you've done something to correct that picture.


Chris Mark