Title: Fire In The Sky: The Air
War in the South Pacific
Author: Eric M. Bergerud
Publisher: Westview Press
ISBN: 0-8133-2985-X
Pages: Hardcover, 723 pages
Price: $35, suggested retail
Fire In The Sky is Eric Bergerud's follow-up to his
superb book on ground combat in the South Pacific
theater, Touched With Fire. A third book on the naval
aspects of this phase of the Pacific War will be next.
Touched With Fire is one of the best books ever written
on ground combat in any theater of World War II, and so
it was with great anticipation that I settled in with
this doorstop of a book on the air war. Like the first
installment of this series, Fire In The Sky gets high
marks for readability, research, thoughtful analysis, and
a refreshingly sensible global perspective. Bergerud
deals with the totality and complexity of industrial
warfare in this book, not just the technical minutia at
the tactical "sharp edge," and the result is a
comprehensive thematic study rather than a conventional
narrative of events. The author does provide an
introductory chronological summary, but as he notes there
is little in it that will be new to anyone who has
studied this topic.
It is important to note that Bergerud's focus in these
books is on the Solomon Islands and New Guinea operations
of 1942-44. Bergerud writes that it is common now for
people to think of these South Pacific campaigns as a
minor prelude to the "real war" at sea and in
the Central Pacific that culminated in the B-29 bombing
campaign. However, this view is quite mistaken: "the
South Pacific campaign was not the preliminary bout; it
was the main event. Yet that is not obvious if one only
counts casualties and numbers. The fact is that the
systematic disasters suffered by Japan in the South
Pacific dislocated the imperial military apparatus and
revealed glaring weaknesses that the Allies proved quick
to exploit. Failures in the Solomons and New Guinea did
not equate to an El Alamein or a Sicily. No, defeat in
the jungle tropics was Japan's Stalingrad." Since
the strategic objective of Japan's war was to gain
possession of the resources of the Indies necessary to do
battle with the West, the Allied counterattack in New
Guinea and the Solomons HAD to be resisted. Japan
ultimately sent - too late as it turns out - massive
reinforcements to the area. Bergerud reminds us that
"there were more Japanese troops trapped on New
Guinea than were deployed in the entire Central Pacific
Theater; there were as many soldiers trapped on
Bougainville as were faced by the U.S. ground forces on
Saipan and Iwo Jima; there were more regular infantry cut
off on Rabaul than were defending Okinawa." And it
is for good reason that Imperial Army Air Force personnel
considered a posting to New Guinea a death sentence.
This book also makes it clear that these were campaigns
ABOUT air bases, and that much of the credit for ultimate
Allied success must go to Army, Marine and Navy air units.
The Fifth Air Force was particularly important, and gets
the credit it deserves for waging one of the most
successful tactical campaigns of the entire war. Bergerud
doesn't ignore the critical contributions of Navy and
Marine aviation in the Solomons, but he essentially
leaves carrier operations to the later volume on the sea
war during this period. So have the publishers put a
picture of a strafing "Air Apaches" B-25 on the
dust jacket? No, it features a U.S. aircraft carrier.
The book is divided into three parts. The first is "The
Three-Dimensional Battlefield," a discussion of the
incredibly hostile geography of the South Pacific region
and its massive impact on operations. "Machines and
Men in the South Pacific" is a wide-ranging
discussion of training, tactical doctrine, living
conditions, industrial technique, and aircraft design,
performance and production. The final section, "Fire
in the Sky: Air Battle in the South Pacific," brings
it all together with a discussion of the impact of these
elements on the nature and progress of combat operations.
Although the book contains much excellent analysis of the
strengths and weaknesses of the most important Allied and
Japanese combat aircraft types, Bergerud makes it clear
that aircraft performance and tactics are almost
meaningless in isolation. General George Kenney,
Commander of 5th Air Force, provided a simple example of
this when discussing his preference for the P-38:
"
I wanted the P-38 in the Pacific because of the long
distances, but not only long distances. You look down
from the cockpit and you can see schools of sharks
swimming around. They never look healthy to a man flying
over them. Say we were going into a combat and you go in
with a P-51, a 100-percent warplane: Give it a status of
100 for combat. The pilot starts out with a rating of 100.
But by the time he gets four or five hundred miles out
over the ocean his morale has been going down steadily by
looking at that water down there, and my guess was that
he would arrive at combat about a 50-percent-efficient
pilot. So the total score of pilot and plane is 150. Now
the P-38 is not a bad combat airplane - I'd give it a
rating of 75 as compared to the P-51, easily - maybe more
than that - but give it 75. But the pilot arrives there
100 percent - he's just as good as when he took off
because he knows one of those big fans can bring him home.
He's got two engines. So his score - his fighting score
is 175 as against the other's 150. And you could hang
gasoline on them."
But as Fire In The Sky makes abundantly clear, the "fighting
score" calculation for military operations went far
beyond even this level, to all aspects of personnel and
equipment. Medicine and health issues (or what could be
considered 'personnel serviceability') provide a
startling example. Bergerud reports that from December
1942 to June 1944 Fifth Air Force had an annualized
hospital admissions rate of 899 cases per 1,000 for all
reasons, and in all areas, of which 772 cases were for
diseases such as malaria, typhus, dysentery, and dengue
fever. One USAAF surgeon reported that "In some
areas of New Guinea, Milne Bay particularly, malaria has
been widespread, in some units as many as 35 percent
contracting it in one month….a unit that remains
there for a period of three or four months will become
100 percent infected with malaria." The Solomons
were even worse: during the Guadalcanal campaign air and
ground crews suffered an incredible disease rate of 2,500
cases per 1,000 men per year! The impact of such health
problems on operations is not hard to imagine. Allied
medical services, while unsatisfactory at first, were
always better than those of the Japanese, and improved
greatly by 1944. Of course equipment serviceability
problems were similarly difficult, and the Allies proved
far superior to the Japanese in that area as well. It
doesn't take a statistician to figure out that in the
hostile environment of the South Pacific, the ability to
sustain ANY sort of military operation was determined by
the quality and quantity of support services.
In some respects Fire In The Sky is somewhat less
impressive than Bergerud's earlier book on the ground war.
Perhaps this is just because the subject is more familiar
to me, or the fact that the author's thesis and approach
owe so much to the earlier work. But I was frustrated by
a lack of simple descriptive data on various points. For
example, what was the TOE of the ground echelon of the
combatants' fighter or medium bomber groups? Did it
change during the period under study? How successful were
the combatants in attaining ideal establishments in
practice at various times and places? Although voluminous
statistical data on such matters exists in the official
histories, at least for the Allies, Bergerud's analysis
is often couched only in qualitative terms. On the other
hand, he does a fine job of making sense of the
incomplete strength and loss figures available. The
eyewitnesses Bergerud quotes provide much excellent, and
even moving testimony, but I would have liked more from
the Japanese side generally, and more of the American and
Commonwealth ground and support personnel that the book
clearly shows were essential to victory. I was also
somewhat irritated by the large number of typos and
editing/writing clams in what is after all a pretty
pricey book.
Many students of Japanese wartime aviation will find that
Bergerud's narrative of Japanese aircraft design is
rather simplified in places, and he makes a few errors of
fact with the sort of technical minutia that aviation
modelers are most likely to spend great energy fussing
about. Such errors do not really diminish the thrust of
the analysis - indeed, most of these details are the
sorts of things that the book convincingly demonstrates
had little impact on the outcome of operations - but for
this kind of money one expects top-notch fact checking
and editorial work. Coverage of the Japanese side is
generally not as good as I had hoped for, even
considering the real problems an author faces more than
fifty years after the event when virtually all the
participants and records are long since gone. Henry
Sakaida's work demonstrates what can still be
accomplished in this area. Some of the sources of
aircraft data Bergerud relies on are not the most up to
date. For example, the performance data for Japanese
aircraft apparently came from Francillon's Japanese
Aircraft of the Pacific War and Richard Bueschel's
monographs. These sources are now 30 years old, and while
excellent in many ways they are not the last word on the
subject by any means. I'm also puzzled how anyone writing
on this subject could fail to consult Shores, Cull and
Izawa's Bloody Shambles, Hickey's Warpath Across the
Pacific, and the USAAF's wartime journal Impact. I doubt
these would have altered Bergerud's thesis, but they
would certainly have added some useful details and
operational examples. Hickey's book is a particularly
fine case study of just the sort of ultimate Fifth Air
Force tactical operations that Bergerud provides the deep
background for.
But hey, it's my job here to nit-pick! Fire In The Sky is
essential reading. It may well be the best study of a
World War II aerial campaign yet written.
Terrill Clements
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