Michael John Claringbould, A6M2/3 Zero-Sen (Osprey, 2023)
The Japanese Zero must be high on the list of iconic WWII warplanes. It is also one of the most written about. However, in this book in Osprey’s Dogfight series, Michael John Claringbould surveys the aircraft, the pilots that flew it over the Solomon Islands in 1942, and their tactics to produce a fascinating account of a small but important slice of the War in the Pacific.
Claringbould begins abruptly with a detailed account of a mission flown by the Japanese in New Guinea in February 1942. Then he sets the scene with the origins of the land-based Zero-sen unit at Rabaul. Their original function was as a bomber escort but soon became a separate fighter unit. They were also quickly occupied in dogfights with American bombers and fighters. Aerial combat intensified from May 1942 with many losses on both sides. Lack of navigational aids caused more losses for the Japanese. Claringbould introduces us to some of the Zero pilots, an elite group of individuals and not the automatons of popular culture, he argues. They were well drilled but those that remained inflexible in combat often failed to survive. To that end, the seven month campaign over Guadalcanal whittled down the cadre through combat and poor health. Stress also took its toll. By the end of 1942, they were severely depleted. Claringbould turns to the planes these men flew, beginning with the Zero’s origins and proceeding through development, tactics, weapons, and maintenance. The author then takes a deeper dive into tactics. The Japanese discovered that their tactics honed over China needed to adapt for missions over the Pacific, partly because of the range of combat actions they had to undertake. Claringbould notes, however, that there were never enough planes or properly trained pilots once combat attrition took hold. He then picks some instructive combat stories to show the variety of Zero operations, including a detailed accounts of dogfights with American Kittyhawks and other US aircraft.
The combat descriptions are the highlight of Claringbould’s somewhat truncated overview of the Zero in action. The stories of how the pilots adjusted to the conditions over the Solomons makes the book worth reading, and Osprey’s excellent illustrations of Japanese tactics works well with those accounts. Claringbould also clearly knows his material inside out, though there are points where he could have excised some of the detail, and I felt that he struggles to talk down to his less knowledgeable readers. That isn’t helped by the lack of an introduction or conclusion; Claringbould pitches his readers straight into the action, works his way through some of the background information you need, more combat stories, then he stops, leaving the reader with many questions. That, of course, may be a positive, but overall Claringbould’s book reads like a chapter taken from a longer work. Otherwise, this slice of WWII combat was an illuminating and insightful study of pilots at war.
