I just finished Afternoon of the Rising Sun by Kenneth I. Friedman (not Norman Friedman!), Presidio Press, 2001, 414 pages (hard bound). Friedman was a retired IBM executive.
It is about the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The text on the inside of the dust cover should have been a warning - he claimed Halsey had six Iowa class battleships! Of course the US only completed four Iowas, as every student of the US Navy in WWII knows.
He goes on to tell us the Brooklyn class light cruisers fired fifteen 8" guns (they were 6" guns), Fletcher class destroyers could do 40 knots (maybe 40 mph), and so on. He says five of the six carriers in Taffey 3 "escaped unharmed," but two of the surviving carriers had significant damage from Japanese gunfire. A 15,000 ton CVL was a "big carrier". There are lots of obvious errors that showed he really didn't know what he was talking about.
He contradicts himself frequently. In one place he says the Japanese "had a rich store of carriers" for the Northern Force, and on the next page tells how the Japanese carrier force had been reduced to one CV and three CVLs, including one that was considered "too small to send into battle." A submarine fired torpedoes at a ship's port side and hit it on the starboard side! On one page he claimed Shima's 5th fleet "came up from the south (Brunei) to join the Southern Force, even though the chart he used (copied from another book) showed them coming down from the north (Formosa). Yet in another part of the book he details Shima's route south from the Inland Sea to the Pescadores (Formosa) and then to Surigao Strait.
He repeats the same stories over, and over, and over, and over, and over, .... About half way through the book I started making notes in the margins and I counted 44 times he repeated what he had written earlier! If the repeated text was removed the book would be a lot thinner. It looks like he had a bunch of notes on multiple topics that he copied from many sources and just crammed them all together and called it a book without any editing, corrections or attempts to make a coherent or chronological story. He writes about an event and randomly tosses in unrelated sentences about other topics out of chronological order, and many pages later comes back to the previous topic and retells the same story again. He describes the sinking of one Japanese cruiser at least three times and an American destroyer sank twice! It is the worst writing and editing I have ever seen in a book. How it got published I don't know!
Worse still, he claims to know the innermost thoughts and detailed actions of major and minor characters (he breathed a sigh of relief, he was thinking about ..., etc.). He tells us Halsey's thoughts at one point and then says "We will never know what actually went through Halsey's mind ..." After two pages of detailed descriptions of Kurita's thoughts, feelings and fears during the Battle off Samar he then concluded with "mystery surrounds" what Kurita was thinking! Except Friedman knows, of course! I counted about 30 instances of sheer speculation in the last half of the book! If you read it be sure to wear hip boots because the BS is knee deep throughout the book! There is far more fiction than fact.
On a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 the best, I would rate it as a 1. Why not a zero, since it is so bad? He attended a Tin Can Sailors convention and interviewed a number of survivors of the battle. Most of their stories are brief and add little to the history, but they do tell something about the individual's experiences, thoughts and fears during these crucial battles. Unfortunately, they are a tiny part of the text and are buried in redundant, disordered speculation, exaggeration and hyperbole.
Phil
_________________ A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle
Last edited by DrPR on Sun Jan 07, 2018 3:26 am, edited 4 times in total.
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