Silent Siege-III: Japanese Attacks on North American in World War II-Ships Sunk, Air Raids, Bombs Dropped, Civilians Killed

This is a quite complete book about aspects of World War II that are somewhat obscure. Most people probably don't realize that the U.S. Mainland was actually attacked by Japan on more than one occasion during World War II. Fort Stevens and an area near Santa Barbara were shelled; the Oregon forest area came under direct Japanese bombing attack in an attempt to start massive fires, and an entire program of balloon bombs was used, with thousands of bombs launched from Japan and aimed to descend on the US mainland for the purpose of starting fires, killing people and creating panic.

The book is lavishly illustrated with photographs of the devices, and includes lots of material on what things were done when, along with numerous footnotes. This is the single best book I've seen on the topic, and the most complete book.

One of the most fascinating parts is “The Battle of Los Angeles” where it seemed that LA was coming under massive Japanese bombing. I'm also interested in the balloon bomb program, and there's lots of material on that.

All of that said, there is one chapter that I am concerned about, and that's chapter 10. which is about the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during the war, when they were gathered up on the US west coast and shipped to assembly centers and then to internment camps situated inland. I have numerous book reviews about these camps in this section of my site.

The publisher of this particular book, though, has a decidedly anti-Japanese sentiment in the description of the camps (indeed, the publisher has an entire book on the camps), which tend to make the camps look like they really weren't that bad at all, and it is only historical revisionists that attempt to make them look bad.

Normally, I don't play the numbers game, but in this case, when, say, sixty or seventy books tend to describe the progress of evacuation and internment in considerable detail, and when those books are written by a wide variety of authors (most of them non-Japanese), and when I can verify those books from newspaper articles and government documents, then I would tend to believe that mass of evidence rather than this publisher's views on the issue.

That aside, the book, as I said, is, with the exception of this one chapter, an incredibly good source of information on an obscure but endlessly fascinating aspect of World War II.

Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page