Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The signing of the Japanese surrender documents on board the U. S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945 was a solemn moment. It all seemed a long way from a certain Sunday morning in December 1941, when Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, C. -in-C. Pacific, had looked out of his office window and seen a swarm of Japanese planes bombing, torpedoing, and strafing his battle fleet moored in Pearl Harbor. #2 Pearl Harbor was a disaster for the Americans, but politically it came as a relief. The attack was a victory which ensured their defeat. The Americans abhorred war, and their politicians avoided it by every possible means. #3 The signing of the Japanese surrender documents on board the U. S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945 was a solemn moment. It all seemed a long way from a certain Sunday morning in December 1941, when Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, C. -in-C. Pacific, had looked out of his office window and seen a swarm of Japanese planes bombing, torpedoing, and strafing his battle fleet moored in Pearl Harbor. #4 The signing of the Japanese surrender documents on board the U. S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945 was a solemn moment. It all seemed a long way from a certain Sunday morning in December 1941, when Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, C. -in-C. Pacific, had looked out of his office window and seen a swarm of Japanese planes bombing, torpedoing, and strafing his battle fleet moored in Pearl Harbor.

Fortunately for the Americans in the Pacific, the Japanese sincerely believed that it was not possible for Westerners to learn their language. Lulled by this misapprehension into a false sense of security, they could only ascribe to luck or coincidence the remarkable frequency with which the Americans intercepted their plans.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The attack on Force Z, which was the British battleship Prince of Wales, the battlecruiser Repulse, and four destroyers, was the end result of a train of unfortunate circumstances. By November 1944, when the British Pacific Fleet was formally in being, the United States Navy and Marine Corps had already won for the Allies nearly complete control of sea and air over most of the Pacific. #2 The British Pacific and East Indies Fleets were a magnificent contribution by a nation 10,000 miles from the action who had already fought a war at sea for five years and over five oceans. But the American 3rd/5th and 7th Fleets were far larger and more powerful than both British fleets combined. #3 The fall of Singapore was a dark and terrible episode for the Navy, but there were two gallant naval actions fought by Allied ships in the Java Sea on 27 and 28 February. Four cruisers and three destroyers were sunk in these actions. #4 The Japanese raiders were Vice Admiral Nagumo’s formidable Striking Force, which included five of the six carriers that attacked Pearl Harbour. They attacked Colombo on Easter Sunday, 5 April, and sank the cruisers Cornwall and Dorsetshire.

The British Pacific Fleet was formed in October 1944 and dispatched to fight alongside the USN in the Central Pacific under Admiral Nimitz. Deploying previously unpublished documents, this book reveals how relations between the UK and US forces developed from a starting point of barely repressed suspicion, to one where both navies came to understand each other and eventually find a remarkable bond. Born out of a shared experience of Kamikaze attacks, extended operations against bitterly hostile shores, the pooling of knowledge and experience, the two navies underpinned the diplomatic moves in both Washington and London. The book carries the legacy of this experience through to the next Anglo-American participation in war, Korea. It illustrates and explains how and why certain lessons were incorporated into the composition, behaviour and structure of the post-war Navy. It demonstrates the significance of what was learned from the USN by the RN and by USN from the RN. As well as examining the background to the largest fleet the Royal Navy ever put to sea, the book also charts its effects on Anglo-American relations, multinational operations, alliance building, and the ways naval forces are shaped by and in turn shape politics. It addresses a period of rapid technological development that witnessed profound changes in the international system, and which raised fundamental questions of what navies were for and how should they operate and organize themselves. In so doing the study illustrates how the experience of a few long months at the end of the war in the Pacific would cast a long shadow over these issues in the very different circumstances of the post-war world.

This study, closely researched by Philip Towle over the past thirty years, is principally concerned with the military relations between Britain and Japan during the first half of the twentieth century and the ambivalence, misunderstandings and misconceptions that informed their relationship, described by the author as ‘an epic tragedy’. Following the signing of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902, Japan was held up as a model in Britain and Britain in Japan. But within a generation, the British came to see Japan as the first country to challenge the League of Nations and to begin a new age of imperialism. Conversely, the Japanese armed forces saw Britain as the greatest obstacle to Japanese ambitions in China and elsewhere. In 1936, Lieutenant Commander Tota Ishimaru’s book Japan Must Fight Britain was printed in Britain, its significance ignored at many levels, and five years later the two countries were at war. ‘The feelings stirred up by that conflict,’ notes Towle, ‘still have resonance today.’ From Ally to Enemy brings together a most important body of research that is long overdue in book form and will be widely welcomed by historians and researchers of the period, as well as those seeking more detailed analysis of specific aspects of the pre-war Anglo-Japanese military relationship.