The Japanese Aircraft Carriers Soryu and Hiryu (Hard Cover Series) Hardcover – July 19, 2015

Excellent book about this pair of IJN aircraft carriers. Well written, good selection of photos. Development and operational histories are covered. It includes color depictions of Japanese aircraft and their USN opponents that are very well done. Would have liked to see Hiryu and Soryu depicted in color as well, particularly some of the flight deck schemes, but that's a minor quibble. Would recommend, my purchase of this volume led to my buying another of his books on the IJN carrier KAGA.

Love the information but better editing is needed. Please give us more IJN material!

A very good book on these two ships. Chapter I on Initial Concept and Design Changes contains information I had never read before. There is a separate chapter on the design of the Hiryu describing the changes to the design and construction as a result of the Fourth Fleet Incident of July 1935. The book is a translation from the original Polish and there are several annoyances. There are quite a few English misspellings and grammatical oddities. For example, Rangun is the capital of Birma. In a couple of sentences it appears that the Polish word for "hull" got translated as "fuselage." Another annoyance is that a couple of photo or drawing captions don't really match the photos. For example, on page 17, the label for the drawing reads "Cross section ... showing the thickness of armor plating." There is no text in the drawing -- the deck levels are not called out and no armor thicknesses are indicated. These things are a bit irritating but the information in the book is still excellent.

Any illustrated book with accurate captions is the most desired book!! This book meets these another expectations!! After over 70 years many rare pictures are starting to come out!! I hope to see such books on Japanese War Ships of the Forties!! Kudos!!

Its hard to find many good books concerning the history of Japan's aircraft carriers from WWII and this one is worth purchasing!

Good research book,good explanation of the 1930`s treaties.

This is a nicely illustrated, 100 page, large format hardbound book with attractive and glossy front and back covers. The content of the book is mostly B & W photos and detailed drawings, with an eight page color section with profiles of IJN and USN aircraft of the period, all nicely presented on semi-gloss paper. There is descriptive text of the design of the ships and their operational history, but that is not the book's strength. The bibliography is a scant 11 sources, but a few footnotes indicate other sources were consulted.As of now, all of the other reviews of this book give it 4 or 5 stars. I don't regard it that highly. As others have noted the translation is often awkward-never incomprehensible-but awkward. My main concerns are the lack of analysis and the sketchy research apparent in some areas. By lack of analysis, I mean the author describes features of the carriers' designs but says little about how effective they were, nor how they compared to other carriers. By sketchy research I noticed the author's description of the Battle of Midway seemed almost straight out of Fuchida's discredited account. He also has the Yorktown sunk solely by aircraft from the Hiryu, totally ignoring the I-168's role. And, admittedly a minor point, he has the Japanese tanker Akebono Maru as sunk by the Americans when it actually was only damaged.(Given that Parshall and Tully's book is cited in a footnote, it's odd these gaffe's were there.) There were other parts of the operational history of the carriers that erred as well, but these examples I hope give you the idea.

This book was a very good read and I gained knowledge of several points not previously know.