Aviation History - January 2016

january 2016 AH 61

OPPOSITE: STEVEN PRATT/GETTY IMAGES

Back in 2009 Edwin M. Dyer

published an account of

Japanese experimental air-

craft and aerial weapons

projects ranging from those

that barely reached the test-

ing stage to some that never

left the drawing board. The

book revealed a combination

of imaginative originality

and attempts to adopt

German technology such as

jet and rocket propulsion.

Among the latter was a plan

to speed up the Kugisho P1Y

Ginga bomber and the Naka-

jima J1N1-S Gekko night

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jet engines, and improving

the range of the rocket-

propelled Yokosuka MXY7

Ohka with a Tsu-11 thermo-

jet. Various special bomb

and missile concepts were

also explored, including the

Fu-Go balloon bombs.

Japanese Secret Projects has

been reissued by Specialty

Anyone with a basic under-

standing of World War II

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15, 1945, and a surrender

ceremony followed aboard

the battleship USS Missouri

in Tokyo Bay on September

2. Be tween those dates, an
   unexpected air encounter
   brought together Japa nese
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   Ameri can bomber and U.S.
   Army photog rapher Ser geant
   Anthony J. Mar chione.
   On August 18, two B-32
   Dom inators took off from
   Oki nawa for what should
   have been a postwar photo

As Harding notes, Mar-

chione, just past his 20th

birthday, was “the embodi-

ment of the millions of young

Americans who left their

homes and families to serve in

the nation’s armed forces in

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mortally wounded. Thanks to

Press, with an added second

volume devoted to experi-

mental designs that made it

to testing, as well as variants

on proven designs intended

either to extend their lives or

transform them into kami-

kaze craft at WWII’s end.

Also included are a few proj-

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ume, such as the colossal

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transport, powered by 12

Hungarian-developed

Jendrassik Cs-1 turboprop

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jaded by the wealth of litera-

ture devoted to Allied and

German experimental air-

craft, Japanese Secret Projects

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counterparts.

Jon Guttman

THE HUNTER KILLERS

The Extraordinary Story of the First

Wild Weasels, the Band of Maverick Aviators

Who Flew the Most Dangerous Missions

of the Vietnam War

by Dan Hampton, William Morrow, 2015, $27.99.

This portrait of the men who pio-

neered the art of knocking out sur-

face-to-air missile batteries in the

Vietnam War reads like a history of

Titanic. Everyone knows the story

ends tragically when the presumably

invincible leviathan plunges to disas-

ter. Yet there are remarkable exam-

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nobility of the human spirit.

Dan Hampton is supremely quali-

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latter-day version of it as a “Wild

Weasel” who notched 151 combat missions over Kosovo and

Iraq. Readers get an in-the-cockpit close-up of what it was like

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most heavily defended airspace the world had ever seen.

There are bound to be comparisons with Jack Broughton’s

1969 classic Thud Ridge, which described an air commander

operating under rules of engagement that all but guaranteed a

failed outcome. Broughton’s book is a condemnatory memoir

written in the heat of the moment. Hampton’s work is a heavi ly

researched analysis prepared a generation later, in the

shadow of a campaign bearing eerily familiar characteristics.

This book is a must for anyone interested in the cat-and-

mouse game played in the skies of Southeast Asia. It ensures

that the lost war’s courageous anti-SAM pilots will not be

forgotten. It is also a reminder of still-unheeded lessons about

the onerous constraints placed on the military and micro-

management by bureaucrats.

Philip Handleman

LAST TO DIE

A Defeated Empire, a Forgotten Mission,

and the Last American Killed in World War II

by Stephen Harding, Da Capo Press, 2015, $26.99.

mission over Japan. Nearly all

Japa nese troops had laid down

their arms, but tensions per-

sisted. The B-32 was a backup

to the B-29 Superfortress,

operational in small numbers.

Last to Die is a heartfelt nar-

rative by historian Stephen

Harding, who published a

small specialty book about

the B-32 fully 31 years ago.

Since then, he has searched

every military archive in the

United States and Japan to

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the bomber’s final mission.

(Harding is also editor of

Aviation History’s sister publi-

cation Military History.)

Harding’s exhaustive inter-

views and research we get

to know Marchione well—a

nice young man who touched

the author and now touches

us as well.

The book raises a big

“what if?” What if large num-

bers of Japanese forces had

chosen to continue fighting

in spite of the formal end of

hostilities—as has happened

in every one of America’s

wars since? Why did General

Douglas MacArthur ulti-

mately decide that the attack

on the B-32s did not call for

large-scale retaliation, poten-

tially restarting the war? Find

out while immersed in this

gripping, real-world tale.

Robert F. Dorr

JAPANESE

SECRET PROJECTS

Experimental Aircraft of

the IJA and IJN 1939-1945

by Edwin M. Dyer III, distributed

by Specialty Press, 2009

(Vol. 1) and 2014 (Vol. 2),

$42.95 each.