Japanese Carriers and Victory in the Pacific: The Yamamoto Option by Martin Stansfeld is certainly an attractively packaged volume. The cover of this Pen and Sword Maritime publication is dominated by a photo of Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) Combined Fleet Commander-in-Chief Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku resplendent in a full-dress uniform. Behind Yamamoto, the rays of the Hinomaru (Rising Sun) naval ensign cast their light over a couple of aircraft carriers at sea, while at the bottom of the cover, below Yamamoto, a battleship of the Yamato class steams proudly ahead at full speed. However, as it turns out, the cover is by far the best part of this volume, which is fundamentally flawed in methodology and concept.

For starters, Stansfeld is not a professional historian but rather an amateur naval enthusiast of the “buff” type who developed an interest in the IJN “because their ships looked far sexier than anyone else’s” (Dust Jacket, Rear Flap). His lack of education as a historian is evident in the superficial research conducted for this book, which apparently (apparently, because citations and a bibliography are lacking) included consulting hoary old classics by Samuel Eliot Morison and Arthur Marder, along with much internet surfing, with Wikipedia mentioned as a favorite online source. To be fair, the author does also refer to reading more recent standard English-language secondary works on the IJN, such as Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887-1941 by the late David C. Evans and Mark Peattie and Peattie’s Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941, but it seems that he missed out on a number of other key sources such as Asada Sadao’s From Mahan to Pearl Harbor: The Imperial Japanese Navy and the United States, Stephen Pelz’s Race to Pearl Harbor: The Failure of the Second London Naval Conference and the Onset of World War II, and John J. Stephan’s Hawaii Under the Rising Sun: Japan’s Plans for Conquest After Pearl Harbor.

The author’s spotty approach to research is further in evidence in his breezy dismissal of the value, and indeed necessity, of Japanese-language sources. As he confesses, “At first I considered the long game, that being to scour the official history of Japanese shipbuilding except it’s written in Japanese and light years long” (p. vii) before concluding that “it did not matter” (p. viii). Although research in Japanese-language sources is a daunting task requiring years of specialized language training, a historian writing in the 21st century simply cannot produce a credible work in the field of Japanese history (including the IJN) without engaging Japanese sources. This does not even appear to have occurred to Stansfeld in his unconscious echoing of Payson J. Treat, an early 20th-century U.S. historian of Japan who once reportedly said that if a document was important enough, it would be translated into English. Although such cultural hubris may have been acceptable in 1923, it is not tenable in 2023.

The author’s lack of understanding of the basics of the historian’s craft and naval history in general is also apparent in his argument, which is largely counterfactual and is based on faulty premises. After a superficial and sprawling overview of Japan’s naval history after World War I in the first couple of chapters, Stansfeld devotes the rest of the book to his thesis that the IJN could have possibly altered the course of the Pacific War by devoting its shipyards to the building of a fleet of fast aircraft carriers (what he calls a “phantom fleet”) instead of the super battleships Yamato and Musashi. Such a full-capacity focus on carriers would have allowed the IJN to better match the U.S. Navy’s carrier force in numbers of ships, which in turn might have resulted in victory under the command of the skilled Admiral Yamamoto. However, even if one accepts the far-fetched notion that Japanese shipyards could have matched those of the United States in terms of gross carrier tonnage, for aircraft carriers to be effective weapons of war, they must be stocked with first-rate aircraft crewed by highly trained and skilled flyers. Furthermore, carriers require large quantities of fuel to conduct wide-ranging operations, and the aircraft they carry also require fuel. In those key areas, Japan was in no position to match the seemingly boundless human and material resources of the United States. Moreover, Stansfeld overrates Yamamoto as a naval commander. After all, he was the loser at the Battle of Midway, when indeed the IJN did outnumber the U.S. fleet.

In addition to its methodological and content flaws, Japanese Carriers and Victory in the Pacific: The Yamamoto Option is written in a conversational, almost stream-of-consciousness style, with one-sentence “paragraphs” abounding. Although the author is principally responsible for such basic stylistic lapses, the publisher also bears significant responsibility for a seeming failure to edit the manuscript. Perhaps some of the resources that were devoted to producing such an attractive cover could have been better used on improving the content that is underneath the cover.