Mark Stille

Mark Stille is one of those people from Osprey's stable of writers that I come to appreciate more and more with time, in as much as he has the background (service as a USN intelligence officer and a continuing career as an analyst) to rise about the obvious and offer some original insights. As for this booklet, Stille has two main points. One, the Japanese effort to take Port Moresby in New Guinea was where their efforts to conquer an imperial exclusion zone in the Pacific began to fall apart, as the available resources began to dwindle. Two, in retrospect, the chances that Ernest King and Chester Nimitz were prepared to take with those resources available to them were highly risky in the extreme. Built on the best available studies at the time, you could do a lot worse if your looking for an incisive examination of this battle.… (more)

Solid account of one of the early battles in the Pacific theatre campaigns of the Second World War. The author does a good job of explaining the command difficulties that beset ABDA, the Allies' bodged force that fought against the Japanese, as well as emphasizing the technical and training angles the Japanese used very well. The Japanese made some mistakes, but overall, the Allied effort was doomed. Above-average selection of the photographs, too, including one of the destruction of the USS Langley that I always wanted to see. Recommended.… (more)