Cheap Eagles of Mitsubishi: The Story of the Zero Fighter (Book) (Jir-O Horikoshi) Price

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Customer Reviews of Eagles of Mitsubishi: The Story of the Zero Fighter

The designer of the legend's own words
For the cerebral military history and aviation history buff, it's hard to get a better book than this one. Mr. Horikoshi was the leader of the team that designed the famous Zero, the plane that scared the Allies silly for the couple of years around Pearl Harbor. The book focuses on what he knows best: the design of the plane, including its context in fighter plane designs of the pre-war years. Toward the end, there are some agonized comments about attempts to design successors to and modifications to the Zero after the Americans developed tactics and aircraft specifically to combat it. Combat results are described in only the most cursory way, so many military history buffs may be disappointed that the only deaths recounted in detail are those of test pilots. For those interested in the more cerebral side of military history -- the weapons systems, the economic and logistical problems, and so on -- there are few books as rewarding as this one.

There aren't first-person accounts of dogfights or bombing attacks here; Horikoshi never participated in combat. Nor is there anything substantive here about the training of the pilots that flew those first Zeros and deserve a large amount of the credit for the victories the design produced in 1940-1942. Instead there is a meticulous recap of the decisions that went into building the plane, and the reader gets keen insight into how an aeronatical engineer must think in order to create a near-legendary design. After reading this book, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that if Imperial Japan of the 1930's had had better engine designs than the ones available to Mr. Horikoshi, the road from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay would have been longer and bloodier than it worked out to be.