Video: The Fyddeye Guide to America's Maritime History

The Fyddeye Guide to America's Maritime History (via YouTube) The book trailer for The Fyddeye Guide, produced by Joe Follansbee, photographed and recorded by Phil Borgnes.

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Review: A compelling story of the Yamato and her battle-sisters

Titans of the Rising Sun: The Rise and Fall of Japan’s Yamato Class Battleships, by Raymond A. Bawal, Jr. Published by Inland Expressions, 194 pages, softcover, $19.95.

One of my earliest maritime history experiences was visiting the USS Missouri at the age of eight or nine. The battleship was tied up with other World War II veterans of the Pacific War in Bremerton, Wash., as part of the U.S. mothball fleet. With a displacement of 45,000 tons, the ship was unimaginably large, almost overwhelming, to a child, though I understood its importance as the site of the final surrender of Imperial Japan in 1945.

As an adult, I wonder if I would have the same feeling standing on the deck of the Yamato, which was half again as large as Missouri at more than 65,000 tons. I’ll never know, because the Japanese super-battleship was sunk by U.S. Navy planes on April 7, 1945. But writer Raymond A. Bawal helps stir the imagination in his new history of Japan’s naval behemoths, Titans of the Rising Sun: The Rise and Fall of Japan’s Yamato Class Battleships.

Bawal painstakingly traces the technical development and strategic thinking behind the Yamato and her sister ship, Musashi, in the context of the entire Japanese Navy. Their roots go back to the rout of Imperial Russia’s Pacific Squadron at Tsushima in 1905 and the Japanese naval command’s belief that the battleship would be the core naval weapon of the 20th century. As Bawal writes, “these symbols of military might were the nuclear weapons of their day, providing security through a deterrent to aggression.”

But a new technology was about to draft an epitaph to the battleship: the airplane. Although some officers foresaw as early as the late 1930s how the bomb and torpedo-carrying plane would trump the Yamato’s 18-inch guns, the Japanese Navy as a whole saw the trend too late, even though it converted one of the unfinished Yamato-class ships to an aircraft carrier, only to see it sunk before it was sent into battle. And ironically, the weapons on which they spent so much money and resources would play virtually no role in the outcome of the war.

The author of two previous books on Great Lakes maritime history, Bawal discusses the Yamato and her sisters in a detached manner, without nostalgia, and the text could have featured a few more anecdotes about the thousands of men who served on these ships. The story is still compelling, however, and students of the Pacific War will better understand the important detail of the Yamato’s history after reading this book.

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Purchase and download the Fyddeye Guide from the Google eBookstore

I'm happy to announce that a new e-book edition of the Fyddeye Guide to America's Maritime History is now available for virtually all popular types of electronic readers, including Sony eReader, Barnes & Noble Nook and Nook Color, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Android phones, and on laptop and desktop computers. The Fyddeye Guide can be purchased and downloaded directly through the Google eBookstore or through a growing number of independent bookstores and Google eBook partners, such as Powell's Books in Portland, Ore. The suggested retail price through the Google eBookstore is $6.99.

A mobile edition of the Fyddeye Guide is also available for the Amazon Kindle.

All editions include more than 2,000 easy-to-browse listings of historic ships, spectacular lighthouses, and intriguing maritime museums in the United States. The Guide includes nearly 30 photographs, four maps, a calendar of popular maritime festivals, and special articles by Fyddeye.com contributing writers. The Guide covers maritime history attractions in the lower 48 states, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.

The Fyddeye Guide is the first maritime history research and travel guide for mobile reading devices. Readers use the Guide to plan a family trip, map out a heritage travel experience, research local history, or find a heritage organization to help them discover the sea captain in their family tree. The Guide includes three suggested travel itineraries focused on west coast, northeast, and Michigan lighthouses.

For more information about the Fyddeye Guide, see the news release.

Imperial Japan's World War II Yamato-class battleships profiled in new book

Clinton Township, Mich. — Author Raymond A. Bawal extends his literary work into World War II with Titans of the Rising Sun, a detailed study of the creation and demise of Japan’s Yamato-class battleship. During the first half of the twentieth century, the battleship symbolized a nation’s power on the world stage, with countries such as Britain, Japan, and the United States contending for dominance of the high seas. The overwhelming victory over the Russian fleet in 1905 by the Imperial Japanese fleet at the Battle of Tsushima would influence Japanese naval strategy for the next forty years.

The desire to build a powerful naval fleet to achieve its empire building ambitions prompted Japan to embark upon a series of construction programs which resulted in the creation of battleship classes with ever increasing capabilities. After an era of construction constraints imposed by naval treaties signed during the 1920s, Japan began formulating plans during the early 1930s for the creation of the most powerful and largest battleships the world would ever witness. These mammoth ships were equipped with the biggest guns ever fitted to a warship, and were capable of destroying any adversary they would meet.

Intended to be glorious symbols of Japanese power, the Yamato class had the disadvantage of being designed at a crossroads in naval strategy in which advances in aviation technology was shifting the focus of sea power from the battleship to the aircraft carrier. This change in paradigms would have dramatic effects not only on the Yamato class, but the battleship in general as they confronted a new type of warfare in which they were at a distinct disadvantage. The story of the Yamato and those of her class illustrate the closing of one chapter in the history of warfare while at the same time the opening of another.

Titans of the Rising Sun (206 pages, 45 illustations) is available in print on Amazon and as an e-book for the Amazon Kindle.