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RARE ORIGINAL AMERICAN HANDBOOK ON JAPANESE MILITARY FORCES 1944

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This is a remarkable original 79 year old, 400+ page American War Department manual prepared and disseminated to very high-ranking military personnel within organizations that needed to know as much as possible about the military forces of Imperial Japan during World War II.

At the time it was published in very, very limited quantities (we think less than 200 were distributed (!) as mentioned on page II), its use was restricted “to persons of undoubted loyalty and discretion”, but of course it was eventually declassified with other such documents at the end of the war.

The War Department Technical Manual TM-E 30-480 HANDBOOK ON JAPANESE MILITARY FORCES is dated 1 October 1944, measures about 1 inch thick, and about 8 x 10-¼ inches and is bound in tan linen hard covers with a shoelace holding it together. The shoe lace binding made it possible to remove old, obsolete sections of the book and add new updates as they became available or if that became necessary. The book was published by the United States Government Printing Office in Washington DC.

The 402-page HANDBOOK ON JAPANESE MILITARY FORCES covers subjects such as recruitment and training, Japanese air service, special forces, Japanese military police, weapons, equipment, uniforms, personal equipment and insignia, military terms and characters, supplemental data, etc., etc.

There are eight full-page, full-color plates in the chapter on uniforms that depict 32 different Japanese uniforms along with insignia, etc.

Examples of this original 1944 military handbook are extremely difficult to find this long after World War II and they are rarely found complete, and almost never in this kind of condition. This one belongs in a museum some place!

It is the first best source of original American intelligence data on virtually everything connected with the Japanese Armed Forces in the Pacific during World War II.

This War Department Technical Manual TM-E 30-480 is very, very heavily illustrated with pictures of everything from vehicles to operating instruments, gas masks, airplanes, etc. and the book is in excellent, little-used condition and has no odor.