Nihon Hatsu no Roketto Sentōki Shūsui: Ekitai Roketto Enjin-ki no Tanjō [Japan’s First Rocket Fighter “Shusui”: The Birth of a Liquid-Rocket-Engine Aircraft].

History of the Mitsubishi J8M1 Shūsui, Japan’s only operational rocket-powered interceptor, built from technical data on the German Me 163 Komet that reached Japan by submarine (one of the two boats carrying the plans was lost en route, leaving designers to work from an incomplete set).

Conceived to climb fast enough to reach high-altitude B-29 formations, the aircraft went from data to a completed airframe in under a year.

Its sole powered test flight, flown by Lieutenant Toyohiko Inuzuka at the Navy’s Oppama airfield on July 7, 1945, ended in a fatal crash; a second death followed eight days later when an engine under acceptance testing at Yamakita exploded, killing Technical Lieutenant Masada. The war ended before a production aircraft could fly.

Matsuoka, a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries engineer for four decades, draws on the company’s internal archives and photographs; later chapters cover a postwar restoration of a surviving airframe and the traces of the Shūsui’s wartime base at Kashiwa.