This installment of Samuel Eliot Morison's insider history of the U.S. Navy covers five of the most eventful months of the Pacific war, March through July 1944. Awash with spectacular rescues of downed airmen, bold beach landings, and brilliant though risky strategic gambles, this volume carries Morison's coverage of the war in the Pacific through the Allies' securing of Dutch New Guinea and the Marianas.

The three assaults that comprised Operation "Forager"--in which Morison participated--add up to one of the most important amphibious operations in history: protracted, bitterly contested, requiring great flexibility as well as fortitude. The development of powerful new weapons and sophisticated new tactics, together with the greatly extended distance of active operations from continental bases, rendered naval operations more vast and more complicated than ever before in history.

After nearly two years of bitter and almost continuous fighting, the Allies have broken the Bismarcks Barrier, conquered key Japanese positions in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, and cleared the way for an advance along the New Guinea-Mindanao axis. General MacArthur is intent on his one road to Tokyo, but Combined Chiefs of Staff decide to send Admiral Nimitz and the Pacific Fleet on a second, northern route, parallel to MacArthur's. Morison follows MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Forces in a series of bold leaps to Holandiak, Wakde, Biak, and the Vogelkop, also covering Pacific Fleet operations from the end of the Marshall Islands campaign to the recovery of Guam.

"What makes this book of particular value is that it constantly shifts from the account of the U.S. Navy to the reporting of what the Japanese were doing and planning at the time. It becomes very clear just where and when the Japanese were outguessed and outmaneuvered."--San Francisco Chronicle

Samuel Eliot Morison (1887-1976) was the Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University and the author or editor of more than fifty books, including Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus, The European Discovery of America, and the multivolume Oxford History of the American People. He retired from the navy with the rank of rear admiral.

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Subjects:
History, Military / History, Am.: 20th C.

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