Based on eyewitness accounts, declassified Navy documents, and interviews and correspondence with veterans, this epic account chronicles the October 1944 battle off Samar between a vastly outnumbered fleet of American warships and a flotilla of the Japanese Navy, a struggle that changed the course of World War II in the Pacific.

This account of a disaster at sea during World War II is “a powerful and engrossing story of tragedy, survival, and heroism” (Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down).
 
In the final days of 1944, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey is the Pacific theater’s most popular and colorful naval hero. After a string of victories, the “Fighting Admiral” and his thirty-thousand-man...

"This ... history encompasses the heart of the Pacific War--the period between mid-1942 and mid-1944--when parallel Allied counteroffensives north and south of the equator washed over Japan's far-flung island empire like a 'conquering tide,' concluding with Japan's irreversible strategic defeat in the Marianas. It was the largest, bloodiest, most costly, most technically innovative and logistically complicated amphibious war in history, and it fostered...

"The final volume of the magisterial Pacific War Trilogy from acclaimed historian Ian W. Toll, "one of the great storytellers of war" (Evan Thomas). Twilight of the Gods is a riveting account of the harrowing last year of World War II in the Pacific, when the U.S. Navy won the largest naval battle in history; Douglas MacArthur made good his pledge to return to the Philippines; waves of kamikazes attacked the Allied fleets; the Japanese fought to the...

"NEARLY FIFTY YEARS AGO, as a new assistant professor in the History Department at the U.S. Naval Academy, I shared an office suite with Elmer B. "Ned" Potter. Ned had taught at the Naval Academy since before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He was also the co-editor with Chester Nimitz of the book Sea Power (1961), which we all used as a text in the required naval history course that I subsequently taught at the Academy for thirty years. Ned knew...

Describes the loss of the cruiser U.S.S. Houston during the early days of World War II in the Pacific and the fate of the warship's surviving crew, who were captured by the Japanese and forced to work as slaves on Japan's brutal Burma-Thailand Death Railway.

Draws on eyewitness accounts and primary sources to describe the first months of World War II in the Pacific, after the U.S. Navy suffered the worst defeat in its history at Pearl Harbor.

Edge of Valor is the fifth thriller by John J. Gobbell featuring the World War II exploits of Cdr. Todd Ingram, commanding officer of the destroyer USS Maxwell (DD 525) who saves his ship when it is hit by a kamikaze off Okinawa. For repairs, they pull into Kerama Rhetto, Okinawa, where they receive news of the war's end. Ingram expects to be shipped home like the rest of his crew but instead receives orders to fly to Manila, where he is met by Brig....