"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...

"The first book in a new three-volume history of the Asia-Pacific War, by the acclaimed author of Downfall and Guadalcanal. In 1937 the swath of the globe from India to Japan contained half the world's population, but only two nations with real sovereignty (Japan and Thailand) and two with compromised sovereignty (China and Mongolia). All other peoples in the region endured under some form of colonialism. Today the region contains nineteen major,...

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.

After a devastating encounter with Japanese submarines at the Battle of Midway, American naval forces are left in disarray as Japan dominates the Pacific, but a bold plan for ambushing the Japanese offers the hope of giving the Americans a fighting chance again.

"Out here, mention is seldom seen of the achievements of the Army ground troops," wrote one officer in the fall of 1943, "whereas the Marines are blown up to the skies." Even today, the Marines are celebrated as the victors of the Pacific, a reflection of a well-deserved reputation for valor. Yet the majority of fighting and dying in the war against Japan was done not by Marines but by unsung Army soldiers. John C. McManus, one of our most highly...

Fully illustrated throughout, Desperate Sunset examines the development and evolution of the kamikaze using first-hand accounts, combat reports, and archived histories. By the middle of 1944, Imperial Japan's armed forces were in an increasingly desperate situation. Its elite air corps had been wiped out over the Solomons in 1942-43, and its navy was a shadow of the force that had attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. But the Japanese had one last, desperate,...

DeRose chronicles the evolution of Aemrican submarine tactics from evasion to engagement as begun by Dudley "Mush" Morton aboard the "Wahoo" and continued by officers who apprenticed under him.