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"War in the Pacific begins with Japan's interest in colonialism, the assassination of Marshall Chang Tso-lien in Manchuria, and Japan's subsequent decision to 'Strike South.' The attack on Pearl Harbor is examined in light of the difficulties Japan's navy had to overcome to launch such an attack.
The atrocities inflicted upon innocent people and prisoners of war, even prior to the Rape of Nanking, are covered in detail throughout Japan's conquest and reign of terror. Here, in a succinct and lucid presentation, is all the information you wanted to know about the Bataan Death March, the Burma Road, Doolittle's Raid on Tokyo, the Death Railway, the Kamikazes, the Firehombing of Japan, and difficulties Japan had in ending the war.
The chapters on 'Other' Surrender Ceremonies and 'Independent Forces and Unnecessary Battles' reveal new information never before published."

Honolulu, Hawaii, Hawaii Pacific University:1996, ISBN 0-9653927-0-8 Provided by a gift from Debbie Wolfe

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"Volume II of War in the Pacific was written at the request of readers of Volume I. So many times I have responded to statements like, 'Where is the Battle for Guadalcanal? Where is the Battle for Leyte Gulf' and, 'You don't have the Battle for Iwo Jima in the book!' There were reasons for their non-inclusion in Volume I. They are now in Volume II along with many other exciting and true events of the Pacific War.
Volume II follows the chronology of Japan's invasion of China, and examines the war in China to a greater degree that Volume I. After all, the Pacific war began in China, not Pearl Harbor.
In addition to such battles as the six-month struggle for Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, the epic Leyte Gulf battle, Truk, and Rabaul, there are 16 chapters that describe major personalities of the war. This look at some of the people who conducted the war helps to understand why certain events happened the way they did.
The chapters on Jimmy Daniels, Martin Clemens, Saburo Sakai, Snow at Nagano, Shinano, Richard Fiske, Sandakan, Yamashita, Homma, Comfort Women, and Shiro lshii reveal information not generally known to the American public."

Honolulu, Hawaii, Hawaii Pacific University:1996, ISBN 0-9653927-0-8 Provided by a gift from Debbie Wolfe

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"The third and final volume in Eric Hammel's highly acclaimed Guadalcanal series, Guadalcanal: Decision at Sea is an entirely new examination in vivid detail of the Guadalcanal naval battle of November 13-15, 1942, a crucial step toward America's victory over the Japanese during World War II.
The three-day action was America's most decisive surface battle of the war and the only naval battle of this century in which American battleships directly confronted and mortally wounded an enemy battleship. This victory decided the future course of the war in the Pacific. Hammel has brilliantly blended the detailed historical records with personal accounts of many of the officers and enlisted men, creating an engrossing narrative of the strategy and struggle as seen by both sides. He has also included major new insights into crucial details of the battles, including a riveting account of the American forces' failure to effectively use their radar advantage."

New York, N.Y., Crown:1988, ISBN 0-517-56952-3 courtesy San Antonio Public Library

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"There have been only five carrier versus carrier battles in history. All of them were fought between the United States and Japan. In Guadalcanal: The Carrier Battles, Eric Hammel has written the first full-volume treatment of the pivotal aircraft carrier battles of the Guadalcanal campaign: the battle of the Eastern Solomons and the battle of Santa Cruz.
After Midway, the U.S. Navy was determined to prove that this 'incredible victory' could be followed up by winning other full-scale naval air confrontations. Eric Hammel vividly imparts the urgency of these two desperate battles in which both sides risked their surviving carrier forces to determine the future course of the Pacific war.
Hammel has brilliantly blended the detailed historical narrative of these battles with the personal accounts of many of the airmen and sailors, creating an engrossing narrative of the strategy and struggle as seen by both sides. The personal recollections of more than a hundred participants bring to life such high points of the battles as the dramatic loss of carriers Hornet and Wasp. We also relive the grim reality of the early Pacific war through Hammel's portrayal of that American generation at war."

New York, N.Y., Crown:1987, ISBN 0-517-56608-7 courtesy San Antonio Public Library

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"The Franklin's agony began when two bombs, smashing down from a lone Japanese plane, set gasoline reservoirs ablaze and touched off tremendous explosions amid stored ammunition. More than 800 on board perished and nearly half as many were wounded. The hangar deck, filled with crewmen and gassed-up aircraft, their bomb racks loaded, was swept by a volcano of flames.
The Franklin was subjected to a more devastating attack than that suffered by any other U.S. capital ship in the history of America's involvement in wars - and yet the ship survived. This, then, is the complete saga - highlighted by dramatic eyewitness stories - of the Franklin's harrowing adventures in the waning days of World War II."

New York, N. Y., Manor Books:1976 (paperback)

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"Hoehling has written an exciting story. His superb accomplishment has been to make clear the dangers that afflict the men engaged in war at sea. Against the menace of death and disfigurement, staunch devotion to duty is the only defense. How the men of the Lexington discharged their duties during the final hours of their ship is a testament to the quiet and normal heroism that marks the behavior of proficient and brave men during moments of adversity and crisis. Americans can with good reason be proud of the valor of these fighting men who personified the virtues of all who overcame obstacles of defeat and discouragement to gain victory in World War II. - Martin Blumenson, renowned American historian and author of Patton: The Man Behind the Legend and Anzio: The Gamble That Failed."

Mechanicsburg, Pa., Stackpole:1993, ISBN 0-8117-2550-2 (softcover) Provided by a gift from Sigfried Richter

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"'This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can.'
With these words, Lieutenant Commander Robert W. Copeland addressed the crew of the destroyer escort USS Samuel B. Roberts on the morning of October 25, 1944, off the Philippine island of Samar. On the horizon loomed the mightiest ships of the Japanese Navy, a massive fleet that represented the last hope of a staggering empire. All that stood between it and Douglas MacArthur's vulnerable invasion force were the Roberts and the other small ships of a tiny American flotilla poised to charge into history.
In the tradition of the #1 New York Times bestseller Flags of Our Fathers comes an inspiring chronicle of courage under fire. James D. Hornfischer paints a remarkable portrait of a naval battle unlike any other in U.S. history - a story as much about the values that define a warrior and a nation as it is about war. Facing overwhelming firepower, with no prospect of reinforcement, thirteen American warships began a fight they couldn't win - and fought it to the death.
Told from the point of view of the men who waged this steel-shattering battle, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors captures Navy pilots attacking enemy battleships with makeshift weapons and sacrificial valor, a veteran commander improvising tactics never taught at Annapolis, and young crews from across America rising to an impossible challenge. It takes us into the heart and mind of an iron-willed, self-made executive officer leading his men through a sea of carnage and two hellish days and nights clinging to survival amid oil, blood, sharks, and madness. And it dramatizes how the overmatched U.S. force, enduring the loss of five gallant ships and nearly a thousand brave men, turned a certain crushing defeat into a momentous victory that would lead to the final surrender of America's ruthless imperial foe.
Filled with riveting detail and based on the author's extensive interviews and correspondence with veterans, unpublished eyewitness accounts, declassified documents, and rare Japanese sources, this is war at sea as it has seldom been presented before - an unforgettable narrative that captures the essence of heroism, the power of loyalty and the way in which the unadorned truth is more stirring than legend itself."

New York, N.Y., Bantam:2004, ISBN 0-553-38148-2 (softcover)

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"In the spring of 1942, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when American prestige and morale were at a low ebb, it seemed quite possible that the war was lost. The Japanese were advancing on all fronts. They had captured Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and had overrun Southeast Asia. Now they were heading for Australia.
The Imperial plan was simple enough: establish bases in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands and use them to cut off Australia and New Zealand from the West. The Japanese sent a top admiral, with three carriers and a dozen capital ships to guard them. In April they were moving.
Seeing this danger, Admiral Ernest King of the U.S. Navy decided Japan must be stopped at all costs. With only four aircraft carriers available in the Pacific and two of them in the waters off New Guinea where a Japanese threat developed, it would not be easy.
Rear Admiral Aubrey Fitch in the carrier Lexington was out looking for the Japanese. So was Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, in the carrier Yorktown. When the forces joined, with Fletcher in command, they suddenly found the enemy landing in the Solomons. Planes from the Yorktown plastered that landing. Then the real battle was set up and it was not long in coming.
Never before had carrier been matched against carrier, and this time Lexington and Yorktown found themselves up against the powerful Japanese fleet carriers, Zuikaku and Shokaku, both veterans of the Pearl Harbor attack. Aboard the ships the men manned their guns. And the fight that would determine the future of the war was on....
Few writers can sustain the kind of exciting narrative that distinguishes this account of brave men of two lands fighting each other to death, carrying as it does, the chill and excitement of history."

New York, N.Y., Paul S. Ericksson:1975, ISBN 0-8397-1021-6 (hardcover)

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"At 7:55 on the morning of December 7, 1941, Rear Adm. W. R. Furlong was pacing the deck of the U.S.S. Oglala, tied up at a buoy in Hawaii's Pearl Harbor. He spotted a plane flying low over Ford Island, coming in from the northeast, and he watched it idly. It was a beautiful morning; the sun had come up over Mount Tantalus about an hour before, and it splashed brightly on the surface of the harbor. The blue of the water and the blue of the sky had never seemed clearer. The dawn had never seemed calmer. Even the snow-white clouds that drifted across the sky looked lazy and content.
And then all hell broke loose. The plane dropped a bomb on the seaplane ramp at the south end of the island, and a cloud of dust and debris soiled the clear air. In a moment there were more planes zooming down, dropping bombs, torpedoes, and strafing with machine guns. The Sunday morning quiet erupted into a torrent of explosions, sirens, whistles, shouts, and screams.
The Japanese were attacking Pearl Harbor."

New York, N.Y., Lancer:1972 (paperback)

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"From 1939 through the early years of World War II they were the most feared and daring killers of the sea...
Under the command of Hitler's brilliant navy commander, Doenitz, the best and brightest German navy officers led their submarines into action, hunted in packs, struck without warning, and formed an awesome, unstoppable naval force that hammered Allied shipping in the North Atlantic. But in 1942 the Allies struck back and began a relentless, all-out counterwar against the German U-boats and Doenitz's daring young captains. In this dramatic account military historian Edwin P. Hoyt goes from the German and British high commands into the steel-enclosed world of the U-boats and the hearts and minds of the men who fought in them. From the first attacks to daring escapes and extraordinary duels on the open seas, here is the true story of Germany's most powerful naval force - and how it was finally brought to its knees."

New York, N.Y., Warner:1988, ISBN 0-446-35568-2 (paperback) Provided by a gift from Masood Looie

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"How should we remember Guadalcanal? In his preface to the 1999 edition, Edwin R. Hoyt argues that, contrary to accepted opinion, Guadalcanal was not the turning point in the Pacific War that it was supposed to be. Rather, Hoyt asks us to see Guadalcanal in light of earlier conflicts, namely those of Coral Sea and Midway in May and June 1942. Coral Sea, though not an American victory, put enough of the Japanese fleet out of commission to seriously hinder Japanese fighting capacity at the more decisive Battle of Midway. Midway left four Japanese carriers on the ocean floor and permanently crippled the combined fleet's offensive capacity. From that point on, the American troops were on the move, pushing back the front in an arduous island-to-island campaign. Guadalcanal must be remembered for its soldiers, for theirs was the fighting spirit that ended the war in the Pacific. The men who fought there represent the tremendous tenacity and mettle that made victory in the East possible."

Lanham, Maryland, Scarborough House:1999, ISBN 0-8128-8563-5 ((paperback) Provided by a gift from Rose and Margaret Foerster

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"As the Japanese began their onslaught through the Pacific, American forces were under two separate commands. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the army commander, needed the cooperation of the navy to conduct operations and move troops. But the Allies - at war in the Atlantic as well as the Pacific - were woefully short of ships and, besides, the navy was at odds with MacArthur's plan to recapture the Philippines, a strategy as much political as military.
Then, slowly, the war's tide began to turn. Allied forces stopped the Japanese advance in the Solomons and New Guinea. Ships were made available for the series of amphibious assaults that were to drive the Japanese back to their home islands. And so the Seventh Fleet was created, and ship by ship MacArthur began to receive the naval support he'd been clamoring for.
New Britain, Cape Gloucester, Hollandia, Biak - these are places forgotten by all but those who fought there and the families of those who died there. Yet with each landing the Allies gained experience, learning valuable lessons about military planning and execution.
In the end, MacArthur prevailed. He got both his navy and his strategy The stage was set for the great invasion of the Philippines, supported by the largest naval force ever assembled. In the Surigao Strait, the Seventh Fleet beat back the Japanese navy's last-ditch attempt to stem the Allied advance. It was the last major surface battle in naval history.
But Japanese desperation brought into being a new and terrible weapon, the kamikazes. The suicide attacks were relentless, killing hundreds and hundreds of sailors and crippling ship after ship. The effect was so devastating, the military censors suppressed reports of the destruction from the American people, not wanting such demoralizing news released when victory seemed so clearly in sight.
By focusing for the first time on the Seventh Fleet, by bringing its campaigns so vividly to life, veteran military historian Edwin P Hoyt makes a valuable new contribution to our understanding of the time the whole world was at war."

New York, N.Y., Crown:1989, ISBN 0-517-56769-5 (hardcover)

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"From all over America they came. Some were men; many were still boys. Almost all were raw recruits; little knowing how war would test them and how it would change their lives.
Now relive every moment of heroism and danger with the men who survived one of the U.S. Navy's most strategic battles of the Pacific...the Battle of Leyte Gulf. From the hasty building of the 'baby flattop' to its death at sea under Japanese fire, the vivid stories of these men - from the captain to the younqest sailor - is a resounding accolade to the American fighting seamen whose valor laid claim to glory."

New York, N.Y., Avon:1981, ISBN 0-380-55806-8 (paperback)

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"World War II began in September 1939. Within four months, the Nazis sank one-third of the entire British battleship force, beginning with the daring entry of submarine U-47 inside the British defenses at Scapa Flow to torpedo the Royal Oak.
In the first six months after America's entry into the war, six U-boats sank fully half the total registered tonnage of the United States. The East Coast beaches ran black with oil.
Despite the experience of the First World War that had made clear the lethal potential of German undersea warfare, and the massive buildup of Nazi military might in the 1930s, neither of the two great Allied powers developed adequate antisubmarine defenses, and the weapons they did have were virtually useless. It was from this appalling start that the great U-boat wars of World War II were fought; and had the battle of the U-boats been lost, the Battle of Berlin - and the Allied victory - would never have occurred.
Edwin P. Hoyt has drawn on German, British, and American naval archives to tell the extraordinary story of the U-boat wars and the counterwar of the Allies that finally overcame the Nazi threat. The sights and sounds of battle ring through these pages. It is a story full of formidable personalities, struggles between merchant captains, destroyer captains, and U-boat commanders warring against one another. It is a cruel and tragic story; the German U-boat crews lost 28,000 of their 39,000 men. And it is the story of heroes fighting heroes, deadly enemies all the way. In the end British perseverance and American productivity overcame German aggression and technological skill, but it was an outcome by no means fore-ordained."

New York, N.Y., Arbor:1984 (hardcover)

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"The Battle of the Atlantic is the first complete, thoroughly documented account of the pivotal campaign of World War Il - the German attempt to sever Allied supply lines in the Atlantic. The battle began with the sinking of the passenger liner Athenia and was remorselessly sustained by U-boats for the next five years and eight months - the entire duration of the war. Twice the crippling losses of merchant shipping brought Britain to the brink of starvation and Hitler to the threshold of victory. Defeat in the longest, most bitterly fought campaign of the war finally cost the Germans 784 U-boats and 28,000 crewmen. Victory cost the Allies 2,603 merchant ships and 175 naval vessels - and 40,000 lives, including 26,000 civilians.
Now, the release of hitherto secret documents from official British, German, and American archives makes it possible, for the first time, to tell the full story of how this momentous battle was fought and won. These documents describe the key role played by ULTRA intelligence in the secret war against the U-boats and reveal the clandestine political deal between Roosevelt and Churchill which saved the West by martialing the full weight of U.S. industrial effort into the Battle of the Atlantic - long before America formally declared war.
Ranging from Murmansk to Trinidad, from Boston to Bremerhaven, this gripping account combines archive reports and eyewitness accounts with more than 400 action photographs (most never before published).
More than just a military record, The Battle ot the Atlantic looks behind the ocean battles between convoys and U-boats to show the human struggle on two continents, including the role played by women in shipyards, factories, and farms. It describes the epic endurance of survivors on gale-wracked seas, the technological miracles of primitive computers that broke the Atlantic U-boat code, and the Germans' massive production program which almost brought a revolutionary fast new submarine into operation in time to threaten the Allied invasion of Furope. Incorporating a wealth of explanatory maps, diagrams, and charts - including key battle maps from German sources - The Battle of the Atlantic traces the ebb and flow of the campaign of which Churchill said, 'The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.'"

New York, NY, Dial Press/James Wade:1977 (hardcover), ISBN 0-8037-6454-2

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"In this compelling study, Richard Humble traces the full story of the aircraft-carrier, beginning with the floatplane and deck-landing pioneers of the First World War. He examines the conversion of battleships to carriers in the 1920s and the evolution of the carrier task force as a far more powerful successor to the traditional battle fleet - as shatteringly demonstrated at Taranto in November 1940 and at Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Whether sealing the fate of the Bismarck or providing vital air cover for convoys, the carrier was rarely out of the news in the Second World War. It helped clinch the defeat of the U-boats in the Atlantic, and was the decisive naval weapon of the Pacific War, from Pearl Harbor to the bombardment and defeat of Japan.
In the post-war jet-and-missile era the carrier served through the Korean and Vietnam wars, showing that it was still the ideal medium for establishing rapid and effective hitting-power by sea. But by the late 1960s, soaring building costs and the apparent advantages of the submarine-launched nuclear deterrent made the carrier seem increasingly obsolete.
Now the aircraft-carrier has entered an ominous new chapter in its history but far from becoming extinct, as many predicted ten years ago, it is now the subject of a relentless Soviet development programme - at the very time when NATO has halted new construction and Britain has decided to phase out carriers altogether, on what could yet turn out to be the eve of the Third World War.
The potency of the aircraft-carrier is therefore again the focus of attention; in the event of war it may be called upon to perform a more dramatic and influential role than ever before.
Indeed, as the remarkable Falklands campaign of April-June 1982 has shown the aircraft-carrier has proved itself one of the most vital conventional weapons of modern warfare."

Hadley Wood, Herts, England, Winchmore Publishing Services, Ltd.:1982

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