By Clay Blair Jr.
With the content of an authoritative reference and the excitement of a thriller, this history of the U.S. submarine war against Japan is one of the most informative and entertaining books written on the Pacific campaign. The author, a respected journalist and World War II submariner, provides a complete and unbiased account of what happened and addresses such controversial aspects of the campaign as the torpedo scandal and discrepancies between claimed and confirmed sinkings.
To get to the truth, Clay Blair interviewed scores of skippers, staff officers, and code breakers and examined thousands of documents and personal papers. He takes the reader into the submarine war at all levels, form strategy session in Washington to moments of terror waiting out exploding depth charges at the bottom of the ocean. He also exposes the reader to the jealous infighting of admirals vying for power and the tensions between the cautious older skippers and daring young commanders. Supplementing the text are nearly forty maps showing submarine activity in the context of every important naval engagement in the Pacific, thirty-two pages of photographs, multiple appendixes, and an index of more tan two thousand entries.
