Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

by Ian W. Toll

Overview

Winner of the Northern California Book Award for Nonfiction
"Both a serious work of history…and a marvelously readable dramatic narrative." —San Francisco ChronicleOn the first Sunday in December 1941, an armada of Japanese warplanes appeared suddenly over Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Six months later, in a sea fight north of the tiny atoll of Midway, four Japanese aircraft carriers were sent into the abyss, a blow that destroyed the offensive power of their fleet. Pacific Crucible—through a dramatic narrative relying predominantly on primary sources and eyewitness accounts of heroism and sacrifice from both navies—tells the epic tale of these first searing months of the Pacific war, when the U.S. Navy shook off the worst defeat in American military history to seize the strategic initiative.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393343410
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/26/2012
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	656
Sales rank:	19,549
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Ian W. Toll is the author of Pacific Crucible, The Conquering Tide, and Six Frigates, winner of the Samuel Eliot Morison Award and the William E. Colby Award. He lives in San Francisco and New York.

Editorial Reviews

Toll’s book does a good job of capturing strategy, tactics, weaponry and, especially, people, on the Japanese side as well as the American…You won’t set [Pacific Crucible] aside.”

Harry Levins - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Excellent. The research is thorough, the writing clear, and the narrative flow exemplary…It is difficult to think of a recent book on this subject that is of such consistently outstanding value.

Roland Green - Booklist (starred review)

Well documented—albeit from previously published materials—and well written. Experienced World War II history buffs may bypass if they feel no need to read another retelling of this phase of the Pacific War, but nonspecialists and general readers will want to consider it.

LibraryJournal.com

The research is thorough, the writing clear, and the narrative flow exemplary...it is difficult to think of a recent book on this subject that is of such consistently outstanding value.

Booklist

Prize-winning freelance naval historian Toll (Six Frigates) chronicles one of the U.S. Navy’s finest performances of WWII in this page-turning narrative of the months following the devastating attacks on Pearl Harbor. Eyewitness accounts and extensive research in American and Japanese print and archival sources combined with Toll’s storytelling abilities make this an approachable and compelling read in a genre typically reserved for military historians. More than mere battle plans and fighter plane model numbers, Toll’s take on the fight in the Pacific is imbued with a sensitivity to detail and individuals, as evidenced by his moving account of the disembarkation of Admiral Fitch and his crew from the sinking USS Lexington at the Battle of the Coral Sea, which saw ice cream being served as the boat burned and men awaiting rescue swam in the warm waters below. But Toll does not pander to sensationalism: his incisive scholastic efforts also shed light on Japanese motives for entering a war that many in the high command considered unwinnable. Revealing and poignant, Toll’s latest deftly navigates the rough waters of the Pacific struggle with flying colors. Illus. and maps. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Winner of the Samuel Eliot Morison and William E. Colby awards for Six Frigates, Toll has the expertise to discuss the first months of the Pacific War. History readers will want; with a seven-city tour.

Library Journal

An entertaining, impressively researched chronicle of the tense period between the bombing of Pearl Harbor and American victory at the battle of Midway.

In between these two signal events of World War II, uncertainty shook America. In the Pacific, the United States was caught off-guard by Japan's sneak attack, her Navy crippled and her fighters outmatched by the agile and deadly Japanese Zeros. Rumors of Japanese invasion of the West Coast seemed more likely with each defeat suffered by the combined forces in the Philippines. Toll (Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy, 2008, etc.) examines the forces moving behind the scenes—the trends in naval combat, complicated allegiances of American and Japanese politics, the military hierarchies and infighting that occurred between the combined forces—to create a full picture of the complex dynamics involved. The author's attempts to be comprehensive occasionally lead to dry passages and unnecessary digressions, especially regarding the more esoteric areas of politics. But when illuminating the remarkable men behind the headlines, Toll truly excels. From the horror of Pearl Harbor to the triumphant battle of Midway, the author carefully balances the narrative to tell the story from both sides of the conflict. His account begins with the American and Japanese officials involved in the burgeoning field of aircraft-carrier combat, and continues down to the pilots and crewmen who acted as the guinea pigs. What he finds is not a group of fearless soldiers, but real, conflicted men nearly torn apart by their doubts and fears, men who found the real courage necessary to act all the same.

Toll gives everyone involved in the conflict a chance to speak, bringing readers into the command centers and cockpits to reveal the humanity of combatants on both sides of the Pacific.

Kirkus Reviews