597 pages
Published March 20, 2011 by W.W. Norton.
On 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.
A great history, the first volume of a trilogy, that covers the war from Pearl Harbor to Midway. American, British, and Japanese sources and points of view are included. Toll does an excellent job of describing the principal personalities involved and of choosing the amount of detail to present in his account. The Kindle version has figures at the back that don't look too bad on the E-Ink screen.
