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The Rising Sun in the Pacific

(Samuel Eliot Morison)

What a great book! To my shame, I'd never read Morison's definitive but early history of U.S. naval operations in World War II. I was interested in airplanes, not ships, and anyhow I figured that his late-1940s sources must have long since been surplanted by better stuff.

Well, maybe there's more detail available now, but I don't know of any contemporary historian who can write with Morison's sweep and skill. He's the Winston Churchill of the U.S. Navy. It's a joy to read this book, with the first third of it given over to a survey of how the Imperial Japanese Navy became the most formidable fleet in the world in December 1941. Just a few weeks after reviewing Mark Peattie's impressive study, Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941, I don't find much to fault in Morison's 1948 analysis. He summarizes the rationale for Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor as follows:

Although the Japanese knew that America had ample resources to stage a comeback, they expected that, with Australia and New Zealand isolated, and the Japanese Navy operating from interior lines, any attempt of the American and British Navies to break through the defensive perimeter could be beaten back for eighteen months to two years. By that time, it was hoped, the English-speaking powers would be so stricken by fighting a two-ocean war as to be ready to make peace on the basis of Japan's retaining most of her conquests. She could then proceed at leisure to the complete subjugation of China. Over half the world's population would then be under the economic, political and military control of the Son of Heaven.

More than half a century later, that still sounds reasonable to me.

The remainder of the book is given over to U.S. Navy (and where necessary, U.S. Army) operations during the terrible winter of 1941-42, when the Japanese were besting the Dutch, British, and American forces wherever they met. He carries the action up to what he calls the "Halsey-Doolittle raid on Tokyo" of April 18, 1942--the small bright spark that lightened an otherwise gloomy winter for the American fleet.

This is a low-cost reprint, but the type is clear and the binding is solid. The photographs lose a bit by being printed on the same paper as the text--but that's an economy you see in many $30 trade books these days, while this hardcover goes for $13! Amazon sells the entire History of United States Naval Operations in World War II for $159, which is just a bit more than $10 a volume. Certainly worth considering.