Although World War II has long been a part of a well-documented history, old events told from a different point of view can still give us a different perspective. Author Kenneth W. Huck shares such an account in Log of World War II: A Pacific Naval Diary. Log of the War: A Pacific Naval Diary brings new information written by a yeoman second class serving on the USS Minneapolis. Vincent E. DeCook's eyewitness account begins December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, continuing through the fall of 1942. There are no comparable diaries that include these events: Pearl Harbor, Battle of the Coral Sea including the sinking of the Lexington, Battle of Guadalcanal, and others. Learn what they knew and when they knew it. Names, dates, locations, vessels it's all here. Through Log of World War II: A Pacific Naval Diary, one can feel the danger, the frustrations, and the fears of serving on a ship during a war, and realize the commitment to duty our servicemen exhibited.

Although World War II has long been a part of a well-documented history, old events told from a different point of view can still give us a different perspective. Author Kenneth W. Huck shares such an account in Log of World War II: A Pacific Naval Diary. Log of the War: A Pacific Naval Diary brings new information written by a yeoman second class serving on the USS Minneapolis. Vincent E. DeCooks eyewitness account begins December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, continuing through the fall of 1942. There are no comparable diaries that include these events: Pearl Harbor, Battle of the Coral Sea including the sinking of the Lexington, Battle of Guadalcanal, and others. Learn what they knew and when they knew it. Names, dates, locations, vessels its all here. Through Log of World War II: A Pacific Naval Diary, one can feel the danger, the frustrations, and the fears of serving on a ship during a war, and realize the commitment to duty our servicemen exhibited.

Fahey was a 24-year-old garbage-truck driver when he enlisted in the Navy on Oct. 3, 1942, and became a seaman first class on the USS Montpelier. During almost three years of battle in the Pacific Ocean, he defied Navy rules against keeping a diary by writing copious notes on loose sheets of paper that appeared to anyone watching to be ordinary let

"...richly describes so many timeless, classical, and archetypal aspects of war that anyone from the Napoleonic soldier to the Iraq War veteran could probably identify and relate to them." — Military Review 1942 would prove crucial for the United States in the Pacific following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and a series of setbacks in the Southwest. As the first ship commissioned following America’s entry into World War II, the light cruiser USS Atlanta would be thrust into the Pacific fight, joining the fleet in time for the pivotal battle of Midway and on to the Guadalcanal campaign in the Southwest Pacific. Embarked was an exceptionally astute observer, Lieutenant Commander Lloyd M. Mustin, who faithfully recorded his thoughts on the conflict in a standard canvas-covered logbook. Diaries were not supposed to be kept by those serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and for good reason. If recovered by the Japanese, they would likely have revealed that the Japanese code had been broken prior to the battle of Midway. Thus, Mustin’s diary is a rare day-to-day accounting of the Pacific from a very opinionated mid-grade officer. Beginning with the commissioning of Atlanta at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on Christmas Eve 1941, Mustin covers the ship’s workups and her deployment to the Pacific in time for the battle of Midway. It’s then on to the Southwest Pacific, where the ship first engages enemy aircraft at the battle of the Eastern Solomons in late August 1942. Mustin’s final entry covers the battle of Santa Cruz in late October 1942. The story is completed by an account of the battle of Guadalcanal and beyond, drawing upon Mustin’s oral history. This is a valuable document, fully interpreted to provide a better understanding of the Pacific War during that critical year.

From the sinking of the British passenger liner Athenia on September 3, 1939, by a German U-boat (against orders) to the Japanese surrender on board the Missouri on September 2, 1945, War at Sea covers every major naveal battle of World War II. "A first-rate work and the best history of its kind yet written".--Vice Admiral William P. Mack, U.S.N. (Ret.). 30 photos.

Author of Lincoln and His Admirals (winner of the Lincoln Prize), The Battle of Midway (Best Book of the Year, Military History Quarterly), and Operation Neptune, (winner of the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature), Craig L. Symonds has established himself as one of the finest naval historians at work today. World War II at Sea represents his crowning achievement: a complete narrative of the naval war and all of its belligerents, on all of the world's oceans and seas, between 1939 and 1945. Opening with the 1930 London Conference, Symonds shows how any limitations on naval warfare would become irrelevant before the decade was up, as Europe erupted into conflict once more and its navies were brought to bear against each other. World War II at Sea offers a global perspective, focusing on the major engagements and personalities and revealing both their scale and their interconnection: the U-boat attack on Scapa Flow and the Battle of the Atlantic; the "miracle" evacuation from Dunkirk and the pitched battles for control of Norway fjords; Mussolini's Regia Marina-at the start of the war the fourth-largest navy in the world-and the dominance of the Kidö Butai and Japanese naval power in the Pacific; Pearl Harbor then Midway; the struggles of the Russian Navy and the scuttling of the French Fleet in Toulon in 1942; the landings in North Africa and then Normandy. Here as well are the notable naval leaders-FDR and Churchill, both self-proclaimed "Navy men," Karl Dönitz, François Darlan, Ernest King, Isoroku Yamamoto, Erich Raeder, Inigo Campioni, Louis Mountbatten, William Halsey, as well as the hundreds of thousands of seamen and officers of all nationalities whose live were imperiled and lost during the greatest naval conflicts in history, from small-scale assaults and amphibious operations to the largest armadas ever assembled. Many have argued that World War II was dominated by naval operations; few have shown and how and why this was the case. Symonds combines precision with story-telling verve, expertly illuminating not only the mechanics of large-scale warfare on (and below) the sea but offering wisdom into the nature of the war itself.

The "Interim" LSM(R) or Landing Ship, Medium (Rocket) was a revolutionary development in rocket warfare in World War II and the U.S. Navy's first true rocket ship. An entirely new class of commissioned warship and the forerunners of today's missile-firing naval combatants, these ships began as improvised conversions of conventional amphibious landing craft in South Carolina's Charleston Navy Yard during late 1944. They were rushed to the Pacific Theatre to support the U.S. Army and Marines with heavy rocket bombardments that devastated Japanese forces on Okinawa in 1945. Their primary mission was to deliver maximum firepower to enemy targets ashore. Yet LSM(R)s also repulsed explosive Japanese speed boats, rescued crippled warships, recovered hundreds of survivors at sea and were deployed as antisubmarine hunter-killers. Casualties were staggering: enemy gunfire blasted one, while kamikaze attacks sank three, crippled a fourth and grazed two more. This book provides a comprehensive operational history of the Navy's 12 original "Interim" LSM(R)s.

For almost 20 years, more than 200 reels of microfilmed Japanese naval records remained in the custody of the U.S. Naval History Division, virtually untouched. This unique book draws on those sources and others to tell the story of the Pacific War from the viewpoint of the Japanese. Former Marine Corps officer and Asian scholar Paul Dull focuses on the major surface engagements of the war—Coral Sea, Midway, the crucial Solomons campaign, and the last-ditch battles in the Marianas and Philippines. Also included are detailed track charts and a selection of Japanese photographs of major vessels and actions.