Pacific Thunder

The US Navy's Central Pacific Campaign, August 1943–October 1944

By: Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

Narrated by: Tom Perkins

On 27 October 1942, four "Long Lance" torpedoes fired by the Japanese destroyers Makigumo and Akigumo exploded in the hull of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CV-8). Minutes later, the ship that had launched the Doolitte Raid six months earlier slipped beneath the waves of the Coral Sea 100 miles northeast of the island of Guadalcanal and just north of the Santa Cruz Islands, taking with her 140 of her sailors. With the loss of Hornet, the United States Navy now had one aircraft carrier left in the South Pacific, USS Enterprise (CV-6), herself badly damaged in the two previous days of the Battle of Santa Cruz.

For the American naval aviators, it would be difficult to imagine that within 24 months of this event, Zuikaku, the last survivor of the Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor, would lie at the bottom of the Philippine Sea north of Cape Engano on the island of Luzon, alongside the other surviving Japanese carriers, sacrificed as lures in a failed attempt to block the American invasion of the Philippines, and that the United States Navy's Task Force 38, composed of 16 fleet carriers, would reign supreme on the world's largest ocean.

©2017 Thomas McKelvey Cleaver (P)2017 Tantor

Pacific War Textbook - US Naval Actions

Reads like a text book. Recommended as a five stars supplemental source for students of the war.

incredible & heart rendering!

such a highly informative account of the naval air war and shi] war from the Marianas Turkey Shoot to Leyte, Manila, & the Battle of Okinawa. highly informative and I highly suggest!

Excellent WW2 Central Pacific History.

This book provides an extremely detailed account of the US military recovery and massive growth after Guadalcanal and its successes and failures. The author writes about the major high level plans and the senior admirals and generals of both sides, US and Japan, that made them. He also provides careful detail of the men on the line who carried the plans out.
This is history with real war time strategy and tactics, with a window into the men, machines, and materials that fueled and fought the war.
This book is one of the best accounts of the war in the Central Pacific that I have ever read.

The will to win!

Great accounts of the different battles and first hand experiences of the Sailors in WWII

Great Book, story and read

loved it, enough detail to satisfy the historian in me, with new insights and observations