“No one has told the story of World War II in the Pacific, from beginning to bitter end, better than Ian W. Toll. … [A] brilliant trilogy.” Alex Kershaw, New York Times best-selling author of The First Wave and Avenue of Spies. Available for the first time in a beautiful boxed set, this prize-winning and best-selling trilogy will stand as the first complete history of the Pacific War in more than twenty-five years, and the first multivolume history of the Pacific naval war since Samuel Eliot Morison’s series was published in the 1950s.
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 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.
Continuing the “marvelously readable dramatic narrative” (San Francisco Chronicle), The Conquering Tide encompasses the heart of the Pacific War - the period between mid-1942 and mid-1944. Parallel Allied counteroffensives north and south of the equator washed over Japan’s far-flung island empire, concluding with Japan’s irreversible strategic defeat in the Marianas. It was the largest, bloodiest, most costly, most technically innovative and logistically complicated amphibious war in history, and it fostered bitter interservice rivalries, leaving wounds that even victory could not heal.
The final installment, Twilight of the Gods, brings to life the harrowing last year of World War II in the Pacific, when the U.S. Navy won the largest naval battle in history; Douglas MacArthur made good his pledge to return to the Philippines; waves of kamikazes attacked the Allied fleets; the Japanese fought to the last man on one island after another; B-29 bombers burned down Japanese cities; and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vaporized in atomic blasts.
Brilliantly researched, the narrative is propelled and colored by firsthand accounts - letters, diaries, debriefings, and memoirs - that are the raw material of the telling details, shrewd judgment, and penetrating insight of this magisterial history.
