The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944

The devastation of Pearl Harbor and the American victory at Midway were prelude to a greater challenge: rolling back the vast Japanese Pacific empire, island by island.Ian W. Toll’s masterful history encompasses the heart of the great Pacific war, when a “conquering tide” of Allied air and sea power supported the U.S. Marines in reclaiming the thousands of Japaneseheld islands on the road to Tokyo. It was the largest, bloodiest, most costly, most technically innovative, and logistically complicated amphibious war in history, and the complexity of it fostered bitter interservice rivalries, leaving wounds that even victory could not heal.Toll’s battle scenes—in the air, at sea, and in the jungles— are simply riveting, but he also takes the reader into the wartime councils in Washington and Tokyo where politics and strategy often collide, and into the struggle to mobilize wartime production, which was the secret of Allied victory. His account 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 narrative.