As I mentioned in my writing tips, sometimes research can be a substitute for experience.  Going even further, the best research in the world is that done by someone else.  One quick way to save oneself a lot of diving and sorting of what sources work the best for you is to find a historiographical essay.  This is basically where a historian (either amateur or professional) looks at the sources available for a given field and gives a run down on what works and what doesn’t. An example of what one looks like (albeit dated from 2010) is attached below, with a Pacific War bibliography pasted behind it.  While Combined Fleet remains my suggested go to for most things IJN-oriented, I stand by most of my assessments made below for the USN side.
Note: This one is really on the long side.  Just so everyone knows in advance.  (Yes, I’m looking at you, Ashley.)
 
 
 
 
 

From the Harbor to the Bay:

A Historiographical Examination of the United States Navy’s War in the Pacific, 1941-1945
 
 
 
 
 

By

 
 
 

 James Young

(c) 2010

 
 
 
 

Historical Background

            The American-Japanese Pacific War began shortly after 0630 on 7 December 1941 as the destroyer U.S.S. Ward engaged and sank a Japanese midget submarine outside of Pearl Harbor.  Nearly four years later, on 2 September 1945, it concluded with the Japanese delegation signing surrender documentation on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri, a battleship not even launched on that fateful December morning.  In the intervening forty-five months, the United States Navy (USN) had grown in size until its strength was greater than that of the next ten navies combined.  Moreover, this great strength had come about despite heavy initial losses incurred as the USN transitioned from an ill-equipped and improperly trained peacetime force to a lethal juggernaut that had all but annihilated the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN), strangled the Japanese economy and set the conditions for a possible invasion of the Home Islands.

State of the Historiography: Foundational Works and General Histories

            How this state of affairs came about has fascinated historians since the Second World War ended.  As with many modern conflicts, the combatants’ derived their methodology from their prewar strategy and design philosophies.  There is very little historiography that focuses solely on the IJN’s evolution, with David C. Evans and Mark R. Peattie’s Kaigun and Peattie’s companion book, Sunburst, serving as the seminal works on this topic.  For the evolution of the USN’s grand strategy, Frank Miller’s War Plan Orange outlines how America’s admirals planned to defeat Japan and is complemented by Thomas C. and Trent Hone’s Battleline and John T. Kuehn’s Agents of Innovation.
For those requiring a general understanding of the Pacific War’s course, Ronald Spector’s Eagle Against the Sun (1985) remains one of the best single-volume treatments of the U.S.-Japanese Pacific Conflict.  First published in 1985, Spector’s treatment of the Pacific War is balanced and relies upon both Japanese and American sources.  For those unable to obtain Spector’s book, Harry A. Gailey’s The War in the Pacific is a slightly more modern (1995) work whose treatment of the pre-war strategic factors is not quite as extensive as Spector’s.
Of histories whose sole subject is the USN’s Pacific War, the field remains dominated by the long shadow of one historian: Samuel Eliot Morison (1887-1976).  A Massachusetts native who received his Doctorate in Philosophy from Harvard University, Morison became the USN’s World War II historian due to his relationship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Many historians consider his final product, entitled History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, to be the definitive history of the United States Navy during the Second World War.  Nine of the 15-volume set deals with American naval operations in the Pacific and, while a daunting read, more than adequately serves the purpose of providing a USN-oriented general history.  Unfortunately, the works were published from 1947 to 1962 and, due to their age and the declassification of several USN documents, are starting to have their accuracy called into question by more recent works.  In addition, Morison made very little use of Japanese sources and, in many places, directly contradicts the autobiographies of Japanese survivors (e.g., Commander Mitsuo Fuchida and famous ace Saburo Sakai).  Therefore, Morison should not be relied upon for anything other than general knowledge and should be read in conjunction with a work such as Paul Dull’s A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy (1941-1945).

State of the Historiography: The Carrier / Air War

            After reading one or more general histories of the Pacific War, it quickly becomes apparent that carrier and land-based aircraft dominated the conflict.  If one accepts the typical narrative, i.e. that the Kido Butai’s strike on Pearl Harbor initiated the conflict and its outcome was decided once the USN crushed that same force at Midway, it is unsurprising that a large segment of the historiography focuses on aircraft carriers and land-based airpower.  What is surprising, however, is the extent to which the aforementioned segment in turn focuses on these two engagements.  Indeed, there are very few single-volume texts that engage the USN’s carrier war in its entirety.  Of these, only Douglas V. Smith’s Carrier Battles: Command Decision in Harm’s Way has been published in the last five years.  Unfortunately, Smith’s book does not adequately fill this historiographical gap because, as its title suggests, it focuses more on the influence of commanders’ interwar education on their actions than a narrative discussing World War II’s five carrier battles.
Pearl Harbor, by virtue of being the catalyst for America’s entry into World War II, has a very large historiographical footprint.  Of the numerous books and articles on the Japanese attack, Gordon W. Prange’s trilogy is the most influential.  Prange, a World War II veteran and history professor at the University of Maryland, did much of the research for his books while serving as a civilian historian on General Douglas MacArthur’s staff (1946-1951).  In addition to having access to the Imperial Japanese Navy’s surviving records, Prange established a number of contacts with IJN veterans.  Thus the first book in his Pearl Harbor trilogy, At Dawn We Slept (1982), was one of the first books on the attack to incorporate Japanese-language research.  Like the subsequent works, Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History (1986) and Dec. 7, 1941: The Day the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor (1988), At Dawn We Slept was published posthumously with the aid of Prange’s coworkers and widow.  Therefore, there was little opportunity for Prange to explain points where his work contradicts Morison or other American sources.  However, combined these three texts continue to dominate the discussion of Pearl Harbor, with most subsequent books on the subject citing them as a major source.  In general, Prange’s narrative has stood up to time and further examination by international historians.  While more recent works such as H. P. Wilmott’s Pearl Harbor have generally better presentation, they only finesse some details (e.g., the third wave controversy, midget submarines effectiveness) while not changing much of Prange’s narrative.
It is in recounting what followed in this first year, specifically the Battles of Coral Sea, Midway, and the Guadalcanal Campaign, that the historiography begins to show major gaps.  First, there are less than five books that focus exclusively on the Battle of the Coral Sea, and of these none provide any insights that are not available elsewhere.  By far the best treatment of the battle in a wider source is John Lundstrom’s discussion of the engagement in The First Team: Pacific Naval Air Combat from Pearl Harbor to Midway.  Lundstrom, a professional historian who is widely acknowledged as the foremost expert on Pacific air combat through 1943, not only deconstructs the decisions involved by both sides but also disects the actual engagement down to the individual airframe level.  Other than Lundstrom and Sherman’s discussion, however, the Battle of the Coral Sea is usually treated in the same manner as an undercard bout before a heavyweight championship fight.
To carry on this analogy, the main event in question would be The Battle of Midway.  Of all five carrier engagements in World War II, Midway by far has had the most works dedicated to it.  Due to Morison, historian Walter Lord’s Incredible Victory, and Prange’s Miracle at Midway, a conventional narrative of the battle was rapidly established by the 1960s.  The general course of this story was that the outnumbered USN, through code-breaking success and Japanese mistakes, was able to score a stunning victory by catching the Kido Butai as that force was prepared to launch a devastating strike.  In turn, the casualties among Japanese aircrews at Midway crippled the Imperial Japanese Naval Air Force (IJNAF) for the remainder of the war.  Therefore, as of 5 June 1942, the Pacific War’s outcome was inevitable, as the Japanese were forever unable to recover the strategic initative.
This narrative went generally unchallenged until the publication of Lundstrom’s First Team and its sequel, The First Team: Pacific Naval Air Combat from Pearl Harbor to Midway.  Lundstrom, through extensive research, demonstrated that a majority of the four Japanese carriers’ aircrews not only survived but went on to participate in the subsequent Guadalcanal and Solomons campaigns.  According to both First Team works, it was only through the attrition of the battles subsequent to Midway rather than that singular calamity that the USN blunted the IJNAF’s edge.  Similarly, Parshall and Tully’s Shattered Sword not only questioned whether Midway truly eviscerated the IJNAF’s aircrew but also began to question whether the conventional narrative got the timing of the USN’s attacks correct.  Using Japanese language sources in addition to pointing out Morison’s undue influence on subsequent historians, Parshall and Tully provide an argument that illustrates how Japanese doctrine would have precluded the Japanese carriers’ decks from being full of aircraft when Yorktown and Enterprise’s dive bomber squadrons arrived overhead.  In turn, Dallas Isom’s Midway Inquest takes Parshall and Tully to task while acknowledging that the Morison/Prange/Lord narrative is generally incorrect.
It is subsequent to Midway that the number of works regarding carrier warfare sharply drops off to be replaced by books that focus on the Guadalcanal campaign as a whole.  First, other than popular historian Eric Hammel, no other other author has written a work of note regarding the Battle of the Eastern Solomons or the Battle of Santa Cruz.  Although not nearly as decisive as Midway, as noted by Lundstrom it was these two battles that largely broke the IJNAF’s carrier arm’s collective back and heralded the slaughter that would occur at the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944.  Much like that last engagement (whose sole modern treatment is Barrett Tillman’s Clash of the Carriers), the historiographical gap around both of these battles is somewhat astonishing.
Likewise, despite books dedicated to individual participants or units, the contribution of ground-based USN air elements after Guadalcanal has received little attention.  With the exception of a couple of units (e.g., VMF-214 “Black Sheep” and VF-17 “Jolly Rogers”) or personalities (e.g., Gregory Boyington and Tom Blackburn), there remains numerous opportunities for scholarly research on the Solomons Campaign’s aerial facets.  Finally, there is also no single-volume treatment of USN land-based aircraft’s contributions in the last year of the war.  Whether in the Philippines or at Okinawa, USN and United States Marine Corps (USMC) fighters played a crucial role in counter-Kamikaze operations, yet their efforts have not been addressed except in popular histories such as Gerald Astor’s Wings of Gold or Semper Fi in the Sky.  This historiographical gap remains to be closed.

State of the Historiography: The Surface War

            Like land-based aircraft, the USN’s surface fleet made several crucial contributions to the service’s ultimate victory in World War II.  Like their land-based counterparts however, the officers manning the USN’s battleships, cruisers, destroyers and PT boats have had few scholarly works devoted to their efforts, with most of these concentrating on actions around Guadalcanal.  In some respects this is understandable, as many historians consider these engagements to be the last time surface vessels made a decisive, rather than supporting, contribution to the USN’s larger victory.  However, as with the destruction of the IJNAF’s pilot cadre, the attrition visited upon the IJN’s surface fleet in the Solomons contributed a great deal to subsequent American victories.
In one of history’s ironies, the Guadalcanal Campaign began with what remains the USN’s greatest defeat, the Battle of Savo Island.  This engagement, due to its traumatic (for the USN and Royal Australian Navy (RAN)) outcome, has received much more attention from American, Australian, and Japanese scholars than any other surface engagement in the war. Disaster in the Pacific: New Light on the Battle of Savo Island, written by Denis Waner, Peggy Warner, and Sadao Seno, is a book representative of the genre.  Like most of the other works, Disaster highlights the Japanese Navy’s preparedness, the Allies’ numerous mistakes (e.g., poor preparedness, failure to pass information between commands, poor C2) that made the IJN’s victory possible.  Like much of the recent carrier historiography, Waner et al. take Morison to task on several of the battle’s details, but do not argue with the general narrative.
Outside of Savo Island, USN surface battles are fortunate to have one work published about them.  Balikpapan, Java Sea, Sunda Strait, Cape Esperance, First and Second Guadalcanal, Tassafronga, Komandorski Islands, Vila-Stanmore, Kula Gulf, Kolombangara, Vella Gulf, Vella Lavella, Empress Augusta Bay, Cape St. George, Surigao Strait, and Samar have had less than a dozen books published about them in total.  Of these, only four have been published in the last twenty years, with Tully’s Surigao Strait being the most recent.  Furthermore, there is only one single-volume work (Vincent P. O’Hara’s The U.S. Navy Against the Axis) published in the last decade that addresses USN surface combat as a whole.  Whereas many World War II historians are familiar with names such as Spruance, Mitscher, and Halsey, very few can tell you the role of Ainsworth or Merrill or their importance to the USN’s Pacific campaign.  This is an area in which historians could do a great deal more work.

            State of the Historiography: The Submarine War

            Ironically, given their nickname as the “Silent Service,” USN submariners do not share their surface brethren’s lack of historical representation.  There are several reasons for this.  First, due to submarine’s impact on the larger war effort it would be hard to ignore submariners’ contributions to America’s victory.  Second, many submarine commanders survived to write accounts of their actions for popular works after the war.  Finally, as with carrier operations, the glamor and danger of USN submarine operations lent itself well to dramatic, tense movies by Hollywood.  This meant that cinema introduced the American populace to submarine exploits through several wartime and postwar movies.
Given this popularity, the USN submarine war has received a great deal of scholarly attention.  The first example of this was the USN’s own official history, written by Theodore Roscoe.  With the workmanlike title United States Submarine Operations in World War II (later called Pigboats), Roscoe’s book used the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey as well as Japanese records to establish a narrative of submarine operations from Pearl Harbor to the end of the war.  Written in dramatic prose, Roscoe’s work served as both a historical narrative and popular text for the American populace.
Despite the popularity of Roscoe’s work, Morison’s discussion of submarine operations overshadowed it.  It would be another twenty-six years before the publication of what would become the definitive work on the USN’s World War II operations, Clay Blair’s Silent Victory.  Oddly published in both single and dual-volume form, Silent Victory brought together Japanese records, recently declassified information, and Blair’s personal submarine experience to put together a rich historical narrative.  Although Blair does not claim that the Silent Service won the war single-handedly, he does make a case that the USN’s submarines’ campaign did more to cripple the Japanese war effort than the rest of the Navy combined.  Blair’s evidence is conclusive, and while further works focus on particular aspects of the fleet boats’ campaign, Silent Victory’s narrative is still the generally accepted one.

            Historiographical Gaps

            While Blair’s account fills in most of the submariner’s narrative, as noted above there are many gaps remaining with regards to surface and carrier/air operations.  In addition to these, however, there are at least two areas of USN Pacific operations that historians have almost completely overlooked.  First, there are no works on USN anti-submarine warfare (ASW) efforts in the Pacific.  While many sources have pilloried the Japanese submarine fleet for not conducting an extensive campaign against extended American supply lines, this ignores the I-boats’ stellar performance through the first year of the war.  In the first twenty-four months of the war, submarines sank or damaged several major USN combatants (with critical effects on several carrier and surface battles); yet after that point only managed one more major success (CA Indianapolis) while suffering extensive losses.  No widely available text or dissertation focuses on this change or how it came about.  While some historians have made allusions to this being a result of the Japanese Navy’s decision to use submarines to resupply cut off garrisons, this does not explain events such as the USS England destroying six Japanese submarines in rapid succession in 1944.
Similarly ignored are the USN’s logistical advances that allowed the Pacific Fleet to range the length of the Pacific.  Whereas initially the USN had difficulty in supplying much more than fuel oil to individual task forces, by the end of the war the Third/Fifth Fleet was often away from its advanced bases for months on end.  Furthermore, while at these advanced bases the USN was able to rearm and provision with such speed that their subsequent operations regularly caught the Japanese unprepared.  Therefore the development of underway and in port replenishment operations were critical to the USN’s ultimate success and, by virtue of never giving the IJN time to recoup its aircrew losses, reduced the number of American casualties.  Despite this, the only major work on Pacific logistics is Worral Carter’s Beans, Bullets, and Black Oil.

            State of the Field

            Overall, given these gaps and those outlined above, it would be fair to say that notwithstanding the many works published on the USN’s Pacific Campaign, much work remains to be done.  For aviators, a single-volume work that provides a narrative for all five carrier battles is a priority, while research on the efforts of the land-based aircraft is similarly pressing.  With regards to surface warfare, more single battle and vessel histories remain to be written.  Although American submarines have been well-covered, the efforts to stop their Japanese counterparts are deserving of treatment.  Similarly, historians should examine the means by which the USN supplied its widely scattered forces while veterans took part in this effort remain living.  Finally, and most importantly, universities that teach military history must begin to give seapower, its theory, and execution the same pride of place given to that of land campaigns and airpower so that historians are inspired to close these gaps.  Until then, the USN’s Pacific Campaign will remain subject to a hodgepodge of works that focus on several famous engagements at the expense of presenting a larger narrative.
 

United States Navy (USN) in the Pacific Bibliography

Astor, Gerald.  Wings of Gold: The U.S. Naval Air Campaign in World War II, Presidio Trade Paperback Edition.  New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2004; Presidio, 2005.
 
_____.  Semper Fi in the Sky: The Marine Air Battles of World War II.  New York: Presidio Press, 2005.
 
Blair, Clay, Jr.  Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan, Volume 1.  New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1975.
 
_____.  Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan, Volume 2.  New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1975.
 
Brand, Max [Frederick Faust].  Fighter Squadron at Guadalcanal, Pocket Books Paperback Edition.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996; New York: Pocket Books, 1997.
 
Buell, Harold L., CDR, USN (ret.).  Dauntless Helldivers: A Dive-Bomber Pilot’s Epic Story of the Carrier Battles.  New York: Dell Publishing, 1991.
 
Buell, Thomas.  The Quiet Warrior: A Biography of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, Paperback Edition.  New York: Little, Brown Publishing, 1974; Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009.
 
Campbell, John.  Naval Weapons of World War II, Naval Institute Press ed.  London: Conway Maritime Press, 1985; Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2002.
 
Cook, Charles, CPT, USN (ret.).  The Battle of Cape Esperance: Encounter At Guadalcanal.  New York: Cromwell, 1968; Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008.
 
Cutler, Thomas J., LCDR, USN (ret.).  The Battle of Leyte Gulf, 23-26 October 1944.  New York: Harper Collins, 1994.
 
Dower, John W.  War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War.  New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.
 
Dull, Paul S.  A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy (1941-1945), Paperback Edition.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1978; 2007.
 
Dulin, Robert O. and William H. Garzke, Jr.  Battleships: United States Battleships in World War II.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1976.
 
Evans, David C. and Mark R. Peattie.   Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the IMPERIAL JAPANESE NAVY, 1887-1941.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997.
 
Fluckey, Eugene B., ADM, USN (ret.).  Thunder Below!  New York: Berkely Caliber, 1992.
 
Friedman, Norman.  U.S. Aircraft Carriers: An Illustrated Design History.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1983.
 
_____. U.S. Cruisers: An Illustrated Design History.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1985.
 
_____. U.S. Battleships: An Illustrated Design History.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1985.
 
_____.  Naval Firepower: Battleship Guns and Gunnery in the Dreadnought Era.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008.
 
Fuchida, Mitsuo and Masatake Okumiya.  Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan, Ballantine War Paperback Edition, 3rd Printing.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1955; New York: Ballantine Books, 1982.
 
Gailey, Harry A.  The War in the Pacific: From Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay.  Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1995.
 
Galantin, I.J., ADM, USN (ret.).  Take Her Deep!  A Submarine Against Japan in World War II.  New York: Alonquin Books, 1987; Pocket Books, 1988.
 
Hammel, Eric.  Guadalcanal: The Carrier Battles.  New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1987.
 
_____.  Guadalcanal: Decision At Sea.  New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1988; Pacifica, CA: Pacifica Press, 1988.
 
Holmes, Harry.  The Last Patrol, Airlife Classics Edition.  Shrewsbury, England: Airlife Publishing Ltd., 1994; 2001.
 
Hone, Thomas C. and Trent Hone.  Battleline: The United States Navy, 1919-1939.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006.
 
Hornfischer, James D.  The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy’s Finest Hour.  New York: Bantam Books, 2004.
 
Isom, Dallas Woodbury.  Midway Inquest: Why the Japanese Lost the Battle of Midway.  Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007.
 
Kuehn, John T.  Agents of Innovation: The General Board and the Design of the Fleet That Defeated the Japanese Navy.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008.
 
Lockwood, Charles A., VADM, USN (ret.) and Hans Christian Adamson, COL, USAF (ret.).  Hellcats of the Sea, Bantam War Book Edition.  New York: Greenberg, 1955; Bantam Books, 1988.
 
Lord, Walter.  Incredible Victory, Pocket Books Edition.  New York: Harper & Row, 1967; Pocket Books 4th Printing, 1976.
 
Lundstrom, John B.  The First Team: Pacific Naval Air Combat from Pearl Harbor to Midway, 1990 Reprint Edition.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1984; 1990.
 
_____.  The First and the Guadalcanal Campaign: Naval Fighter Combat from August to November, 1942.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994.
 
Miller, Edward S.  War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan, 1897-1945.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1991.
 
Morison, Samuel Eliot.  The Two-Ocean War: The Definitive Short History of the United States Navy in World War II, Ballantine Books Edition.  New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1963; Ballantine Books, 1972.
 
O’Hara, Vincent P. The U.S. Navy Against the Axis: Surface Combat, 1941-1945.  Naval Institute Press, 2007.
 
O’Kane, Richard H., RADM, USN (ret.).  Clear the Bridge!: The War Patrols of the U.S.S. Tang.  New York: Rand McNally & Company, 1977; Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1989.
 
_____.  Wahoo: The Patrols of America’s Most Famous WWII Submarine.  Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1987.
 
Parshall, Jonathan, David Dickson, and Anthony Tully.  “Doctrine Matters: Why the Japanese Lost at Midway.”  Naval War College Review 54, No. 3 (Summer 2001).
 
Parshall, Jonathan and Anthony Tully.  Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway.  Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2005.
 
Peattie, Mark R.  Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001.
 
Polmar, Norman.  Aircraft Carriers: A History of Carrier Aviation and Its Influence on World Events, Volume 1, 1909-1945.  Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006.
 
Potter, E.B.  Nimitz.  Annapolis, MD: 1976.
 
_____.  Bull Halsey.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1985.
 
Prange, Gordon W., Katherine V. Dillon, and Donald M. Goldstein.  At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor.  New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981; Penguin Books, 1982.
 
_____.  Miracle At Midway.  New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982; Penguin Books, 1983.
 
_____.  Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History.  New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986.
 
_____.  Dec. 7, 1941: The Day the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor.  New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988; Warner Books, 1989.
 
Roscoe, Theodore.  United States Destroyer Operations in World War II, reprint ed.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1953.
 
_____.  Pigboats: The True Story of the Fighting Submariners of World War II (authorized abridgement of United States Submarine Operations in World War II).  Annapolis, Maryland: 1949; New York, Bantam Books, Inc., 1982.
 
Sherman, Frederick C., ADM, USN (ret.).  Combat Command: The American Aircraft Carriers in the Pacific War, Bantam War Book Edition.  New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1950; Bantam Books, 1982.
 
Silverstone, Paul H.  The Navy of World War II, 1922-1947.  New York: Routledge, 2008.
 
Smith, Douglas V.  Carrier Battles: Command Decisions in Harm’s Way.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006.
 
Spector, Ronald H. Eagle Against the Sun , Paperback Edition.  New York: Vintage Books, 1985.
Stafford, Edward P., CDR, USN (ret.).  Little Ship, Big War: The Saga of DE 343, Jove Edition.  New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1984; Jove, 1985.
Tillman, Barrett.  Clash of the Carriers: The True Story of the Marianas Turkey Shoot of World War II.  New York: NAL Caliber, 2005.
Tully, Anthony P.  Battle of Surigao Strait.  Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009.
Tuohy, William.  America’s Fighting Admirals: Winning the War At Sea in World War II.  St. Paul, MN: Zenith Press, 2007.
Waner, Denis and Peggy Warner with Sadao Seno.  Disaster in the Pacific: New Light on the Battle of Savo Island.  Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1992.
Willmott, H.P. with Tohmatsu Haruo and W. Spencer Johnson.  Pearl Harbor.  London: Cassell & Co., 2001.
Whitlock, Flint and Ron Smith.  The Depths of Courage: American Submariners At War With Japan, 1941-1945.  New York: Penguin Group, 2007.
 

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