The strategies, tactics, decisions, personalities and controversies
that turned America's audacious gamble in the
South Pacific into its first successful offensive of the Second World
War
Written with the storytelling drive that made Jim Hornfischer's first
two books award winners and word-of-mouth favourites, here is an indispensable
work of narrative history by one of the most commanding chroniclers of the US
Navy in Second World War.
The fight between the US and Japanese fleets for control of the seas
around Guadalcanal was the most ferocious and
important naval campaign of the Pacific war. In this, the first major account of
this landmark struggle in two decades, Hornfischer narrates an epic tale,
breathtaking in its spectacle, of naval combat unprecedented in its intensity.
Off Guadalcanal, in seas that would become known as Iron Bottom Sound for the
number of warships sunk in action there, three US sailors would
die for every marine who perished ashore.
Based on three years of research, including interviews with veterans
who have never spoken publicly before, essential new archival sources, and the
latest scholarship, Hornfischer gives vivid life to the story of a nearly
forgotten sacrifice, written on a canvas that is at once epic and deeply,
poignantly human.
