Words from the achiever
“I started reading Samuel Eliot Morison when I was in the fifth grade or so. And then just kept branching out and out and out. He conveyed the professionalism and the determination of the U.S. Navy to do its part in winning the Second World War. And in doing so, to defeat malignant forces that would have transformed the world into something that it should not be.”
About the book
Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Two-Ocean War is a classic work, a grand and wholly engaging distillation of Morison’s definitive fifteen-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. More than a condensation, The Two-Ocean War highlights the major components of the larger work: the preparation for war, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the long war of attrition between submarines and convoys in the Atlantic, the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, the long grind of Guadalcanal, the leapfrogging campaigns among the Pacific islands, the invasion of continental Europe, the blazes of glory at Leyte and Okinawa, and the final, grudging surrender of the Japanese. Morison was a distinguished historian, Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University. But he also wrote as a participant in many of the events described in this volume: he served on 11 different ships during the war, emerging as a captain with seven battle stars on his service ribbons and later served as a Rear Admiral in the United States Naval Reserve.