I loved Hornfischer's Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, and enjoyed Neptune's Inferno – but I did not love this one.
The title and the book are two different things – the book begins with the U.S. Navy's invasion of the Marianas Islands in June 1944, and deals with that subject in excruciating detail, but then skips over the campaign in the Philippines in – literally – a few paragraphs, and jumps ahead to Iwo Jima and Okinawa, which it then covers lightly, then goes over the issues surrounding the plans to invade Japan and the development of the mission to carry the atomic bomb into combat. So what's this book actually about?
It's more of a book about the invasion of the Marianas, with essays on other late Pacific War topics. If its thesis was that the invasion of the Philippines was a sideshow unnecessary to ending the war in the Pacific, and that the path to victory was wherever Spruance's Fifth Fleet went, I don't disagree, but that's not the same thing as the war in the Pacific in 1944-45.
But the sections on the final months of the war with planning for invasion and use of the atomic bomb, as well as the Japanese military and civilian side of the same issues was well done, but shifted into an almost contemporary discussion of decisionmaking, which I thought was ill-suited to a history.
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