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    Pacific Thunder: The US Navy's Central Pacific Campaign, August 1943–October 1944
    Pacific Thunder: The US Navy's Central Pacific Campaign, August 1943–October 1944
    Pacific Thunder: The US Navy's Central Pacific Campaign, August 1943–October 1944
    Audiobook13 hours

    Pacific Thunder: The US Navy's Central Pacific Campaign, August 1943–October 1944

    Written by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

    Narrated by Tom Perkins

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    About this audiobook

    On 27 October 1942, four "Long Lance" torpedoes fired by the Japanese destroyers Makigumo and Akigumo exploded in the hull of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CV-8). Minutes later, the ship that had launched the Doolitte Raid six months earlier slipped beneath the waves of the Coral Sea 100 miles northeast of the island of Guadalcanal and just north of the Santa Cruz Islands, taking with her 140 of her sailors. With the loss of Hornet, the United States Navy now had one aircraft carrier left in the South Pacific, USS Enterprise (CV-6), herself badly damaged in the two previous days of the Battle of Santa Cruz.

    For the American naval aviators, it would be difficult to imagine that within twenty-four months of this event, Zuikaku, the last survivor of the Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor, would lie at the bottom of the Philippine Sea north of Cape Engano on the island of Luzon, alongside the other surviving Japanese carriers, sacrificed as lures in a failed attempt to block the American invasion of the Philippines, and that the United States Navy's Task Force 38, composed of sixteen fleet carriers, would reign supreme on the world's largest ocean.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 19, 2017
    ISBN9781541478053
    Author

    Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

    Thomas McKelvey Cleaver has been a published writer for the past 40 years, with his most recent work being the best-selling Osprey titles MiG Alley (2019), I Will Run Wild (2020), Under the Southern Cross (2021), The Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club (2021), Going Downtown (2022), The Cactus Air Force (2022) alongside the late Eric Hammel, and most recently Clean Sweep (2023). Tom served in the US Navy in Vietnam and currently lives in Encino, California.

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    Reviews for Pacific Thunder

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    • 3/5
      A detailed history of the pacific campaign that would be useful for other historians but a rather dull listen in the narrative and the reading. Not to take anything away from the memory of those who participated and the supreme sacrifice made by so many in defending the freedoms we enjoy.
    • 3/5
      Pacific Thunder is a good, in-depth look at the naval campaign against the Empire of Japan during World War 2. There is a lot of detail, but I found the writing style at times to be stilted, like I was reading the specific logs of battles, rather than a narrative history of the men and battles. There were aspects of the book that I really liked that many authors about the war don't always include, or tend to just gloss over. Cleaver took the time to discuss the development of the aircraft carrier as a ship of war for the US Navy, discussing the early ships, the doctrine, and the thoughts that went into creating the aircraft carrier's role in the US Nave in the interwar years. Another chapter dealt with the topic of downed pilots and the amazing role that US submarines played when on "lifeguard" duty during a battle. This is an aspect of the Pacific War that is usually not discussed at all in books about the battles, and I found this chapter to be fascinating. I need to see if anybody has written more detailed accounts of these submarines and their crews, and the heroic work they did to save downed pilots.Overall, I enjoyed Pacific Thunder. I would have preferred a more narrative style of writing, but overall Cleaver provides a detailed account of the war in the central Pacific.