If you're interested in this book, I have good news and bad news.

The good news is, if you want to know something about what an American destroyer did in World War II, it's bound to be in here. The book is more than 400 pages long, and every destroyer action I know anything about is in here. Since it was written soon after the war, there are some secret details that aren't known, but on the whole, I was very impressed with what the author dug up.

The bad news? Well, for starters, there is no index. There is a table of contents, of sorts, but with only eight sections listed, and no dates associated with them, it's no real help. If you want to find something, you have to know the date of the event, and then you have to skim through perhaps dozens or hundreds of pages to find it.

Which of course won't matter if you are reading the book from cover to cover. But there was another thing that really got to me, and that was the way the author treated the enemy. That's all they were -- the enemy. Not quite human. This was most obvious in dealing with the Japanese, where the author clearly is guilty of racism as well as of tribalism; the Japanese are never known by that name; they are "the Japs." Consistently. It really grated. The other statements about non-Americans aren't as blatant, but the feeling of "not-one-of-us-ness" is still there.

This perhaps isn't surprising in a book from 1951, but it made me very uncomfortable.

That's the bottom line, I think: Almost anything you want to know about destroyers is in here, but you may not enjoy the process of finding it out. ( )

The history of the US NAvy destroyer fleet in World War II. It has details of all the US destroyers and Destroyer escorts lost in WWII. Very interesting. The story of destroyer sailors who were executed by the Japanese, blown up by torpedoes, mined, hit by kamikazees, sunk by Japanese battleships and sunk by U-boats ( )