Samuel Eliot Morison (1887–1976)

As others have noted, this is a single-volume distillation of Morison's definitive multi-volume account. Even though it still clocks in at just under 600 pages it can still feel condensed, riding a sometimes awkward line between breadth of detail and narrative depth. Morison is a classically-informed military historian, so casual readers might find his attention to the minute particulars of each engagement frustrating. However, he occasionally finds room to spark the imagination with an evocative detail (sailors' pet names for their ship, a German copy of "Murders in the Rue Morgue" bubbling up from the wreckage of a submarine).

As a reader, I'm usually more interested in the human stories behind the grand narratives of battle. So, I sometimes found myself struggling through Morison's litanies of tonnage and displacement, contact reports, bomb hits, kill counts, casualties, degrees of list, and so on (the chapters on submarine warfare suffered especially in this regard). Indeed, readers should expect a semi-specialized text with a good deal of jargon (including plenty of terms outside its own glossary) that presumes a fair bit of naval familiarity on the part of the reader, or willingness to answer one's own questions through further research.

Not that I take any of these to be deficiencies of Morison or the book per se, just some of the hazards of reading hard military history. I found that Morison was at his best in the heat of battle, where he does an excellent job of following the action minute by minute and infusing his pages with a palpable sense of the tone and tenor of each operation.

Readers should also not expect a particularly critical point of view. As a retired sailor himself, Morison is more or less straightforward in his militarism. He sees America's inter-war pacifism as unmitigated folly, and also occasionally is heard to mourn the passing of the pre-20th century period of colonial expansion. Writing in the depths of the Cold War, he expresses an unrepentant belief in the importance of American strategic dominance. He will sometimes preface a chapter with some comments on the political background of the operation at hand, often to bemoan the loss of tactical advantage through diplomatic sluggishness (Churchill comes off especially poorly in these passages).

In conclusion, I think this book could be a worthwhile jumping-off point for a detailed study of the topic, and useful as a quick reference when investigating this or that incident of the war. Scholars and other readers of intense interest will no doubt want to tackle this volume's mother-work. Readers more interested in the human face of the war, the political maneuvers behind it, the cultural impact on the nations that endured it, and other not-strictly-military topics, will probably want to look elsewhere.… (altro)