For the first time, American sailors tell the story of the U.S. Navy in World War II as they themselves fought and lived it in the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Mediterranean. Here, in first-person accounts from interviews, letters, and diaries, are the sights and sounds, the feel of the war as only those who were there could describe it: the sailors who manned the gun turrets, the engine rooms, the torpedo tubes, as well as the laundries, the libraries, and the kitchens. For this book, historian Edwin Hoyt, author of many highly acclaimed works of World War II, contacted hundreds of veteran sailors. From their responses, he has forged a powerful chain of individual stories, linked together by the larger drama of the war as it unfolded in different theaters. Hoyt follows raw recruits through basic and specialty training and from there into combat and exhaustion, boredom and sheer terror, losses and lucky escapes, snafus and successes. Hoyt chronicles how the U.S. Navy, with little time for training, transformed itself into the greatest force at sea, even though it had not fought a war since 1812, and was now facing navies that had better ships, better planes, and better weapons. It did this by becoming a navy of the common man and Hoyt has recorded the voices of the common sailors who made it happen. Throughout the book, the men tell it like it was - frank assessments of their commanding officers, in sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic, revelations of incompetence and error, and in hair-raising moment-by-moment descriptions of the most important moments of the war from the Japanese air assault on Pearl Harbor, through the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, to the final onslaught at Okinawa. With a storyteller's sense of pacing and color, Hoyt effectively captures the courage, the fear, and the devotion of American sailors under the extreme stress of battle. The result is a riveting testament that conveys heroism in the kind of detail and emotion that often gets left out of conventional narrative histories of war.