Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Hopkins has assembled a commendable work that links the most important battles of the Pacific with the US strategy, the politics, and the personalities that shaped the Pacific theater. He provides the backgrounds for each major step and takes you through the events at a level sufficient to put it into the broader perspective.
You won't find content regarding technology or the tactics of specific battles. Hopkins puts a timeline to these seemingly disparate events of this theater to give the reader appreciation for the decisions of MacArthur, Nimitz, Halsey, Marshall, and Roosevelt. But he does it in a very readable way. The many maps help as well. I also enjoyed the brief descriptions of the smaller battles which haven't yet warranted their own books (which made me feel sorry for the many who perished fighting these battles without any real historical recognition).
Having read individual personal recounts of individual battles or campaigns in the Pacific, I was pleased that Hopkins has delivered a very readable history that brings it all together. I'm not a historian who remembers each fact, so I can't comment on Hopkin's accuracy. But its sufficient for a reader to "get" the US Pacific strategy and timeline, and to enjoy doing so.
I've avoided other books spanning the Pacific theater that are tomes with small print and too much detail, or those which seem to have the authors political slant. "Retribution" comes to mind. If you've enjoyed reading books about Tarawa, Guadacanal, Peleliu, Okinawa, Iwo, then you'll appreciate what Hopkins has accomplished.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Pacific War: The Strategy, Politics, and Players that Won the War
Once the stories have been told of battles won and lost, most of what happens in a war remains a mystery. So it has been with accounts of World War II in the Pacific, a conflict whose nature is only obscured by the linear narrative. In this book, a veteran and respected military author opens the story of the Pacific War to a broader and deeper view.
Going beyond the usual accounting, William B. Hopkins investigates the strategies, politics, and personalities that shaped the conduct of the war. His regional approach to this complex war conducted on land, sea (and significantly by America, undersea), and air offers a more realistic perspective on how this multifaceted conflict unfolded--in many ways, and on many fronts. As expansive as the immense reaches of the Pacific, and as focused as the most intensive pinpoint attack on a strategic island, this account offers a whole new way of understanding the hows--and more significantly, the whys, of the Pacific War.
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