The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-1945

From the seas of the Central Pacific to the shores of Japan itself, The Fleet at Flood Tide is a stirring, authoritative, and cinematic portrayal of World War II's world-changing finale.
WINNER, Commodore John Barry Book Award, Navy League of the United States
From the ''dean of World War II naval history''* and an author who has been acclaimed as "doing for the Navy what popular historian Stephen Ambrose did for the Army," here is an unprecedented account of the extraordinary World War II air, land, and sea campaign that brought the U.S. Navy to the apex of its strength and marked the rise of the United States as a global superpower.
With its thunderous assault on the Mariana Islands in June 1944, the United States crossed the threshold of total war. In this tour de force of narrative storytelling distilled from extensive research in new primary sources, James D. Hornfischer brings to life the campaign that was the fulcrum of the drive to compel Tokyo to surrender--and forever changed the art of modern war. With a close focus on high commanders, front-line combatants, and ordinary people, American and Japanese alike, Hornfischer tells the story of the climactic end stage of the Pacific War as has never been done before. Here are the epic seaborne invasions of Saipan, Tinian and Guam; the stunning aerial battles of the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot; the first large-scale use of Navy underwater demolition teams; the largest banzai attack of the war; and daring combat operations large and small that made possible the strategic bombing offensive culminating in the atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
* "Hornfischer is the dean of World War II naval history.... In his capable hands, the story races along like an intense thriller.... Narrative nonfiction at its finest--a book simply not to be missed." --James M. Scott, Charleston Post and Courier "An impressively lucid account.... Hornfischer crisply and satisfyingly sketches all these figures, and his big Iliad contains a hundred smaller ones, as he propels his complex story forward with supple transitions that never leave the reader behind in the details. . . . At the end of his admirable, fascinating book, Mr. Hornfischer makes a strong case that America's failing to use the most terrible weapon yet born would have meant many hundreds of thousands more deaths, theirs and ours alike." --Wall Street Journal
"An extraordinary memorial to the courageous--and a cautionary note to a world that remains unstable and turbulent today." --Admiral James Stavridis, Supreme Allied Commander, NATO (2009-2013), author of Sea Power

"A masterful, fresh account of the latter days of the war in the Pacific that ably expands on the prior offerings of such classic naval historians as Samuel Eliot Morison." --Dallas Morning News