RaveOpen Letters ReviewIt is a sign of an outstanding historian if he can take a subject that has been the focus of an almost monumental amount of detailed scholarship and bring all that research together in a coherent narrative. It is the sign of an excellent writer and storyteller if he can make that same story compelling from the first page to the last. Craig L. Symonds manages to do both in less than eight hundred pages in his new maritime history of World War II ... Symonds doesn’t lose the biographies of the players in this global drama by focusing on grand strategy and fleet movements. Alongside the drama of battles, personalities are analyzed and sketched against the backdrop of war. Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt and Mussolini get their due. Assessments of naval leaders like Yamamoto, King, Spruance, Donitz and Halsey are balanced and deftly handled ... With all the detail, with a helpful selection of maps and photographs, and with ample notes and a useful bibliography as well as index, this is a volume that belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in World War II. Its great strength, a compelling narrative, could have been drowned in detail. Instead, the mastery of detail supports the narrative trajectory to create a history that doesn’t let up until the combat is over.
