I was not there, so it has been difficult for me to grasp the time. I thought the author did a great job of explaining that time frame to the reader.
I did spend time in a navy family, and did a tour at sea myself, but I have to consider myself one of those “uninitiated”, especially since I never had to enter a burning compartment (except for damage control training). I consider myself to be very well informed about these things, but I learned a lot from that book.
It boggled my mind to imagine the carnage. So many lives lost in engagements measured in minutes...the description of the way a salvo from a battleship could be seen at night glowing red, disappearing into the clouds, then reappearing from the clouds downrange in their arc...it really helped me to visualize that.
I wish more people would pick up a book, study the Pacific theatre more. What’s rather troubling is the lack of awareness of what truly went on. Seems too many people think the war in the Pacific consisted of Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and a couple of naval battles. Way, way off the mark – not even close. There were dozens of invasions, dozens of pitched battles over land and water. We had to spool up momentum to move in, dominate every nautical mile of the sea and air out there to disrupt enemy lines of communication in support of the overall strategy – and keep that momentum up, not let it fall off. We had to land on and take all sorts of widespot-in-the-ocean places most people have never even heard of to ‘base’ our way into Empire held territory. It was a long, nasty slog that many remain unaware of to this day. The distances involved were daunting, and the efforts to overcome them in order to take the war to the Japanese even more so, making the struggle in Europe look simple in comparison.