This fourth part of the great work of S.E. Morison, written immediately after WWII, describes a crucial moment in Pacific war and especially what was possibly the most dramatic battle in the world history - Midway. Surprisingly however this book is much inferior both to the previous volume ("Rising sun in the Pacific") and to the next one ("Struggle for Guadalcanal").
This book is divided in three parts. The first two deal with Coral Sea-Tulagi and Midway-Aleutians campaigns and they are quite honest. The third one, about submarine operations, is completely outdated and mostly devoid of interest.
The description of Coral Sea-Tulagi campaign is probably the one which aged the less - and admiral Morison's style of writing is always enjoyable, even in his lesser books, so this is something still very much worth reading. However there are now better, more detailed and more researched narratives of this campaign - one of the best (short but very well done) is available in Osprey Campaign series ("The Coral Sea 1942", by Mark Stille and John White).
Midway campaign is quite well described, but many things available in more modern publications are missing here, especially the biggest part of Japanese side description of the events. If you do not need a very detailed story, that book is still OK. If however you want more precisions, like what damage was inflicted on Japanese carriers and why were all of them lost so fast, when "Yorktown" managed to stay afloat even after taking an incredible beating and it almost made it home, well, then I must recommend you other, more recent books. Of the short ones, probably the best is another Osprey Campaign book, "Midway 1942", again by Mark Stille and John White. However if you want a REALLY detailed one, "Shattered sword" by Jonathan Parshall is probably the best choice. On another hand, the Aleutian part of this campaign is very well described and I think this part of the book resisted very well to the time.
The third part of the book, describing submarine operations in 1941-42, is very superficial and aged very badly. Here THE book to recommend is Clay Blair's "Silent victory" - a monument amongst books on naval military history.
That being said, the next volume in admiral Morison's "opus magnum", about the Guadalcanal campaign, is an absolutely magnificent book, so if like me you want to read the whole series in chronological order, my advice is to read the Coral Sea and Midway parts of this book (if necessary "fast forwarding" some pages), skip totally the submarine part and head fast to the Solomon Islands...
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 March 2011
