Review of Pacific Thunder by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

Author:  Thomas McKelvey Cleaver.
Title:  Pacific Thunder:  The US Navy's Central Pacific Campaign, August 1943 - October 1944.
Publisher:  Osprey Publications.
Copyright: 2017.
Pages:  296.
Price:  $35.00 (US).

Overview and Impressions:
The author covers the US Navy's central Pacific campaign from August 1943 to October 1944.  It's mainly the carrier air war between the American and Imperial Japanese navies.  Cleaver goes into pre-WWII naval aerial doctrine, tactics, organization, and logistics and how they affected the outcome of the conflict.

Military planner had been expecting a naval war between Imperial Japanese and US navies since the 1920s.  They thought it would be fought with battleships.  The old battle wagons were sunk at Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, 1941.  The only capital ships the US Navy had left after that were flat-tops.  So the Second World War in the Pacific theater was fought by carrier fleets.

The Battle of Midway was the decisive battle of in the Pacific.  Everything after that were mopping up operations against the Imperial Japanese navy.  The Japanese overplayed their hand at Midway and lost.  Admiral Nimitz's plan was bypass their Pacific strongholds and go for the jugular vein of the Japanese home islands.  That plan infuriated General MacArthur.  He wanted to liberate the Philippines, first.  Invading Japan was projected to cost millions of casualties.  That is why Truman ordered the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

That is outside the scope of this book, which looked at the US central Pacific naval campaign to crush the Japanese.  It was brutal, effective, and it worked.  The Japanese couldn't afford to lose their carrier pilots.  The US Navy had a luxury of experienced naval aviators and aces.  The campaigns in the Marianas, Philippine Sea, and Leyte Gulf provide the worth of Nimitz's staff and underlings.  It went a long way in winning the Pacific theater....

Recommended.