Pacific Thunder, Thomas McKelvey Cleaver
Pacific Thunder, Thomas McKelvey Cleaver
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Pacific Thunder
The US Navy's Central Pacific Campaign, August 1943–October 1944

Author: Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

Narrator: Tom Perkins

Unabridged: 13 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/19/2017

Synopsis

On 27 October 1942, four "Long Lance" torpedoes fired by the Japanese destroyers Makigumo and Akigumo exploded in the hull of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CV-8). Minutes later, the ship that had launched the Doolitte Raid six months earlier slipped beneath the waves of the Coral Sea 100 miles northeast of the island of Guadalcanal and just north of the Santa Cruz Islands, taking with her 140 of her sailors. With the loss of Hornet, the United States Navy now had one aircraft carrier left in the South Pacific, USS Enterprise (CV-6), herself badly damaged in the two previous days of the Battle of Santa Cruz.

For the American naval aviators, it would be difficult to imagine that within twenty-four months of this event, Zuikaku, the last survivor of the Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor, would lie at the bottom of the Philippine Sea north of Cape Engano on the island of Luzon, alongside the other surviving Japanese carriers, sacrificed as lures in a failed attempt to block the American invasion of the Philippines, and that the United States Navy's Task Force 38, composed of sixteen fleet carriers, would reign supreme on the world's largest ocean.

About Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

Thomas McKelvey Cleaver has been a published writer for the past forty years, with a lifelong interest in the Korean War. He is the author of Aces of the 78th Fighter Group and F4F and F6F Aces of VF-2, as well as Fabled Fifteen: The Pacific War Saga of Carrier Air Group 15 and The Bridgebusters: The True Story of the Catch-22 Bomb Group. He is also a regular contributor to Flight Journal magazine. During his thirty years as a screenwriter in Hollywood, he wrote the cult classic The Terror Within and worked as a supervising producer on a number of TV and cable series. He served in the US Navy in Vietnam and currently lives in Encino, California.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jonathan on October 05, 2020

Meh. Not a bad read, but I didn't feel that Cleaver had anything new to teach me about this campaign. The focus is on aircraft carriers and aircraft, but because of that much about the complex and varied types of combat is neglected here.......more

Goodreads review by Urey on December 29, 2018

An interesting read, covering the Central Campaign in the Pacific from August 1943 to October 1944. Cleaver separates out various aspects of the Pacific War by chapter – one chapter describes the assorted Admirals and command structures; one pretty interesting chapter discuses carrier development be......more

Goodreads review by Tim on June 19, 2021

Great overview of the U.S. Navy’s Central Pacific campaign in World War II, pretty much starting from just after the Guadalcanal Campaign, covering actions in the Gilbert Islands, Marshall Islands, Mariana Islands, and the Palau Islands and elsewhere, all the way to the conclusion of the fighting at......more

Goodreads review by Charles m smith jr on April 08, 2018

Hat's off to the Navy! This is the side you never hear about. Those guys on those ships had no place to hide. Those time in combat was long and hard. Like all the men of that germination they saw it thought to the end.......more

Goodreads review by Joe on November 29, 2021

This wasn't bad at all, it just didn't have much new to say. It did discuss Admiral Halsey and Spruance and the unusual rotating command structure that was used in the Pacific. A lot of the book was dedicated to these two men, their differences, similarities, strengths and weaknesses.......more

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