The Quiet Warrior

An unassuming, quiet, but very effective Pacific War commander. The Fleet Admiral responsible for the complex sustained mid-pacific thrust thru the Marshals, Carolines, Marianas, and eventually the battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Commanded a huge fleet of nearly 1000 ships of all kinds including dozens of carriers and hundreds of amphibious transports as well as thousands of fighters and bombers. Among the public he is known for Midway but that was only a small part of his vast and extremely interesting wartime experience. Many difficult contentious issues requiring considerable effort, conferences, discussions and thoughtfulness to resolve. This book allows you a front seat to all this and what makes it so interesting and informative. It is even more instructive to make this book part of a more extensive reading campaign to include Adms Burke, Halsey, Nimiitz, and King to see how the same issues and incidents were seen at progressively higher levels. It goes without saying that all USN officers should be not only have already read these biographies but periodically re-read them. These were truely great, effective, exceptionally well prepared leaders.

This was a good book. I enjoyed learning about Adm. Spruance, but it also had some later unusual chapters that were inserted and written by staff members in first person…strange.