Neptune's Inferno
Subtitle: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York, USA
Language: eng
Format: ebook
ISBN-13: 9780553908077
Description: From the Prologue...

On Friday, August 7, 1942, Eighty-Two U.S. Navy ships manned by forty thousand sailors, shepherding a force of sixteen thousand U.S. Marines, reached their destination in a remote southern ocean and spent the next hundred days immersed in a curriculum of cruel and timeless lessons. No fighting navy had ever been so speedily and explosively educated. In the conflict that rolled through the end of that trembling year, they and the thousands more who followed them learned that technology was important, but that guts and guile mattered more. That swiftness was more deadly than strength, and that well-packaged surprise usually beat them both. That if it looked like the enemy was coming, the enemy probably was coming and you ought to tell somebody, maybe even everybody. That the experience of battle forever divides those who talk of nothing else but its prospect from those who talk of everything else but its memory.

...

The founders of the U.S. Navy, having faced their own moments of decision, from John Paul Jones off Flamborough Head to Stephen Decatur against the Barbary Pirates, would have felt kinship with the men of the South Pacific Forces. There as everywhere, men in uniform fought like impulsive humans almost always have: stubbornly, viciously, brilliantly, wastefully, earnestly, stupidly, gallantly. At Guadalcanal, so distant on the ear, a naval legacy continued, and by their example in that bitter campaign the long shadows of their American quality reach right on up to the present.
Table of contents: label: Maps; label: Tables; label: Prologue
title: Eighty-two Ships; label: Part I
title: Sea of Troubles; label: 1
title: Trip Wire; label: 2
title: A Great Gray Fleet; label: 3
title: The First D-Day; label: 4
title: Nothing Worthy of Your Majesty's Attention; label: 5
title: Fly the Carriers; label: 6
title: A Captain in the Fog; label: 7
title: The Martyring of Task Group 62.6; label: 8
title: Burning in the Rain; label: Part II
title: Fighting Fleet Rising; label: 9
title: A New Kind of Fight; label: 10
title: The Tokyo Express; label: 11
title: A Function at the Junction; label: 12
title: What They Were Built For; label: 13
title: The Warriors; label: 14
title: The Devil May Care; label: 15
title: The Visit; label: 16
title: Night of a New Moon; label: 17
title: Pulling the Trigger; label: 18
title: "Pour It to 'Em"; label: Part III
title: Storm Tide; label: 19
title: All Hell's Eve; label: 20
title: The Weight of a War; label: 21
title: Enter Fighting; label: 22
title: "Strike--Repeat, Strike"; label: 23
title: Santa Cruz; label: 24
title: Secret History; label: 25
title: Turner's Choice; label: 26
title: Suicide; label: 27
title: Black Friday; label: 28
title: Into the Light; label: 29
title: The Killing Salvo; label: 30
title: Death in the Machine Age; label: 31
title: Point Blank; label: 32
title: Among the Shadows; label: 33
title: Atlanta Burning; label: 34
title: Cruiser in the Sky; label: 35
title: Regardless of Losses; label: Part IV
title: The Thundering; label: 36
title: The Giants Ride; label: 37
title: The Gun Club; label: 38
title: The Kind of Men Who Win a War; label: 39
title: On the Spot; label: 40
title: The Futility of Learning; label: 41
title: Future Rising; label: 42
title: Report and Echo; label: 43
title: The Opinion of Convening Authority; label: 44
title: Ironbottom Sound; label: Photo Insert; label: Acknowledgments; label: Dedication; label: Ships and Aircraft Types of the Guadalcanal Campaign; label: Naval Battles of the Guadalcanal Campaign; label: Total Naval Losses at Guadalcanal; label: Source Notes; label: Bibliography; label: Photo Credits; label: Index