In the early chapters of THE CONQUERING TIDE, author Ian W. Toll spends a lot of time lingering in liberty ports. Not actually, of course, but the narrative takes long pauses where it stretches out and fills the reader in on what it was like to be a sailor on the beach in San Francisco, in the sleazy dive bars of Honolulu, or courting the grateful local girls of Sydney. It’s something of a curious choice; what the sailors, pilots and Marines of the Pacific War did on their downtime is interesting, and often colorful, but not what you would call vital to the overall story.

And what a story it is. THE CONQUERING TIDE is the second of three books in a trilogy that purports to tell the whole story of World War II in the Pacific, from the first air raid report on Pearl Harbor to the last echo of MacArthur’s pen scratching paper on the deck of the USS Missouri. The book starts in mid-1942, with the run-up to Guadalcanal, and spends most of its time on the island-hopping campaign, where the American forces contested Japanese occupation of Tarawa, Kwajalein and Saipan. “Island-hopping” is a fair descriptor for the campaign, but it doesn’t properly connote the incredible distances of ocean that each hop had to cross or the ferocity of the individual battles.

"THE CONQUERING TIDE more than lives up to the scope of its subject.... it does an outstanding job of setting the stage for each conflict and presenting it in rich and powerful detail."

Toll begins his story with the high-level debate about whether to challenge the Japanese occupation of Guadalcanal, and the massive naval and land battle that ensued. Toll’s focus here is primarily on the air battle and the Japanese attempts to eradicate Henderson Field, home of the ragtag Cactus Air Force. Even in a book the size of this one, there ought to be a little more room in there for a full discussion of how the Navy lost the Battle of Cape Esperance, for example. And as a New Jersey resident, I was more than a little exasperated to find no mention of the Garden State’s John Basilone, who held off 3,000 Japanese troopers with his machine gun on Guadalcanal.

But these are minor quibbles. THE CONQUERING TIDE more than lives up to the scope of its subject. Although it occasionally gets bogged down in Navy political and technical details (mostly regarding the faulty torpedoes that plagued both air and submarine forces), it does an outstanding job of setting the stage for each conflict and presenting it in rich and powerful detail.

For example, Toll expertly illuminates two of the war’s turning points. He profiles intrepid submarine commander Mush Morton, whose aggressive submarine tactics aboard the USS Wahoo set the standard for what the Silent Service would become. Toll compares the timid approach taken by Morton’s predecessor with the wildly dangerous --- and wildly successful --- ambushes that Morton and his Wahoo crew pulled off in their first cruise. Morton returned to Pearl Harbor with a broom tied to his periscope to signify a “clean sweep,” and submarine commanders who followed his example swept the oceans free of Japanese merchant shipping.

Toll then outdoes himself with his narrative of the brief, sharp and incredibly bloody battle for Tarawa, which cost the lives of over 2,000 Americans and resulted in the utter devastation of Japanese resistance on the island. When Toll writes about the courage and bloodshed of battle, the prose is at turns lyrical and forceful, telling the story in a remarkably realistic and readable way.

And so it’s just as well that Toll takes the occasional time out from telling the story of the bloody conflicts of the Pacific War to tell the stories of the liberty ports where the warriors let off a little steam before heading back into the maelstrom of battle. Everyone deserves a little rest and relaxation, especially authors engaged in huge projects. I hope it’s not too much longer before Toll completes his trilogy.