Clayton Chun is nothing if not workmanlike as an author and, for all practical purposes, seeing as he's on the faculty of the U.S. Army War College, this constitutes official history. This means one has a very "lines on the map" kind of narrative, as Chun examines the operational trade-offs the American and Japanese chains of command made, what with the United States looking for the most efficient way to get to grips with the Japanese home islands, and the Japanese desperately looking for their "decisive" battle that would stop the United States in their tracks. This opens up a whole range of political and cultural questions that a library of books have been written about.

What is striking to me, and this work is far from the first time that I've studied this topic, is that for all the epic and horrifying events that occurred during this campaign, is how little has really been written about it. To a large degree Chun depends on the old U.S. Army "Green Books" in relating this story; I'd been hoping that there was some more contemporary operational sources he could refer to. It's as though Douglas MacArthur's insistence on making this campaign about "him" sucked all the energy out of the room, not helped by Walter Krueger (the main operational architect of this campaign), being uninterested in leaving a memoir. Still, if you want to get the distilled content of the official history, this is a useful work. If there is a particular plus, the contributions of the large Filipino resistance force are integrated into this study. ( )