Book Review: 'The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy’s Finest Hour'
Cover design for Bantam Books: Belina Huey. (C) 2005 Bantam Books, a division of Penguin Random House World War II is now three quarters of a century away in our collective memory. All of the great or infamous military and civilian leaders – Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, George Patton, Takeo Kurita, and William F. Halsey – are long dead. The elderly veterans that in the U.S. are dying at a rate of 2000 men and women a day are now the junior officers and enlisted men who were then the youngest. In a decade or so, the last people to have lived during history’s largest and bloodiest clash of arms will be gone, leaving only the historical record and a plethora of monuments as reminders of those turbulent, violent years. Since the 1980s, when authors like Max Hastings, Stephen Ambrose, Rick Atkinson, Antony Beevor, and Carlo D’Este kicked off the renaissance of popular World War II history writing, many fine books have been publ...