A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2016 Bantam Books, an imprint of Penguin/Random House LLC The United States Navy is currently the world’s largest and most capable navy in the world. No other nation – including the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation – has as large a fleet – 282 warships, including 11 aircraft carriers in service, with two Gerald R. Ford carriers being built – or can project naval air power (3,700 deployable aircraft, second only in size and striking power to the U.S. Air Force, the world’s mightiest air force) as the American Navy. It’s worth remembering, though, that until World War II, this wasn’t always so; America’s mother country, Great Britain, started the war as the world’s premier naval power; in 1939 the Royal Navy’s 1,400 warships ensured that Britannia did, indeed, rule the waves. But after the United States entered the war – having restarted its naval construction program in 1937 to modernize a badly-neglected fleet, create jobs, and deter aggressor nation...

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...