The Last Days of the United States Asiatic Fleet: The Fates of the Ships and Those Aboard, December 8, 1941-February 5, 1942 Paperback – May 11, 2018

This is an expensive book for what you get. After spending an evening reviewing it, I decided it wasn't worth the money, so I returned it. I admit that I did not read every page, because I have read many other better presented and sourced books about the US Asiatic Fleet. Why Williams chose the title of 08 Dec 1941 – 5 Feb 1942 is a mystery to me. It’s somewhat misleading. Williams does present events that enveloped the US Asiatic Fleet between 8 Dec 1941 - 1 March 1942, but in a somewhat piecemeal fashion. The story of these individual ships and how they related to the "big picture" was hard to follow. Much of the detail about the ships could probably be found in a copy of Janes's Fighting Ships. Williams glossed over one of the epic battles fought in the Java campaign on 01 Mar 1942 that featured the destroyer USS Edsall (DD-219). Kehn's In The Highest Degree Tragic uncovered the here-to-for unknown details. It was learned immediately after the war that Edsall was sunk by enemy action and that there had been survivors that did not survive the war. However, for more than fifty years the circumstances of the sinking remained unknown. Kehn's research discovered that Edsall had stumbled across Admiral Nagumo's carrier battle force. Nagumo detached two battleships and two heavy cruisers to sink the Edsall. She fought back. Nagumo finally sent dive-bombers from three carriers to dispatch Edsall. After a ninety minute running battle Edsall finally sank. Williams gives only a brief reference to this battle and refers the reader to Kehn's book. He mentions nothing about the stories of the survivors and their subsequent execution by the Japanese.More than half of the book was a listing of the crews who were lost. That task certainly took a lot of work to compile, and if that's what you’re looking for then this is the book for you. However, those names can be found in other sources too. The font used to quote actual messages and other important correspondence was incredibly small. The text font used in the rest of the book was also very small and made it challenging to read. I don’t consider this a scholarly work. The author had only a page and a half bibliography and no footnotes or end notes. Kehn's book on the other hand has seven pages of bibliography and 55 pages of end notes.

Great book. If you are looking for a masterpiece of literature, this is not it. But, if you are looking for a great book filled with important data, and a detailed accounting of US naval personnel and ships in the Asiatic theater, you will love this book.