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” one of Churchill’s advisers had warned him. If London did not commit to Eisenhower’s invasion of France, the adviser wrote, “everything points to a complete reversal of our present agreed strategy and the withdrawal of America to a war of her own in the Pacific.” On hearing this, Churchill reportedly remarked, “Just because the Americans can’t have a massacre in France this year, they want to sulk and bathe in the Pacific.” That was a dubious characterization of what his Atlantic cousins really wanted. Because the Japanese had struck them directly, and Hitler hadn’t, what many Americans—or the Navy at least—wanted was a massacre in the Pacific. The victory at Midway opened the course.

The Navy would find its war on the boundless battlefield of the western ocean. When Martin Clemens turned on his teleradio in Aola and tapped out news of an airfield in the making, the pattern of the coming days began to take shape in the mind of Ernest King.

SHIP OF GHOSTS

A Bantam Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Published by Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2006 by James D. Hornfischer

Excerpt from Neptune’s Inferno copyright 2010 by James D. Hornfischer

© Marguerite Campbell / Houston Chronicle

See pages 513-516 for credits pertaining to photographs and art throughout.

The author is grateful for the permission of the copyright holders to quote selections from the following works:

The Ghost That Died in Sunda Strait by Walter G. Winslow, excerpted with the permission of the author’s daughter, Delsa W. Amundson.

Last Man Out by H. Robert Charles, excerpted with permission of the author.

Out of the Smoke and Into the Smother by Ray Parkin, excerpted with the permission of The Sir Edward Dunlop Medical Research Foundation, Brunswick, Australia.

Maps by Robert Bull

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006047530

Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Neptune’s Inferno. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

eISBN: 978-0-307-49088-9

www.bantamdell.com

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