HELL IS UPON US D-Day in the Pacific

The U.S. invasion of the Mariana Islands in June of 1944 inflicted a fatal blow on the Imperial Japanese forces, after which that country's air power never recovered. The author's attempt to place the Marianas campaign in the context of the entire Second World War dilutes his focus. Unable to organize the information, he jumps from the Pearl Harbor attack to the American Civil War and from North Africa to the Aleutians—in just the first chapter. Narrator Peter Ganim deserves praise for his careful enunciation and skill with the multilingual names of the South Pacific. However, he reads in a jerky, uneasy style made more tedious by the author’s lengthy sentences. The predictable difficulty of understanding complex military movements without maps adds to the production's inadequacies. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine [Published: MAY 2010]