Holmes, a graduate of Annapolis and a onetime officer on Admiral Nimitz' staff, has prepared a 2 lb. digest of all the major American and Japanese undersea fighting that took place in the Pacific during WWII. Although the layman immersed in the naval history of the period will not find this over-technical in description, the pile up of detail is probably enough to sink the interest of the non-fiction adventure addict despite the popularity of all things to do with submarine warfare. The book starts with the U.S.S. Gudgeon's sinking of the first combatant vessel ever destroyed by an American submarine on January 27, 1942 and ends with the sinking of two Japanese coastal defense beats on August 14, 1945. Very little that can be documented from American or Japanese sources has been missed. For the serious student and naval/military collections.