THE BRITISH PACIFIC FLEET: THE ROYAL NAVYS MOST POWERFUL STRIKE FORCE

摘要

It is often stated that history is the propaganda of the victors and that the defeated do not have their story told. If this is true then it is also the case that history is the story of the senior partner in an alliance, not that of the supporting power. Undoubtedly this has proved to be the case in the writing of the history of the War in the Pacific. Captain Samuel Eliot Morison was commissioned into the USN and sent to sea in 1942 to write the history of the US Navy and the Marine Corps as it unfolded before his eyes in the Pacific. His eyewitness first draft of history later became his definitive History of United States Naval Operations in World War 11 which extended to 15 volumes. It has been the mother lode for generations of naval scholars. Captain Steven Roskill performed the same task for the RN with his The War at Sea 1939-45 in three volumes. He recorded the exploits of the British Pacific Fleet (BPF) in 1944-5.