Samuel Eliot Morison’s monumental fifteen volume series, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, covering the complete record of the U.S. Navy during the war, is a critically acclaimed work of history. First published by Little Brown and later by the University of Illinois, the complete series will now be published by the Naval Institute Press in updated paperback editions with new introductions by noted military historians.

One of America’s most distinguished historians, Samuel Eliot Morison, was commissioned in the Naval Reserve early in 1942 with the sole duty of preparing the history of which OPERATIONS IN NORTH AFRICAN WATERS, OCTOBER 1942– June 1943, is the second volume. The work, as a whole, is a “shooting history,” written from the inside out, in effect simultaneously with the events it records. Morison spend more that half his time a sea during the war, seeing active duty on eleven different ships and emerging with seven battle stars on his service ribbons. Either he or one of three officers on this staff personally covered every major operation after 1942. His is the story of naval combat, surface actions, submarine and antisubmarine warfare as conducted from carriers and naval bases ashore, and amphibious warfare.

Volume 2, which was actually the first to be published, covers naval aspects of Operation“Torch,” the North African campaign, which carried out the plan favoured by President Roosevelt for opening a second front to relieve the Russians. Told with the accuracy of a historian, the pace of an experienced narrator, the detail of firsthand observation and participation, it is a full record of what was, at the time it occurred, the largest overseas expedition ever undertaken.