Samuel Eliot Morison, in the midst of writing the History of United States Naval Operations in World War II in 14 volumes which I greatly enjoyed some years back, was asked to give a talk at Exeter. This talk, combined with some Oxford lectures later in the year, yields this slender and likeable volume. Morison is best, of course, on American strategy in the Pacific; he was there, and he was singularly well connected. He's got less to say about Japanese strategy, in part because his view was that the Japanese had no plausible options. The European strategic picture he draws is conventional, but what else is the point of having an Official Historian?