Either Caroline Alexander has lost her touch, or she agreed to write a book about the subject and then discovered there was only enough interesting information for a magazine article. The book jumps from subject to subject so frequently that it became annoying. The accounts of flying over "the Hump" were interesting. The ground battles in Burma were covered so sketchily that they were impossible to follow.

But as for the theater, this book was a very discouraging read. Chiang Kai Shek, the leader of non-communist China, was a con man who convinced Roosevelt that the U.S. needed to dump billions of dollars into China to keep them in the war against Japan. But very rarely did Chinese troops actually battle Japanese troops. Thousands of U.S. airmen gave their lives to fly stuff into China, but the vast majority of it ended up either in the hands of black marketers or in government warehouses to be used after the war as Chiang tried (unsuccessfully) to keep power. He pressed Chinese men and boys into the army, treated them like slaves, and taxed them into the hands of the Communists. And there is no evidence that anything involving China shortened the war by even a day. It was yet another (there are so very many) example of Roosevelt's incompetence.