Two books. Three files. 1,279 pages.

The Ruthless Pacific explains how there came to be an American fleet standing behind each of the mornings the Pacific war is remembered for. It follows the treaty that fixed the fleet’s shape in 1922, the fleet problems that found the answers early, the endurance problem that decided how far the Navy could reach, and the organization that finally out-built the losses.

US Command in Color is a separate 526-page visual volume: 100 American commanders, the same archival photographs presented as a colour gallery.

What you get

• The Ruthless Pacific — 753 pages, 46 chapters in four parts, three appendices, 2,198 endnotes, 117 captioned photographs, a bibliography of 171 works and 67 articles. PDF and EPUB, both included.
• US Command in Color — 526 pages, fixed-layout PDF
• No DRM. Download the files and keep them.

How it is sourced

Three tiers of evidence run through the notes and they are not interchangeable: a document, a reproduction printed inside a published work, and a secondary account. Where a claim reaches its evidence through a published intermediary, the note says so. Where the record runs thin, the book says so in plain words rather than filling the gap. Where two figures disagree on different bases, the note names the basis and gives you both numbers. Captions are derived from the record, never written to it.

The colour volume is image-heavy at roughly 195 MB, so get that one on wifi.