In 1983 Richard Hough published The Great War at Sea, a classic of military history that managed to pull together the disparate naval events and battles of World War I into a single scholarly but readable volume.

Writing a comparable World War II at Sea is a much bigger task. The naval history of World War I involved three combatants—the United States, Britain, and Germany—locked in a maritime struggle limited, with a few exceptions, to the Atlantic and two inland seas, the Mediterranean and the North Sea. Major naval operations in World War II sprawled over four oceans, from the South Pacific and the Bay of Bengal to Murmansk and the Arctic Circle, and virtually every littoral in between. Telling the story of these naval operations also demands an intimate knowledge of the air and amphibious operations this naval war involved, from the carrier battles in the Pacific theater to Operations Torch and Overlord in the European theater.