That most portentous of titles, Twilight of the Gods, is often filched from the Norse to provide unearned grandeur to codpiece fantasy or rock-and-roll biographies. For once, with Ian Toll’s Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945, the final installment in the historian’s Pacific trilogy, we have some content worthy of that name.

Military histories often struggle to strike a balance between the battlefield experience of individuals and larger strategic views of a war, but scale is an especially tricky problem for histories of the Pacific theater of World War II. Unlike the European theater, with its relatively straightforward battlefronts, the Pacific involved fiendishly complicated land-sea-air missions over ludicrous distances, naval battles in which opposing ships were never anywhere near each other, submarine warfare that’s difficult to sum up in any particular, and much more. There are numerous excellent histories on individual battles in the Pacific, but prior to Toll, the best account of the theater as a whole was Samuel Elliot Morrison’s elephantine naval history of World War II, which features eight volumes on the Pacific War alone. Toll has done a superb job synthesizing the scholarship into a 3,000-page trilogy, which might sound like a lot until you have trouble putting it down.