�������t¶��

Mr. Bungle was formed in Northern California’s Humboldt County in 1985 by high school friends including guitarist Trey Spruance, bassist Trevor Dunn and vocalist Mike Patton, who went on to perform with Faith No More.

The sequentialists, Spruance and Halsey among them, emphasized step-by-step tactical triumphs that would bring American forces to Japan’s shores for an ultimate invasion, while King and the Army Air Corps commander Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold emphasized cumulative sea and air operations — the destruction of Japan’s merchant fleet, the strategic bombing of Japanese cities — that, they believed, would make an invasion unnecessary.

What emerges is a study as detailed as it is unsparing, with King, Nimitz, Spruance and Halsey as pivotal to victory in the Pacific as George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and George Patton were to the victory in Europe.

And while the names of these Navy giants do not roll off the tongue as readily now as those of their celebrated Army counterparts, they should — with Nimitz emerging as the true architect of America’s Pacific naval strategy and Spruance as his masterly, if sometimes overly careful, tactician.

The rise of Nimitz and Spruance pushed the irascible King into the background, where he took on his proper role as the Navy’s key defender among the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Halsey cast as Nimitz’s headstrong bad boy.