After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, America's fast carrier task forces, with their aircraft squadrons and powerful support warships, went on the offensive. Under orders from Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, the newly appointed Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, as the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet, took the fight to the Japanese, using island raids to slow their advance in the Pacific. Beginning in February 1942, a series of task force raids led by the carriers USS Enterprise, USS Yorktown, USS Lexington and USS Hornet were launched, beginning in the Marshall Islands and Gilbert Islands. An attempted raid on Rabaul was followed by successful attacks on Wake Island and Marcus Island. The Lae-Salamaua Raid countered Japanese invasions on New Guinea. The most dramatic was the unorthodox Tokyo (Doolittle) Raid, where 16 carrier-launched B-25 medium bombers demonstrated that the Japanese mainland was open to U.S. air attacks. The raids had a limited effect on halting the Japanese advance but kept the enemy away from Hawaii, the U.S. West coast and the Panama Canal, and kept open lines of communications to Australia.

 After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, America's fast carrier task forces, with their aircraft squadrons and powerful support warships, went on the offensive. Under orders from Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, the newly appointed Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, as the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet, took the fight to the Japanese, using island raids to slow their advance in the Pacific. Beginning in February 1942, a series of task force raids led by the carriers USS Enterprise, USS Yorktown, USS Lexington and USS Hornet were launched, beginning in the Marshall Islands and Gilbert Islands. An attempted raid on Rabaul was followed by successful attacks on Wake Island and Marcus Island. The Lae-Salamaua Raid countered Japanese invasions on New Guinea. The most dramatic was the unorthodox Tokyo (Doolittle) Raid, where 16 carrier-launched B-25 medium bombers demonstrated that the Japanese mainland was open to U.S. air attacks. The raids had a limited effect on halting the Japanese advance but kept the enemy away from Hawaii, the U.S. West coast and the Panama Canal, and kept open lines of communications to Australia.

The War Begins reveals in detail the events of the early carrier raids by the U.S. Pacific Fleet against the Japanese in the first half of 1942 in the Pacific War. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, carrier airpower would take on the supreme offensive role against Japanese forces in the first phase of the war. America's fast carrier task forces, with their aircraft squadrons and powerful support warships, took on the challenge, but the Pacific Fleet carrier force had a total of three carriers in the Pacific on 7 December 1941. Adm. William F. Halsey's Task Force 8, positioned on the Enterprise, and Rear Adm. Frank Jack Fletcher's Task Force 17, on the Yorktown, executed the first raid on Japanese positions on 1 February 1942, with attacks on the Marshall and Gilbert Islands. Raids on Rabaul, Wake Island, and Marcus Island followed. The most daring carrier raid was the unorthodox Doolittle Raid on Japan itself, on 18 April, when sixteen U.S. Army B-25 medium bombers launched from the Hornet. Though the carrier raids had limited material effect on Japan's continuing advance in the Pacific, they yielded valuable operational experience for U.S. carrier forces, kept open the lines of communications to Australia, and boosted morale. The raid on Tokyo inspired the elaborate Japanese plan to occupy Midway Island in June, resulting in a major carrier battle and the U.S. Navy's greatest victory.

In April, 1942, President Roosevelt urged the military high command to prepare a devastating carrier-launch raid against the Japanese home islands. And the only person who dared to lead the mission was the best-known risk-taker in the U.S. Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle.

Ten years after the close of World War II, the U.S. Navy published a chronology of its operations in the war. Long out of print, the work focused on what were then defined as critical and decisive events. It ignored a multitude of combat actions as well as the loss or damage of many types of U.S. ships and craft—particularly auxiliaries, amphibious ships, and district craft—and entirely omitted the U.S. submarine campaign against Japanese shipping, This greatly expanded and updated study, now available in paperback with an index, goes far beyond the original work, drawing on information from more than forty additional years of historical research and writing. Massive, but well organized, it addresses operational aspects of the U.S. Navy’s war in every theater.