A Blue Sea of Blood: Deciphering the Mysterious Fate of the USS EDSALL By Donald M. Kehn, Jr. (244 pages, photos, maps) Reviewer:  Terry Miller Overall Rating: Four Stars: Highly recommended. An excellent book. Through excellent scholarship Donald Kehn takes the reader into the Asiatic Fleet of the 1920s and 1930s, leading up to the early days of WWII. Any naval history buff will applaud Kehn’s descriptions of this forgotten fleet and how it was written off even before Pearl Harbor was attacked. As he concentrates on DesDiv 57 and especially USS EDSALL (DD-219) Kehn shows us with meticulous care how miscalculations in London and Amsterdam impacted FDR’s decision not to reinforce the Asiatic Fleet. A handful of undersized and ill-equipped old destroyers manned by poorly trained and outfitted crews were nearly all that stood between the Imperial Japanese Navy juggernaut and European and American interests in East and Southeast Asia . No one knows with certainty the final minutes of EDSALL’s life but Kehn uses recently uncovered Japanese Navy documents and a study of Imperial Naval doctrines and cites the work of other scholars to piece together painstakingly what the ship’s final hours must have been like. He provides reasoned and logical answers to some of the mysteries that have shrouded the loss of EDSALL for the past 67 years and tells a compelling story of inevitable loss. He doesn’t forget the human side of the saga, either. Among his massive research efforts many items are drawn from personal recollection and correspondence that bring the story to life. These earliest days of the war in the Pacific are often overlooked or overshadowed, perhaps because there was so little in which to take pride. Kehn fills in many gaps in the history with the rich background to what could have been a simple tale about an old four-piper destroyer. What he has created is a book worthy of any navyman’s library. Availability: Tin Can Sailors Ship's Store $26.00 Media Rate $31.00 Priority Rate