Probably the biggest limitation on Two-Ocean War's battle history is the fact that ULTRA, the British program to decrypt and disseminate German Enigma traffic, was not declassified until a decade after it was written. This shows up early in this chapter, where it talks about the futility of hunting groups as opposed to convoys. In fact, hunting groups were used, particularly in the spectacularly successful campaign against the German U-boat tankers in 1943. More broadly, the questions of the appropriate strategy against submarines is a complicated one, and the fact that WWI and WWII came to similar answers is somewhat coincidental. (If you want more on this, there's a good summary in Norman Friedman's new Cold War Anti-Submarine Warfare.)
Also worth commenting briefly on is that, yeah, in retrospect the fall of France was pretty improbable. The German generals who told Hitler it would be a disaster were, by conventional lights, quite right, and it wouldn't have taken all that much for it to actually be a disaster. But instead, France fell, and we got the war as we now know it.
Beyond that, we're seeing Morison's tendency (with one notable exception) to lionize American figures on full display here. King is also famous as "the most even-tempered man in the Navy - always in a rage", which doesn't really come across in the description. He was definitely a competent and effective admiral, but I don't think Morison's superlatives are entirely deserved.
On the Pacific side, there's more of the same problems that showed up in the first chapter. I will note, for instance, that his count of fleet strength doesn't include Repulse and Prince of Wales at Singapore, or the Dutch and Australian cruisers in the southwest Pacific. His evaluation of Yamamoto's strategy is also off. The basic outline is not difficult to follow given modern sources. Yamamoto was trying to deliver a major shock to the US in hopes of forcing us out of the war, and, failing that, to give Japan time to expand and fortify her perimeter. I don't think his account of the politics on Japan's side is much better, but it's been a while since I read much on this. If anyone is interested in a recent and quite readable book on this, I'd recommend Tower of Skulls by Richard B Frank (Amazon affiliate link).
Despite my criticisms, I think this chapter was an improvement on the last one. The Atlantic side was the first time we've seen Morison's genius for describing the operational side of things, and next time out, we'll get his account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which will play far more to the book's strengths.
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