In his semi-official account of the Battle of Savo Island, a disastrous defeat for the U.S. Navy in World War II, Morison partly blamed the defeat on the failure of an Australian aircrew to inform the Americans of the approaching Japanese forces.
Some degree of criticism has been leveled at Morison for his description of the Italian Regia Marina as having been considered by the British seamen as nothing but a joke, and which he explicitly called "Dago Navy".