Puttering in the Study

Storm Over the Gilberts: War in the Central Pacific: 1943

This is a short book about the landings on Tarawa and Makin in November 1943, the essential (but bloody) proving ground for major amphibious assaults in the Pacific.  I was pretty disappointed in it - no map of the island to provide context, and the narrative was disjointed and not very helpful.  Halfway through in exasperation I dug out the December 2008 issue of Naval History, which had a package of issues and art commemorating the 65th anniversary of the landings.  It was far superior to this, providing detailed maps, artwork, articles explaining the broader context of the invasion, and providing important context.

It got me to thinking, because Hoyt's book on the Battle of the Coral Sea was the major one I read growing up, and in retrospect I wonder if these type books may have been the '70's historical equivalent of pulp fiction - short books that recycled the primary sources.  This is actually the shortest of Hoyt's books I have, and I suspect that the choice of subject - a single invasion and a restricted time frame ended up making it briefer than he may have intended.

Halsey's Typhoon - Bob Drury & Tom Clavin

I actually listened to the audiobook recently, and it's been one of the better ones I'd had.  The book tells the story of the major typhoon that Admiral Halsey unwittingly took his Third Fleet directly into in December of 1944 off the Philippines.  The book is well-written and narrated with the one exception that light carriers and escort carriers are both referred to as "jeep" carriers, a term that applied only to the escort variety.  Light carriers such as the Monterey and San Jacinto mentioned in the book for in fact classified as fleet carriers as their speed allowed them to operated with the larger Essex class carriers.  The CVE's, on the other hand, were significantly slower, and performed the various utility functions that earned them the term "jeeps".
But I digress.  Great story, well-told, of the ships that sank during the storm and the ships that did not, and why.  The authors eventually somewhat reluctantly conclude that blaming Halsey is only justifiable in hindsight.  He simply did not have sufficient information for his actions to definitively be labeled as negligent.  Certainly he made numerous mistakes and could have done better, but in the end, the losses of the various ships seem to have been attributable to their commanders' faults and flawed decisions, made with full knowledge of their ship's seakeeping defects - in each case defects that had been magnified, if not caused, by the addition of topside weight (in the form of additional weapons and equipment).  Halsey didn't know he was sailing the fleet directly into a typhoon.  Those ships' captains knew the faults in their ships and their either knew or should have know what they needed to do to preserve their ships in such a storm.  They did not do enough, soon enough - that much was clear.  In contrast, captains such as those of the destroyer escort Tabberer that not only weathered the storm but began rescue operations during it, and continued them in spite of orders from Halsey to rejoin the fleet (Halsey didn't know what the DE was doing, and revoked the order as soon as he learned).  Or that of the light carrier Monterey who likewise disregarded Halsey's directive to abandon his ship when it was afire from wrecked aircraft in its hanger deck, and send Lt. Jerry Ford below with a firefighting team to put the fire out.
I knew little about this episode before this book, and it is a story I really enjoyed hearing.

Now Hear This: The Story of American Sailors in World War II - Edwin P. Hoyt

This book is supposed to be not a narrative of the naval war, but instead a series of stories reflecting the life and experiences of American sailors in World War II.  Thus while the stories are essentially in chronological order, they don't follow traditional dramatic arcs, where players enter the scene, fight a grand battle, then exit, and you rarely see what happens before or after.  It's far more common for the story to follow a sailor from enlistment through various postings - perhaps a battle or two, or maybe not - then on to the next story ending up with returning home after the war.  There is a greta deal of tedium, minutiae, and lack of understanding of what is going on or the part the sailor is playing in the war.  In other words, you get a far better understanding of what life was like for the average sailor.
What the book offers a useful perspective, it really isn't much of a story, and Hoyt has to add a lot of context to what's happening which provides what little overall structure the book has.  But when he does that, you lose the day to day sailor's perspective of what's happening, so there is a constant tension between immersing yourself in the tedium of the sailor's life and understanding the overall context of the war.  It's a useful book - but not a particularly interesting one.

How They Won the War in the Pacific: Nimitz and His Admirals - Edwin P. Hoyt

I've been looking forward to reading this book for some time.  It's perhaps somewhat dated by now, as it was originally released in 1970, but it's still a good summary of the story of the Pacific War from the perspective of the admirals who fought it.  It shows Nimitz as the clear-headed leader that kept all the egos and agendas from pulling the war efforts in the Pacific apart, and explains what he did and why involving the promotion and assignment (and reassignment) of admirals during the conflict.
It may be because it predates some better research - I don't know - but I found Hoyt's explanation of some controversial episodes insightful.  He was fair to Admiral Fletcher at Midway and especially at Guadalcanal (he's not so fair in a later book I'm reading) and makes Leyte Gulf a lot clearer by explaining that far from abandoning the invasion fleet at Leyte, Admiral Halsey was never charged with protecting it if an opportunity to attack the Japanese fleet presented itself.  Whether he should have been so charged is really the question, and strangely enough, the blame here actually might have been Nimitz'.  Hoyt relates the story of how Nimitz' son, a sub commander, happened to be at CincPac when Leyte occurred, and when he read what Halsey's orders were, he told his father that the blame lay with his father for not charging Halsey with protecting the invasion fleet - Halsey did exactly what his orders told him to do (although he was at fault for not making clear what he was doing, which Hoyt explains was an example of Halsey's chronically bad staffwork).  Historians seem to assume that he should have, but that job was actually assigned to the Seventh Fleet, not Halsey's Third, and was just another by-product of the divided command structure that caused problems (which you are actually surprised weren't worse)  of having dual commands in the Pacific - Nimitz and MacArthur.  This book, by the way, illustrated those proiblems better than anything else I have read, surprisingly including E.B. Potter's Nimitz, which came out at about the same time as this book.

Days of Infamy - Newt Gingrich & William Forstchen

This book really, really ticked me off.  I'm in the Houston airport yesterday and I see this book about an alternative history to the days after Pearl Harbor.  The "alternative" is Japanese Navy commander in chief Yamamoto Isoruko personally commanding the strike on Pearl Harbor and deciding to send in a third strike on Pearl Harbor, which destroys the U.S. Pacific Fleet's fuel supplies, communications, and drydock facilities.  He then hangs around to try to locate and destroy the U.S. carriers Enterprise and Lexington.  Such a strike would have been far worse for the U.S. Navy than the destruction of the battle line in the first two strikes, as this book makes clear.  I didn't realize till after I finished this book today (your first hint that I liked it) that the third strike actually occurs in the authors' Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8th, but as reader and sometime author on Pacific War topics, I was immediately interested in a book that posited the worst-case scenario for the Navy after Pearl Harbor (no fuel, communications or repair facilities, and an opponent led by a commander who was willing to fight) and relied on the Enterprise and Lexington - far and away this carrier enthusiast's favorite ships - to save the day.
As much as it infuriated me to buy a book by someone whose political views (at least some of) I dislike as much as I do Gingrich's (although we have similar historical tastes and I'd actually really like to have a beer with the guy and talk history), not to mention to endure what I assumed would be the political lecturing the book would contain (which was admittedly substantially tempered by my knowing that Gingrich thinks a lot of FDR) I just couldn't stand not reading about my beloved Enterprise and Lexington duking it out with the Japanese fleet.  Maybe the Lexington would even survive!
To my surprise, the book was very, very good.  It started out a little florid with FDR's internal thought processes having to lay out the situation, but quickly settled into a good solid narrative.  It's uniformly well-written, and the authors are true - often painfully so - to the realities of what would have happened if the U.S. carriers had tried to pit their inexperienced aviators, with inadequate aircraft, and  often worthless (literally) ordnance against the finest carrier fleet in the world.  The pilots and crew facing almost insurmountable odds lose their bravado very quickly, and even the best toy with the idea of simply not going out to face almost certain death one more time.  The accuracy of the fictional narrative and the quality of the writing made this a very good read indeed.  The authors didn't flinch from the unpleasant reality of what would have happened if either carrier had tried to engage the Japanese, and as a result when you finish the book you feel like you have a good idea what really would have happened.  One comment about the conversations between the political leaders.  Reviewers of the previous book thought they weren't very good - I thought they were actually okay - and I particularly liked (oddly enough) the political background that was provided.  It was probably something FDR continually thought about that his War and Navy secretaries were Republicans - the party which had been isolationist - and that they'd worked previously for cousin Teddy when he was president.  And until the very end the book is - I have to admit - completely bereft of any political commentary or analogies to the present day.  At the very end some of Yamamoto's thoughts that the U.S.'s war leadership might be made to dissolve into political infighting by reversals in the war can be read as applied to the current situation in Iraq, but they are also accurate to the man and to his nation's foreign policy at the time, which depended on such an outcome.
The factual narrative appears to be helped by an awareness of recent scholarship on the Pacific War, specifically the Lundstrom's Black Shoe Carrier Admiral and Parshall and Tully's Shattered Sword, which of which I have reviewed on my weblog recently.  Both sides - but particularly the Americans - are constantly worrying about fuel, with the Americans horrified that the wartime usage rates are far worse than what they'd planned on.  But it is Yamamoto that consistently takes risks with this issue - and the book doesn't go far enough in time to finish the story of whether he pays a price for it - although that could certainly start the next book in the series with a bang.  The significance of fuel as a concern for fleet commanders is something we are only recently beginning to fully understand, and this book includes it, as it should.
The book does have a number of failings, however, all of which I track back to a need for additional editing, as well as a more thorough historical scrubbing.  First of all, while the narrative was almost uniformly very good, there were times that the narrative dropped in facts that were not apparent to the viewpoint of the person whose experience was being narrated, thus damaged the "you are there" feel unnecessarily.  The best example I can think of is when the destroyer Ward is hit while executing a torpedo attack on a Japanese battleship, the story is told from the perspective of the admiral on the bridge.  While I think it's okay to point out that the ship then took a fatal hit, it isn't okay to observe that its valiant heart was stopped, and only twenty of its crew survived.  That's probably an accurate observation - but not where it is included.  There are some florid touches, as I mentioned, but not nearly what you'd expect.  And the references to a character losing a hand on the Panay are repeated three times on two pages - I think we got the picture the first time.  Those sorts of editing and continuity issues crop up, albeit only occasionally.
Several other historical errors - admittedly all (remarkably) minor are present.  For example, the Enterprise air boss is Wade McCluskey, not McCloskey, as he's repeatedly named.  The error is noticeable to readers, since six months later (in the real war) McCluskey, as Enterprise CAG, is the pilot who locates the Japanese fleet at Midway.  The mounts on the Enterprise's bow were not 40mm until late 1943 - they were 20mm in 1942 and at this time I'm not sure they were there at all, and even if they were they were likely only .50 cals.  More egregious was the reference to the Lexington (and perhaps the Enterprise too - the narrative is unclear) having giant hull numbers painted on the deck.  Such numbers didn't come into use until  late 1943.   The cover photo as well, while an ingenious computer enhancement (flipped and bow wave added) of a well-know picture of the Lexington in late 1942, is also not only inaccurate as to the Lexington's starboard side, it's also the wrong camouflage for December 8, and misses using a picture of the Lexington that is from exactly the same angle, with the right camouflage and a bow wave already present - in other words it used the lower instead of the upper of the attached images from p. of the Warships Pictorial #11 on the Lexington class carriers.    (Admittedly the captions to the attached aren't clear as to which camo is later, but when you look at pictures of the camo being painted over in March 1942 it's clear that the Ms. 12 two-color scheme had to be the later one).  All of these could have been corrected with a little more editing, and probably no one except me, who's studied these sorts of things in detail for books and modelmaking purposes would notice. 
The most important thing about these errors is probably how minor they are - the plot, the characters, the factual detail, what the characters do is all so well handled that it's nitpicking to complain about any of it.  None of it detracted from the story, certainly.
In the end, I thought this was a really good book, and I am looking forward to reading the next installment.  I might even go back and pick up the first one.  And for a book by Newt Gingrich, that's really saying a lot. 

Fredericksburg trip - Hangar Hotel & Nimitz Musem

A couple of weeks back I had a bar association meeting in Fredericksburg, Texas.  We stayed at the Hangar Hotel, which is literally a hotel inside an old hangar at the airport.  It, and the adjacent conference center and diner which are built inside what is supposed to look like a hangar, are both World War II themed, and the whole experience was like watching the menu for the Pearl Harbor DVDs which, if you know me, is a good thing.
I also made my first trip to the Nimitz Museum (now the National Museum of the Pacific War) in fifteen years, and was really impressed with the new exhibits.

The Price of Admiralty - John Keegan

I've been looking forward to reading this book for some time, and finally started on my trip to Houston just before our Alaska trip, then finished it just now in the Wheelhouse Lounge on the Island Princess as it entered Glacier Bay.
Back to the book.  Keegan illustrates the history of war at sea (he never really explains the title) using four battles, Trafalgar, Jutland, Midway, and the Battle of the Atlantic (specifically two convoys' struggles against U-boats in March 1943), and ends with a quick conclusion that the submarine is the naval weapon of the future.
His summary of the background on navies - originally created to protect a nation's trade fleets from pirates, and only later used to assert national primacy over a conmperting nation's fleet of warships - is a good and something I didn't know.  His lead-in to Trafalgar and analysis of the battle itself was very good, especially since I knew virtually nothing about the battle itself (after all, Hornblower wasn't there).  The chapter on the Battle of Jutland was also quite good, although Massie's analysis of it in Castles of Steel (the followup to one of my all-time favorites Dreadnought).  But when he got to Midway, factual errors started creeping in.  There was the almost standard provision of a photograph of the wrong Yorktown, and while he narrowly got right that the Army B-17s that attacked Nagumo's fleet did no damage, he mistakenly asserts that the U.S submarine Nautilus sank the damaged carrier Soryu, something no historian I'm aware of in the last forty years has claimed (Price of Admiralty came out in 1989).  While it isn't surprising that his analysis doesn't have the insights that Shattered Sword provided (although he tracks parts of what their analysis that I've never seen anyone else do) the analysis of Midway is still a bit off, and inexplicably his bibliography doesn't cite Walter Lord's seminal Incredible Victory, which came out over 20 years before.  Granted that's my all-time favorite work of nonfiction so I'm perhaps a bit biased, but how he could publish a book on Midway and not even cite it as a source is inexplicable to me.  He could disagree with it - Shattered Sword certainly did and I agree with it, but not even citing it perhaps led to the Nautilus/Soryu errors, as well as others.
Finally, the chapter on the U-boat battles is just narrative, and while well-told, it was just a snapshot of the seesaw battle that went on from 1939 to 1945.  And the hasty postscript that "submarines are the ultimate weapon" seems almost as dated as the prior assumptions that battleships and carriers were.  While I can't say I disagree that subs are a necessary part of any navy - assuming you don't have the national resources to operate a carrier fleet as well - I think that both carriers, subs and surface fleets have benefits, and which is better depends on who you are and what you have to contend with.  In short, your options are a lot better if you have a five billion dollar carrier task force hanging around (which necessarily requires another two task forces in bases refitting for their turn, and several other trios in other parts of the world).  I am probably judging the book with hindsight because Keegan was writing during the Cold Ward, when a substantial Soviet fleet was opposed to the U.S. Navy, and the problem was far more acute then than now, when there is in effect no other naval power that could compete with the U.S.
Anyway, I did enjoy the book and would recommend it.  I just think the premise is a bit dated, and the Midway section (which is all I have outside expertise on) has a few errors.
In the end, I think the book might better have ended with Jutland and contrasted it with Trafalgar, because that was to me the best analysis the book had.

The Battle of Leyet Gulf - H.P. Willmott

En passant.  En passant.  En passant. 
The most memorable pat of this book is the author's inexplicable use of this phrase (which he never translates for the reader) over and over and over throughout the book - sometimes twice on a single page.  While it may be useful to note that something is said "in passing" it is sympomatic of the book's serious disregard for readability.  I reread the first sentence at least half a dozen times trying to figure out what the author meant - and the firts paragraph at least three times.  Paragraphs go on for nearly a page more often that not, and the author's comments, such as "no further comment is necessary" leave you completely lost as far as what he meant - did he agree with the statement or disagree with it?  Add to that that the author clearly intends the book to be not a dispassionate account of a very complex battle but a highly opinionated retelling, and you have a very difficult to decipher book.  (Another problem I had was with the repeated use of the phrase "the waters that washed..." The first time I read it in reference to a place I thought it was a great phrase - but the author used it at least six times - that's a vanity that no editor should have permitted).
Let me say that I don't object to the opinionated nature - I just can't always tell what his opinion is, due in part to the snarky way he writes.  I can tell generally what he thinks about Halsey (and especially MacArthur) and I agree, but at innumerable places he tosses off a sarcastic bon mot than I am just unsure I am correctly interpreting.
Halfway through the book, I realized what the problem really is.  The book is hard to understand when read - but it would be clear as a bell - and probably very entertaining - if read aloud by the author.  Most of the problems stated above would be solved if I could consider tone of voice.  Sarcasm is rare in historical writing, and hard to evaluate on the written page.
The above aside, the book obviously reflects a tremedous amount of research and provides a useful resource for basic data on the battle, and I like the way the author identifies the conventional view of something and then sets forth a little-known fact or theory about it - but it's never clear whether he's debunking a belief because it deserves to be debunked, or just out of pleasure at debunking something.  As subjective as the book's judgments are, it's just not a reliable source for these newly-stated beliefes, in my opinion, because the author doesn't demonstrate a thorough understanding of the status quo of historical scholarship before taking issue with it (Shattered Sword being the gold standard in this area).  I'm not questioning that he has it - I'm just saying that he didn't show it before he explains why it is wrong.
The appendices and footnotes are good, although in my opinion the maps ought to reflect the same level of detail as the text (what's the point of explaining something happened between A and B near the C creek when the maps don't show it) and ought to be somewhere useful - not all collected at the end.
Bottom line is that in my opinion the book needed a serious editing - at least a third of it needed to go, and the author needed to be forced to back up his opinions and write in a more readable fashion.  And ditch the repeated metaphors and en passants.

War at Sea - Nathan Miller

I got this book and Hough's The Longest Battle at about the same time and read the Hough first.  As I indicated in that post, I was disappointed in that book, primarily due to the ending.  This book was well written and while it didn't have the detail on the Atlantic war that Hough had (which excelled in explaining the Mediterranean war at sea, including the significanec of Malta) it was better balanced overall and was a uniformly good read.  It had some occasional opinionated statements (primarily dealing MacArthur's insistence on retaking the Philippines) that, while I agreed with them, were far too black and white for a serious history.  But overall a good overview of the war at sea.  Although I learned things from both books - I have to admit one isn't a complete substitute for the other.

Essex Class carriers - Andrew Faltum

Just finished )finally) this 1996 book about Essex class carriers.  Coincidentally, it was released in 1996, the same year as my book Essex Class Carriers in action.  It's taken me a while to get around to it, probably in part because I was afraid I'm find mistakes in mine!

I found it to be a very good book - a good overview of how a carrier works, of the battles the ships fought in, and a excellent source of reference information on the class (the appendices are outstanding).  There were many little tidbits I didn't know.  The combat history bounces between large issues and detail quite a bit, but usually with a good reason.  One thing I particularly liked was the way this book made clear that the carriers didn't just walk all over the Japanese in 1944 - the Japanese planes fought back, and the carriers spent a lot of time actively destroying targets, and losing planes and taking damage the entire time.  That they were able to succeed had a lot to do with their numbers - only massed as they were were they able to provide sufficient fighter cover as the war progressed to keep the fleet intact.  Even with better ships and planes, they were still not able to defeat the Japanese by as much as I'd thought.

The book does have one defect, however, and that is poor photographic coverage of the class.  It does have many very good pictures, but they are reproduced so small that they're difficult to learn anything from - and a substantial number are clustered together late in the book so there is one of each ship, but taken at no particular point in the ship's history.  That the pictures are not large isn't unusual, but it is extremely annoying to see all the white space around the photos. 

But this is a very good book, and a useful part of the library of anyone wanting to know more about the Essex class.