Puttering in the Study

Warships After London: The End of the Treaty Era in the Five Major Fleets, 1930–1936 - John Jordan

This was an enlightening book.  It covers naval ship design following the second of the interwar naval arms limitations treaties, and explains why the treaty came out the way it did, and how it affected warship design in the late 1930s.  

Following the end of World War I, a major naval arms limitation treaty (Washington) resulted in the scrapping of large numbers of capital ships then under construction, and provided Britain, Japan, and the United States with the battle cruiser hulls, unusable for their original purpose, which became the first generation of large fleet aircraft carriers.  Some years later, a second round of arms limitation talks (London) resulted in a second set of limitations, which had a major impact on all countries' naval construction in the 1930s as they began to ramp up for a possible war.  

The book was very interesting in that it explained the differing strategies countries had for naval construction – for example France and Italy had very different needs, and had different ideas about the best way to allocate their limited shipbuilding tonnage.  Similarly, Britain, Japan and the United States experimented with different allocations of their tonnage based on which ships they believed would be most useful in the event of war.

It can be dry reading, especially when the book is discussing ships which did not play a role in World War II, but it is still interesting to see that there were different strategies surrounding naval construction during this period, and that all nations had false starts and design dead ends, with differing effects when the war began.

Captain McCrea's War: The World War II Memoir of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Naval Aide and USS Iowa's First Commanding Officer - John L. McCrea, Julia C. Tobey

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, which is a publication in book form of various writings and oral histories of Admiral McCrea.

The significance of this officer is that he served as naval aide to President Franklin Roosevelt throughout 1942, and subsequently as the first captain of the new battleship Iowa, in which capacity he carried his former boss to North Africa for conferences with Churchill and Stalin in late 1943.  I'm gathering references for a model of the Iowa during this trip, including the privacy screens on the first superstructure deck and the two elevators that allowed FDR to go up to the bridge levels, so it's interesting to read about the actual journey.

The book provides a great insight into Roosevelt's wartime White House, but with a couple of bonuses.  McCrea was charged with replicating Winston Churchill's map room in the White House, and selected a room on the ground floor next to the president's doctor's office.  I'm partial to this room, and it was one of the ones I asked to see when Jamie and I had a private tour of the mansion some years ago.  At that time its wartime use was commemorated by the map showing the Allied armies closing on Berlin on the day FDR died hanging over the mantel.  That's long gone, I understand, but the history's still there.  

He was also responsible for the creation of the presidential retreat Shangri-La in the nearby Maryland mountains, which would subsequently be renamed Camp David by President Eisenhower.

It is a very interesting story, and his stepdaughter did a good job of creating a narrative from the various sources available.  I highly recommend it to the reader interested in this interesting corner of World War II history.