Puttering in the Study

Roosevelt's Navy: The Education of a Warrior President, 1882-1920 - James Tertis de Kay

This was a magnificent little book.  It focuses on Roosevelt's tenure as Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1919, ending with his nomination to the vice presidency in 1920.  It notes that from his earliest days in college he wanted to emulate the career path of his distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt, from Assistant Secretary of the Navy, to Governor of New York, to the White House, and follows his development as a young man and a young politician in Albany to Washington, where he saw firsthand the work necessary to prepare and lead a nation at war.

I have read numerous biographies of FDR, but none that expressly focused on the education he was receiving in playing a significant role in Pres. Woodrow Wilson's administration.  FDR's office was next to his chief, Sec. of the Navy Josephus Daniels and only a short walk across the street from the West Wing of the White House, where cousin Theodore had moved the president's administrative offices only a few years earlier. 

In fact the exterior of the West Wing shown in this picture I had taken on what is still called the Navy Steps is (despite extensive renovations during FDR's tenure) is still that that was there when FDR worked in Room 278 of what was called the State, War & Navy building (ignore the parapet FDR added - he was hoping Congress would) under Daniels.

The book is a very insightful analysis of FDR's decisionmaking process - good and bad - as a young politician, but its strength is pointing out the experiences he had that helped foreshadow what he would do as president when faced with similar challenges to those he saw Wilson face in 1914-1919. Of course at the time FDR was looking backwards towards his Uncle Ted's tenure in the office and how he could use the office to similarly promote his subsequent political career.  But what he took from the experience of watching Wilson would in the end play a much larger role in FDR's management of World War II and the creation of a postwar international organization.

One point I'd never seen mentioned before was when Roosevelt was confronted with the absolute need to arm merchant vessels in face of Germany's decision to begin unrestricted submarine warfare.  His problem was that the ships could not purchase the necessary ordnance, and the Navy could not provide it to them.  FDR's solution was to have the Navy "lend" the necessary ordnance to the civilian vessels.  Although Daniels and Wilson eventually decided against even this halfway measure (I think - on rereading I am not certain what happened to the proposal) it may have been in Roosevelt's mind over 20 years later when he came up with Lend-Lease.

Any treatment of FDR in 1916-1918 must include a treatment of his relationship with Lucy Mercer, but the book's is remarkably slender.  It spends less than four pages on the issue, but only because there is so little to draw conclusions from.  And because it bears little relationship to the larger issues the book is concerned with.  In the end, Roosevelt - confronted by his wife and his mother - reluctantly made the decision that stopped the relationship before it hampered his political career.  That he restarted it 25 years later is a subject for another book.

Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay - Craig L. Symonds

There hasn't been a comprehensive biography of Fleet Adm. Nimitz since Craig Symonds' mentor E.B. Potter wrote Nimitz in 1976 - and this isn't it either.  Instead, Symonds has written an account of Nimitz' command leadership during the Pacific War, leaving out, except where a look back is necessary, Nimitz' prewar career.

As a result, the book focuses on what readers are most interested in – what did Nimitz do during the war, why, and what effect did it have on the course of the war?

I am familiar with Symonds' prior work – I have read and listened to his book on Midway multiple times, as well as his his overall book on the history of the war at sea, and had the pleasure of meeting and conversing with him at length about Midway and Dick Best at the 2019 World War II symposium in New Orleans, where I brought first editions of all his books, which he was kind enough to sign.  I don't mean the battle of Midway, by the way – I mean the movie Midway where we compared impressions on the historical accuracy of the movie.  He was, as you might expect, less enthusiastic than I was, although I recall we both would have loved to see Dick Best's reaction to his movie portrayal. 

This is the point where I usually complain that I had a problem because I was reading the book at the same time I was reading another book on the same subject.  I didn't have that problem here – I'm actually watching Prof. Symonds' lectures on the Pacific war through a Great Courses program, so I had the benefit of hearing his voice as I was reading his words – it might as well have been an audiobook. 

But it is a very good addition to the literature on an extraordinary individual, and I highly recommend it.  The Potter book is good for background, but it was nice not to have to slog through the long peacetime career.

Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War - Paul Kennedy

This was my second read of this interesting little book.

Kennedy studies five problems that the Allies faced in World War II, from how to get convoys safely across the Atlantic, to winning command of the air, stopping a blitzkrieg, seizing and enemy-held shore, and defeating the "tyranny of distance".  He explains the role that engineers played in solving each of the problems. It's a good story - as usual it suffers when I am simultaneously reading other more global accounts of the war which slice the issue differently.  I think a reader who was not reading something else on the same subject at the same time would probably enjoy this more than I did.  As it was, I was reading parts of the same story in at least two and at times three books at the same time, which I am learning is not conducive to an enjoyable experience with the book

On the Double Build Road Again ...

This time it's a 1944 and 1969 USS Hornet (CV/CVS-12).  The former is pretty much an out of the box Dragon Essex (CV-9), which approximates Hornet's wartime appearance better than their Hornet does, actually. 

The latter is a heavily kitbashed Trumpeter Ticonderoga (CV-14).  At this point we've got the major hull and stern alterations done and new flight deck installed, and about half the gallery deck.  It's looking much more serious with the brand-new Model Monkey island.

I can already tell I messed up by adding the waterline plate - it doubles the problem of a kit that already had the ship a good six scale feet too far out of the water.  But it might be able to sand it down - and a thick boot topping stripe never killed anybody.  It also has me thinking about a water based - for a waterline model.  That might be fun ...

2021 Modeling Review - Four Essexes, Nine Aircraft and a 88mm

https://imodeler.com/2022/01/2021-modeling-review-four-essexes-nine-aircraft-and-a-88mm/

1/700 USS Randolph (CV-15) – August 1945

https://imodeler.com/2022/01/1-700-uss-randolph-cv-15-august-1945/

Leppla/Liska "Sail 12" SBD Dauntless – Battle of the Coral Sea

https://imodeler.com/2022/01/leppla-liska-sail-12-sbd-dauntless-battle-of-the-coral-sea/

Rereads: "Dune", "Declare", "Battle of Britain" and "Overlord" on Audible

I have recently noticed a tendency to reread books that I think I might enjoy - and more often, to start listening to them as audiobooks.  

Most recently, I decided to reread Frank Herbert's Dune in advance of the new film.  I knew I had not read it since the mid-'90s, and that reading had not been especially successful, I remembered. 

The new reading was a disaster.  I was completely unable to read the book without seeing the visuals of the 1984 David Lynch film which, although I love it, was definitely getting in the way of experiencing the novel.  I also could see the tendency to want to skip over narration to get to dialogue, and suspected I was missing important parts of the book as a result.  I could already tell that I was not able to absorb anything of the characters in the book that was not from the movie.

To try to get around this, I downloaded the audiobook and began listening to that.  I can't say that I liked the audiobook per se – dialogue was mostly narrated, but occasionally characters would come in and be voiced separately, and to my taste poorly - but what it did was eliminate any carryover from the earlier film and allow me to focus on what the book and the characters were actually saying.  It's like watching a play – the actor can be doing an inferior job, but it's still Shakespeare.  I did end up reading the last few chapters in the hardback version, but by that time the characters were almost completely divorced from the movie's incarnations.  And I was getting impatient.

While I was reading Dune, I also remembered that I really didn't think I had adequately understood Tim Powers' Declare the first time I read it, and had probably skipped over important parts looking for scenes that had more action or supernatural involvement.  So I got the book for that and listened to it over the next several weeks.  Again, I think I got a much better understanding of the book, as I was forced to listen to everything in it, and not skip over parts that seemed duller.  At least now I know that I actually listened to everything in the book, and didn't skip over any important parts.

The next book, James Holland's Battle of Britain I started in hardback with the copy that Mr. Holland inscribed for me at the World War II conference in 2019.  I had just finished building a new tool Airfix 1/72 Hawker Hurricane and was starting on a new-tool Spitfire and wanted to reread a good book on the subject.  Within a couple of chapters I realized that I was not able to read as much as I wanted in the limited time that I have to read in the study in the evening, and instead got the audiobook and listened to most of the book that way.  The individual accounts got a little tiring after a while, but it ended up being an efficient way of getting the book read.  The hardest part was that a substantial part of the book deals with the battle of France, and it is almost midway through before you get to Fighter Command engaging the Luftwaffe over Britain beginning in the late summer of 1940.  Which began to conflict with the next book I listened to ...

Finally, several years ago I listened to Max Hastings' Overlord because I wanted to read something about the actual D-Day landings.  This is not the best book for that – it focuses on the battle for Normandy instead, and is similarly full of individual accounts that are not exactly what I was looking for – but Hastings does eventually provide commentary and analysis on the major questions surrounding the campaign. 

Central here is British general Sir Bernard Montgomery.  It is pretty well agreed that Montgomery made major mistakes in how he characterized and promised his forces' activities from D-Day to the end of the campaign, but Hastings takes the position that there was in the end nothing lost as a result, because neither Montgomery nor Bradley could actually have done anything earlier than they did that would have generated a faster, or better result.  Hastings is adamant that no advance against the German forces could take place until they had been written down by weeks of attrition.  If you agree with this viewpoint – and it seems sound to me – then much of that heat directed at Montgomery is warranted, but in the end irrelevant.  (Something you can't say about the German leaders and generals' action, I note).  He overpromised and did not manage expectations regarding what he was actually going to be able to do, but in the end it is difficult to see how that had a negative effect on the final outcome.  Hastings even goes so far as to decline to call the failure to close the Falaise pocket an error that had any effect because he believes that even if the forces allotted had closed the pocket, the desperate German forces would have blown through them anyway.

That's what I was in the end looking for.  What were the actions taken, are they subject to criticism, and what effect would different actions have had.

 

Beans, Bullets, and Black Oil - The Story of Fleet Logistics Afloat in the Pacific During World War II - Rear Adm. Worrall Reed Carter

This is a digital reissue of a 1953 book issued by the Naval War College Press that tells the story of the floating logistics train that made the Navy's drive across the Pacific in World War II possible. 

I can't overstate how impressive a job this book does in detailing what the Navy started out with, and where it ended up.  The daunting challenge of providing logistical support to a fleet that never went back to Pearl Harbor after January, 1944 is detailed, and the author explains what the support arm did, and how it expanded to meet the challenges as the fleet grew and moved further, and further away from established bases on the West Coast and Hawaii.

I am him absolutely looking for a paper copy of this now.

The Royal Navy and the Battle of Britain - Anthony J. Cumming

It's rare someone takes issue with Winston Churchill's statement about the Battle of Britain that "[n]ever in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."  But this book does. 

Incidentally, according to Pug Ismay, Churchill's first attempt was "never in human history was so much owed by so many to so few."  Ismay asked "what about Jesus and his disciples"?  Churchill immediately added the qualifier "in the field of human conflict."

This 2010 US Naval Institute Press book takes issue with the credit given to the RAF fighter pilots for saving Britain from invasion after the fall of France, arguing that it was in fact the Royal Navy, and not Fighter Command that made an invasion of Britain impossible during the summer of 1940.  In fact many commentators include the RAF bomber pilots in "the few" since their spoiling raids on not just the cities of Germany, but on the German airfields in France and the buildup of barges for the cross channel invasion played a critical role in convincing Germany that an invasion was not possible. 

Where Cumming adds to the conversation is in his insistence that there is a blind spot when it comes to analyzing whether Germany could have in fact invaded Britain, and that is that the Royal Navy retained unquestioned control of the necessary waterways.  The situation was in fact analogous to the Napoleonic wars when Earl St. Vincent told the Board of Admiralty "I do not say, my Lords, that the French will not come.  I say only they will not come by sea."

But it was not in Britain's national interest to present itself to its potential savior the United States as impregnable and safe behind the unchallenged supremacy of the Royal Navy.  Instead, it was better served by presenting itself as in mortal danger, saved by young, handsome fighter pilots who were daily taking on the Luftwaffe and winning. 

But as Cumming points out, in many ways the RAF's fighters were not "winning".  They were unable to protect their own infrastructure, nor were they able to stop German bombers from attacking British cities that will.  What they were able to do was provide a stubborn defense on a daily basis which showed both Germany and the United States that Britain would not surrender, and could remain in the fight, albeit with American material aid.  While the terrible attrition that Fighter Command inflicted on the overstretched Luftwaffe would not be known for some time (it claimed more kills than it should have, but the actual effect of even roughly equal aircraft losses was catastrophic to the Luftwaffe in a way that was not known at the time).

While the book reflects a somewhat parochial interest, and is written with hindsight not available in 1940, when the advent of aerial bombardment and aerial assaults involving paratroopers made it unclear whether Britain was in fact safe from invasion, it does provide a useful additional insight into who actually should count among "the few".