Leading off is Michael Palmer's Command at Sea: Naval Command and Control since the Sixteenth Century. In it, Palmer analyzes the evolution of naval fleet command and control starting with the English Navy's battles against the Spanish Armada. The essence of the book is the struggle of two opposing philosophies of naval (and military) command: the centralizers versus the decentralizers. The author takes as his benchmark the guidance and techniques used by Rear Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson in his classic action at the 1801 Battle of the Nile, where he waged a battle of annihilation against the fleet of French Vice Admiral François Paul Brueys.
Present there, in conflict, were the prevailing theories of battle. The Frenchman favored a theory scientifically controlled from above, using preplanned maneuvers and a well-developed set of signals, in which subordinates would execute the plan in obedience to orders. The captains of the British fleet, having absorbed Nelson's carefully taught doctrine emphasizing the initiative of the subordinate, knew they should not expect to see flags signaling what they were to do. Nelson was willing to accept a certain amount of confusion, disorder, and even chaos in battle because he trusted his commanders to do what was expected of them. The main idea was that if trained ship commanders knew what to expect, they could prevail even in the "fog of war," where uncertainty is a constant. In Palmer's view, this is still the main principle for success in battle.
Despite revolutionary improvements in communications, the central crisis of command remains. In fact, the impact of steam-driven ships, heavy armor, steam torpedoes, breech-loading guns, gas-turbine engines, and ship-launched missiles have accelerated the need for rapid command decisions and greatly reduced the time required to make them. By the same token, the advent of the telegraph, submarine cables, wireless telegraphy, and satellite communications have only enhanced the naval commander's worst nightmare: the tendency of headquarters staffs that are out of touch with local conditions to micromanage the battle space.
Command at Sea is deeply researched and written concisely and with flair. Moreover, the author's opinions are not hidden. This is an essential book for the libraries of Navy officers, policy makers, naval scholars, and military history buffs.
Next up is a classic reference work, Volume 11 of the Naval Historical Center's Naval Documents of the American Revolution. This long-awaited tome deals with the period January through March 1778 and includes documents drawn from both the Atlantic and European theaters of war, selected from an enormous variety of sources from state and private archives in the United States and Europe. Two-thirds of the selected documents are drawn from American archives, covering roughly 855 pages, while the European documents cover 339 pages.
To ease access to these papers, the editors have provided a complex index of 166 pages. This volume has 30 illustrations, including end sheets that exhibit the lines of the Continental Navy frigates Virginia and Randolph. Michael J. Crawford, current editor and head of the center's Early History Branch, and his staff must be congratulated for the broad scope and excellent quality of their scholarship in providing us with these essential documents.
Recent years have brought to light renewed interest in the life of Commodore John Paul Jones, whose career embellished the brief existence of the Continental Navy. We now have retired Rear Admiral Joseph F. Callo's John Paul Jones: America's First Sea Warrior. Scotsman John Paul immigrated to America when it was still a colony. His arrival in the future United States coincided with the outbreak of rebellion and the drive for independence from Britain. He assumed the generic surname Jones and began climbing the career ladder in the new Continental Navy. Not that this was an easy task; rewards for merit were rare in an age of privilege, rank, and seniority. Jones understood that ship-to-ship engagements, however rewarding, were not enough. His capture of HMS Drake and the raids on the British seacoast made the British aware of their vulnerabilities despite having the most powerful navy in the world.
The following year, Jones' Bonhomme Richard and his squadron of American and French ships raised the alarm along the Firth of Forth before his encounter with HMS Serapis. The Battle off Flamborough Head immensely raised his reputation and that of the Continental Navy. Honors and recognition came his way, particularly from the French.
From this point on, however, events did not go entirely his way. He was not made an admiral in the United States, nor was anyone else for that matter. Nonetheless, he had set the standard of professional behavior for American naval officers in both his deeds and written words. For Admiral Callo, Jones' drive for success represents a quest for liberty for himself and his adopted nation. His treatment of the naval officer raises him to the level of one of the America's founding fathers, and a good number of naval-minded people might agree. This book is highly recommended for a succinct and accurate account of our first sea warrior.
Leaping into the 20th century, we have two revisionist works that seek to overturn the perceived wisdom of the past 50 years on World War II. One is John B. Lundstrom's Black Shoe Carrier Admiral: Frank Jack Fletcher at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal. Lundstrom's goal is to rehabilitate Admiral Fletcher's World War II career. The second book, Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully's Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway, is, if anything, even more controversial in that the authors dare to contradict several well-established historians in retelling and reanalyzing the Battle of Midway from the Japanese perspective.
Both of these books are large (more than 600 pages), detailed works demanding the reader's close attention. They are complimentary to a certain extent because Admiral Fletcher provides a linkage. He was the central figure in the early battles of the Pacific war. From the attempted relief of Wake Island through the Coral Sea and Midway battles and the invasion of the Solomons, Fletcher was the man on the scene who executed the decisions to attack, stay, or withdraw his carrier task force. With regard to Wake, Vice Admiral William S. Pye recalled the relief force, Task Force 14, led by Fletcher. For many years, Fletcher's critics have maintained that he should have turned a blind eye to Pye's order and pushed ahead with the relief plan. But had Fletcher violated that order he would have put TF 14 and the Saratoga (CV-3) at risk at a time early in the war when the U.S. fleet could have ill-afforded their loss.
At the Battle of the Coral Sea, Fletcher was more in control of events and knew more about the intentions, capabilities, and disposition of enemy forces. With a Japanese task force heading for Port Moresby and the enemy's strategic objective being the cutting of the U.S.-Australia line of communications, it was vital for Fletcher's Task Force 17 (USS Yorktown [CV-5]) and Admiral Aubrey Fitch's Task Force 11 (USS Lexington [CV-2]) to force a showdown. This they did despite shortages of fuel and sparse information as to the location of enemy forces.
In the final analysis, Japan suffered a strategic defeat in that its attempt to take Port Moresby and establish control of the Coral Sea failed. Further, the loss of the light carrier Shoho, damage to the heavy carrier Shokaku, and the loss of a large number of planes and pilots meant that these assets would not be available for the attack on Midway. For these reasons, despite the loss of the Lexington and damage to the Yorktown, Lundstrom rejects the idea that Coral Sea was a tactical defeat for the U.S. Navy.
In discussing Fletcher's role as senior task force commander at the Battle of Midway, many observers have criticized or only faintly praised the admiral while highly praising Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance, another non-aviator battle-group commander. Lundstrom points out that Task Force 17, based on Fletcher's flagship Yorktown, was better handled and more effective than Spruance's Task Force 16. He has in mind, among other things, Rear Admiral (select) Marc Mitscher's command, the USS Hornet (CV-8), and the failure to coordinate her squadrons' attacks and wastage of her pilots and planes in inadequate search patterns. There is no doubt that the Hornet's torpedo squadron directly found its way to glory, but the fighter and bombing squadrons that should have supported the TBDs in a coordinated attack never found their targets that day. What the senior leadership (Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King) may have held against Fletcher was the loss of the Yorktown, another favorite of the prewar Navy. Still that gallant ship and her crew did their job, sharing in the sinking of the four Japanese carriers on 4 June 1942.
The other major episode covered in Lundstrom's book is Fletcher's handling of his task force off Guadalcanal during the invasion of that island and the nearby islands Ndeni and Tulagi. Admiral King had given Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley overall strategic command of the South Pacific Area. Fletcher commanded Task Force 61, the expeditionary force that included three carrier task forces-11, 16, and 18. It was all-important that this operation pre-empt a similar move by the Japanese. The major issue in the U.S. plan was the degree to which Admiral Fletcher could afford to expose his primary task force to the enemy's attacks while he defended the landings during the buildup of American forces. Admirals King and Chester W. Nimitz had expressed their concern about a prolonged presence (more than two days) that would surely lure the Japanese in for an attack on the carriers.
During the days after the landings, the Japanese began their aggressive surface attacks and in successive night actions severely punished the relatively inexperienced American surface forces. They also interrupted the landing of Marines and supplies that were the immediate responsibilities of Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, the amphibious commander, and Marine Major General Archer Vandergrift. In the years that followed, the Marine Corps, Admiral Turner, and others produced a wealth of criticism of Fletcher, in particular, for leaving them undefended.
In Lundstrom's opinion, historians Samuel Eliot Morison and Fletcher Pratt were unfair and biased in their evaluation of Fletcher's leadership in the early battles of the South Pacific. Lundstrom adduces in great detail Fletcher's reasons for the withdrawal of his task forces for fueling and tactical defense. Those who have accused this admiral of being overly prudent (cowardly) should especially read this book. Lundstrom does not whitewash Fletcher, but he does set the record straight.
Parshall and Tully, meanwhile, have written a massive revision of the Battle of Midway as told by Japanese sources. It is a fascinating, detailed account, with critical comments on two generations of American historians who did not have the access or Japanese language skills to have done what they did. They also came down hard on Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okuyima's account, Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan (published in Japanese in 1951 and in English in 1955). Commander Fuchida was Carrier Division 1's air group commander, an expert naval aviator, and close adviser to Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo during the attack. The authors claim that Fuchida's account was "unfaithful" to the record and that he "did not tell the truth" since he had a personal interest in how the battle would be portrayed and understood.
Fuchida was writing for public consumption in order to counter criticism that had begun to mount in Japan after the war. The authors' point is that Fuchida's version created what American historians understood to be the way in which the Japanese fought the battle. But these historians, with a few exceptions, did not understand the Japanese military culture and the Japanese Navy's "way of war." Much of the 600 pages in this volume is spent informing us on the differences in the way the Japanese constructed their warships, the details of their aircraft and weapons systems, the way they organized combat air patrols, and the fact that they held their reserve squadrons in the hangar decks of their carriers, not on the flight decks. They deny that the American task forces at Midway faced "overwhelming Japanese force" because those enemy forces active in the Pacific to coordinate with the attack on and invasion of Midway were too widespread to support Nagumo's striking force when he was in danger. The virtue of Shattered Sword is that, aside from the internecine arguments about which historians are right or wrong, Parshall and Tully have opened an entirely new chapter of writing on the Battle of Midway by bringing to light more Japanese sources and interpretations than were previously available to most historians of World War II.
Turning from carrier battles to submarine warfare in the Pacific, a subject nearly ignored until recently is the World War II service provided by U.S. subs based in Australia. From the principle bases of Fremantle and Brisbane, American and other Allied submarines sortied to attack Japanese merchant and naval ships active in the South China Sea, the Philippines, the Sea of Japan, the Solomon Islands, and the islands of the Indonesian archipelago. With U.S. Subs Down Under, Brisbane, 1942-1945, two Australian authors, David Jones and Peter Nunan, have concentrated on the lesser-known of the two bases.
At the onset of the war the U.S. Navy had 23 modern fleet-type submarines positioned in the Pacific and six smaller, older S-class boats. The latter were of World War I-era design, with shorter range, outdated equipment, and poor habitability. One of Admiral King's first moves to reinforce U.S. allies in the Pacific and to defend the United States-Australia line of communications was to send Captain Ralph W. Christie with the submarine tender USS Griffin (AS-13) and Submarine Squadron 5 to the Australian east coast port of Brisbane, a city of about 350,000. Brisbane had good port facilities and a dry dock that could accommodate the U.S. subs. Christie's S-boats and the tender arrived after a long voyage in March 1942. Five other S-boats had escaped from their Philippine Islands base at Cavite and made passage to Fremantle, on Australia's west coast. With their short range inadequate for war patrols from Fremantle, it made more sense to shift these boats to keep company with the other S-boats and share the services of the Griffin in Brisbane. All but one of these subs went to action stations in the Battle of Coral Sea.
As time went by, the fleet submarines of Sub Squadron 2, formerly of Fremantle, joined the S-boats in Brisbane. When the war intensified in the Solomon Islands, both fleet- and S-boats were put to the test against the aggressive tactics of the Japanese Navy. Before September 1942, the Navy Department decided the S-boats had made their contribution but were worn out, ill equipped, and had to be replaced by the newer fleet boats.
Jones and Nunan flesh out the story of the submarines and their Sailors in Brisbane with descriptions of submariners on liberty, warm relations with Australians, the gradual buildup of the port, the arrival of more boats and tenders, and the change of command, replacing Captain Christie with Captain James Fife Jr. They also relate the stories of Lieutenant Commander C. C. Burlingame and the USS Silversides (SS-236) and Lieutenant Commander D. W. "Mush" Morton in the USS Wahoo (SS-238), both of whom were, for a time, based in Brisbane. As the war moved north in early 1945, the submarine base closed, sending boats, tenders, men, and equipment to Subic Bay in the Philippines. The authors have done a solid job of research and narrative history, bringing the submarine base at Brisbane gracefully into the historiography of the Pacific war.
An intriguing history of a later war, one neither as popular nor as successful from an American point of view, is the subject of Douglass H. Hubbard's Secret Agent Vietnam: A Naval Intelligence Memoir. This is a partial account of what a few officers and enlisted men and some two dozen civilian naval intelligence officials did to help prosecute the war in Vietnam. It begins with a foreword by Rear Admiral Thomas A. Brooks, a former director of naval intelligence who served in-country during the Vietnam War and figures briefly in the narrative. The author has presented us with a collection of previously unpublished materials, largely gathered through recorded oral interviews with former special intelligence agents, many with previous law enforcement or intelligence backgrounds.
Hubbard was, as he states, "the youngest special agent to deploy to the Republic of Vietnam and the longest serving—from March 1969 to March 1972." The author attempted to obtain—through both Freedom of Information Act requests and by more informal means—documentation that he knew existed in government archives, but none was released. Thus, of necessity, the author's vignettes have come voluntarily from veterans of the Naval Counterintelligence Support Activity, Saigon, and the Naval Investigative Service Office, Vietnam. The actions narrated range from colorful descriptions of Saigon and up-country headquarters to accounts of assignments requiring dangerous helicopter rides to remote embattled areas and aircraft crash sites. Hubbard's and other agents' duties also included investigating such things as money laundering, postal fraud, rapes, drug dealing, murders, fragging incidents, attempted thefts of classified information, and the enemy sabotage of ships and aircraft.
As the war wound down, American morale plummeted, and the pace of their investigations increased, with far from enough investigative agents to do the jobs required. For anyone with curiosity about the quiet, unpublicized underside of war, this book is essential reading. It helps one understand the immense difficulties involved in waging a prolonged war in a foreign country surrounded by a largely alien environment.
From a rising naval officer's point of view Edgar F. Puryear Jr.'s American Admiralship: The Moral Imperatives of Naval Command may qualify as the most useful book of the year. A virtual handbook on how to succeed as a flag officer, it's full of advice from successful admirals, and occasionally generals. Former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James L. Holloway III wrote the foreword and a considerable number of anecdotes exemplifying situations he and his peers experienced in their tenure as top Navy leaders. Puryear's stated purpose was to "focus on the insights and thoughts of these senior naval leaders on why they personally believe they were successful leaders and how they analyze the success of other senior naval officers." In researching the book, the author relied heavily on oral histories. First, he consulted the reminiscences of flag officers collected through the Naval Institute's Oral History Program, established years ago by John T. "Jack" Mason Jr. Then Puryear interviewed retired naval flag officers, including those retired as recently as Admiral Jay L. Johnson (2000).
From these interviews, the author distilled the following principles of successful leadership: willingness to put service before self; the desire and strength of character to achieve positions that require making tough decisions; possession of a sixth sense that enhances the judgment required for sound decisions; an aversion to "yes men"; maturity in perception and judgment that comes from life-long professional reading; mentorship that reflects an understanding of the need to develop successors from among the most promising individuals under one's command; willingness to delegate authority in leadership; and true character, as in one who fixes problems rather than blaming a scapegoat when something goes wrong. Above all else is the ability to accept accountability for whatever happens on one's watch. To which all this reviewer can say is amen.
Command at Sea: Naval Command and Control since the Sixteenth Century
Michael A. Palmer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)
Naval Documents of the American Revolution, Volume 11
Michael J. Crawford, editor (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 2005)
John Paul Jones: America's First Sea Warrior
RAdm Joseph Callo, USNR (Ret.) (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006)
Black Shoe Carrier Admiral: Frank Jack Fletcher at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal
John B. Lundstrom (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006)
Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway
Parshall and Anthony Tully (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005)
Secret Agent Vietnam: A Naval Intelligence Memoir
Douglass H. Hubbard Jr. (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006)
U.S. Subs Down Under, Brisbane, 1942-1945
David Jones and Peter Nunan (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2005)
American Admiralship: The Moral Imperatives of Naval Command
Edgar F. Puryear Jr. (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2005)