The Lions of Iwo Jima: The Story of Combat Team 28 and the Bloodiest Battle in Marine Corps History
Major General Fred Haynes, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired), and James A. Warren. New York: Henry Holt, 2008. 288 pp. Illus. App. Notes. Index. $26.
Reviewed by Richard B. Frank
This terrific book is essentially a biography of the 28th Marines, 5th Marine Division, from the formation of the regiment under its exemplary leader, Colonel Harry Liversedge, through the maelstrom of the unimaginable, costly battle on Iwo Jima. While it draws from contemporary and secondary sources, it is enriched by numerous well-selected accounts from Marines of all ranks and especially the perspective of one of the coauthors, Major General Haynes, who served as the regiment's operations officer.
The Lions of Iwo Jima fills a niche in the wealth of literature on Iwo Jima between Bill D. Ross's superb overall account, Iwo Jima: Legacy of Valor (Vanguard Press, 1985), and the squad-level view of James Bradley's Flags of Our Fathers (Bantam Books, 2000). Two attributes set this narrative apart from other works on the battle. First, Iwo Jima was a vast and extended storming operation fought and won by squads and platoons. The perspective from regimental level provides a perfect balance between the overall situation and the real face of the battle as the Marines of all ranks who did the fighting and dying experienced it. Second, the authors pay homage to their adversaries with a rare, if not unique, complete chapter that provides a well-informed and insightful examination of the mindset of the Japanese who fought on Iwo Jima.
The 28th Marines trained relentlessly for its initial task of seizing Mount Suribachi. That training paid enormous dividends when the regiment encountered ferocious resistance on D-day. Despite severe casualties and the loss of many leaders, the 28th Marines knifed across the island just north of Suribachi and then began its reduction, culminating four days later in the two famous flag raisings. After a brief rest spell, the regiment went back into the line to break through the main defense belt at Hill 362A and Nishi Ridge. It then secured the dubious distinction of remaining in the line through the very last hours of the battle, in the fight at Bloody Gorge.
The authors speak wisely in an understated tone about the strategic background of the battle and the various controversies. One of the rare nitpicks about the text is that, perhaps due to excessive compression of events, it appears to attribute the idea of seizing Iwo to U.S. Fleet commander Admiral Ernest King, whereas the actual author was Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander-in-chief, Pacific Fleet. The authors also are careful not to overstate the number of American aviators whose lives were saved by landings on Iwo Jima, but they do answer challenges to the wisdom of the battle by correctly framing decisions in their contemporary context.
By interweaving both pointed and poignant accounts of the struggle, The Lions of Iwo Jima delivers not just a factual but also a sensory portrait of the savage battle. Because the Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, aimed not to win but to exact the greatest price in defeat, the Japanese fought not just with their customary tenacity but also with shrewd tactics. The overwhelming majority of Japanese fought and perished in hellish conditions underground. This left the Marines with the eerie sense that they were fighting the very terrain itself, not a human adversary.
The accumulated individual accounts carefully explore a host of timeless elements of war. In the forefront of these, however, stands the esprit de corps that sets the Marines apart, and the depth of their leadership. By the end of the battle, death and wounds had stripped the regiment of the majority of its company-grade officers and noncommissioned officers. Likewise, few of the original junior enlisted men remained at the front. As the authors candidly explain, the combat power of the regiment plummeted due both to the shortage of front-line strength and the fact that much of that strength consisted of replacements and impressed men from non-infantry assignments. The Lions of Iwo Jima magnificently conveys the human texture of the battle and honors all those who fought there.
The H. L. Hunley: The Secret Hope of the Confederacy
Tom Chaffin. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008. 258 pp. Notes. Bib. Index. $26.
Reviewed by John T. Kuehn
"Wall Street Meets Das Boot" might have made a more apt subtitle for Tom Chaffin's highly readable account of the H. L. Hunley. That's because the Confederate "submarine boat" was neither very much of a secret (as Chaffin shows) nor much of a hope for the Confederate government. Whose hope, one is tempted to ask? Well, the investors'. The intriguing newness that Chaffin brings to the saga of the first submarine to sink a ship has as much to do with money as it does with combat or patriotism. Chaffin's "show me the money" approach is more the tale of buccaneering investors and inventors looking for an easy buck than the story of a group of Rebel patriots who saw in this technology a weapon to lay the Yankee Navy and its maddening blockade low. This is not to say that patriotism and military progress did not play a role, but they were not initially the primary agents in the various submarines' conception, production, and deployment (there were actually two prototypes before the Hunley).
To Chaffin's credit, he tells his tale with great gusto, using a highly readable narrative style that evokes a sense that one is reading fiction. The heroes of this story are Horace L. Hunley, Baxter Watson, and James McClintock. These were the men most responsible for the development and deployment of the Hunley on the fateful night of 17 February 1864, when their technologic offspring sank the USS Housatonic in the vicinity of Charleston, South Carolina. In addition to telling us as much of the saga of the Hunley as it can, Chaffin's book has the added value of being very much a whodunit that considers the mysteries surrounding the loss of the Confederate vessel in the hour of her greatest (and only) triumph. In the process Chaffin also demolishes some of the longstanding myths that still surround the boat's demise.
This isn't dry history, and it's exceptionally well researched. There are still many gaps in the Hunley story, as Chaffin constantly points out in his text, but thanks to this book the most glaring of them seem to have been addressed rather conclusively. That's because four days before the Russian submarine Kursk tragically sank in 2000, the wreck of the Hunley was raised from its resting ground some 1,000 yards from where the Housatonic sank.
The last part of Chaffin's book reads like an episode of one of those crime-scene investigative TV shows, complete with a cold-case approach to the intervening yezars of theories before the Hunley was finally located in 1995. Archaeologists answer some questions, but they also raise as many as they answer. Chaffin makes clear that there are still mysteries to solve about the Hunley's last moments. Some will never be settled conclusively. As one would expect of a book of this type, the illustrations and photographs he has chosen complement the text nicely. I recommend this book to as broad an audience as possible—it's a page-turner.
Hell's Islands: The Untold Story of Guadalcanal
Stanley Coleman Jersey. College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 2008. 489 pp. Illus. Maps. Append. Bib. Index. $35.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Merrill L. Bartlett, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)
The seizure of Guadalcanal-Tulagi during the last half of 1942 arguably foreshadowed the defeat of the Japanese in the Pacific theater during World War II. While so much has been written about that epic struggle in the Solomon Islands, readers may question if anything new remains worthy to appear in print. After Richard B. Frank's Guadalcanal; John Toland's The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945; the official histories brought out by the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps; and the published memoirs by American veterans of Operation Watchtower, what else must be told about the epic seizure of the Solomons during the first year of the war in the Pacific?
To those who fought there, "Hell's Islands" seems an apt name; however, the Japanese also called Guadalcanal "Starvation Island." "Ga," the first syllable of Gadarukanaru—their name for Guadalcanal—means hunger. The latter name seems the more appropriate; at times, the Marines ate only two meals a day or fewer, while more Japanese soldiers died from starvation than as a result of enemy activity.
This book's subtitle trumpets that it provides untold tales of Guadalcanal. Jersey takes four chapters to recount the history of the Solomon Islands and the period between the opening salvos of the war in the Pacific and the American invasion, before he gets to D-day for the American amphibious force. While this history evolves with excruciating detail, it falls far short of the mind-numbing material in subsequent chapters. Much of this monograph consists of selected interviews or personal accounts cobbled together in a haze that often overwhelms the reader.
Jersey's strength lies in his use of Japanese sources. Unlike most of the accounts that have appeared in Western publications, Hell's Islands contains information from interrogation reports, letters, diaries, and interviews. But he frequently uses snippets of information without skepticism or by comparing them with other sources. As a result the line between fiction, journalism, and oft-told sea stories becomes blurred, and thus anecdote evolves into indisputable fact.
To his credit, Jersey includes additional information on the seizure of the islands adjacent to Guadalcanal. Most histories concerning what many Marine veterans are prone to call Operation Shoestring seem to dismiss the seizure of these small islands as footnotes to the main assault on Guadalcanal and its subsequent defense.
The publisher of Hell's Islands bears much of the blame for the monograph's flaws. The author would have been well served by having the services of a copy editor conversant with modern military and naval terminology. For example, artillery is organized into batteries, not companies; the Paramarines were not "chutes"; and Marines are never "troopers." The abbreviations for Navy enlisted ranks seemed to trouble the author and editors as well. Japanese names are written as family name first, followed by the given name. Furthermore, careful editing would have removed much of the narrative's tiresome passive voice, trite expressions, and repetitions. Hell's Islands begs for more maps, and in a larger format for those few that do appear. The photographs are too small and sometimes are poorly reproduced. Unforgivably, the galleys and page proofs appear not to have been scrutinized carefully. Using someone's rank, first name, middle initial, and last name each and every time it is mentioned becomes an irksome repetition.
Still, readers who want to read more about America's first significant amphibious salvo in the naval war against Japan will find an abundance of new information in Hell's Islands. Meanwhile, the earlier works by Frank and Toland remain the undisputed standards for serious students of Operation Watchtower.
The Metal Life Car: The Inventor, the Imposter, and the Business of Lifesaving
George E. Buker. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2008. 232 pp. Illus. Notes. Bib. Index. $29.95.
By Captain Robert F. Bennett, U.S. Coast Guard (Retired)
Joseph Francis, an accomplished inventor and purveyor of metal boats during the first half of the 19th century, is the focus of this two-part book. George Buker weaves two interconnected stories, detailing in the first the development of Francis' metal boats, their use in the Second and Third Seminole Wars, as well as his involvement with the U.S. Army before and during the Civil War. In the second tale, the author pits Francis against Douglass Ottinger, to determine the true inventor of the so-called life car.
The life car garnered accolades in the 1850s because shore-bound rescuers used the device to successfully save large numbers of people from ships stranded on the beaches along the approaches to New York Harbor. The life car was a smal—less than 12 feet in length—covered metal boat that rescuers hauled out to stranded vessels along a line shot to the ship. Its capacity was only three to five adults. Rescuers on the beach then hauled the life car and its occupants ashore to safety. After the Civil War, as transatlantic steam-propelled passenger ships replaced sailing packets, the number of strandings diminished and the life car declined in importance as a primary life-saving device.
Joseph Francis claimed to have invented his life car long before the Secretary of the Treasury assigned Captain Douglass Ottinger of the U. S. Revenue Marine to establish federal coastal rescue stations on the New Jersey coast between Sandy Hook and Little Egg Harbor. Ottinger's claim to fame was not as an inventor. But he was able to develop a cooperative means by which Francis' life car could best be employed. These efforts resulted in a hawser-based traversing system between stranded wreck and shore that could be deployed whenever the surf raged so high that no surfboat could survive. In this, the life car was amazingly successful.
Francis also manufactured metal surfboats. Over time, the verdict on his surfboat went from enthusiastic approval to distrusting condemnation. The first government version in 1849 had a wooden bottom to which the corrugated, galvanized metal sides were fastened. Because the wood shrank from the sides and leaked, his follow-on versions extended the metal hull continuously across the bottom.Final versions added a hardwood plank over the metal bottom. Francis blamed Ottinger for the original design. In 1869 Ottinger accused Francis of never supplying surfboats that conformed to the surfmen's "model." The problem with the Francis boats, besides being about twice the weight of cedar surfboats, was that iron and saltwater are incompatible. Today, the only surviving Francis surfboats are found on the freshwater Great Lakes.
Buker's research is carefully identified and presented, but his characterization of Ottinger as an impostor and description of his behavior as perfidious may disturb professional and amateur Coast Guard historians. Ottinger may have been a controversial figure; indeed, he appears unpopular among his Revenue Cutter Service peers. Revenue Cutter Service Captain Horatio D. Smith, in his definitive Early History of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service (R. L. Polk Printing Co., 1932), was unambiguous in his assessment. Writing of the 1839 use of Francis metal boats on the cutter Hamilton, Smith wrote, "The inventor was the celebrated Francis who also originated the well-known life car so extensively used in the Life Saving Service. Like thousands of other inventors the fruit of his brain failed to bring him the reward he so richly deserved, and others reaped the benefit of his genius."
Despite his loss of the Revenue brig Lawrence in 1851, Ottinger took command of the Revenue cutter Robert McClelland. His service on the Great Lakes and in New York and North Carolina during the Civil War resulted in positive acclaim. If anything, the antagonists were most alike in that their greatest virtue was not humility; both seem to have been accomplished spinners.
The few minor inaccuracies relating to local New Jersey coastal sites in the text are of little consequence. For those interested in the equipment and personalities of the Coast Guard's predecessor agencies, this book is a must read.