Four Years on the Great Lakes, 1813-1816: The Journal of Lieutenant David Wingfield, Royal Navy
Edited by Don Bamford and Paul Carroll. Toronto, ON: Dundurn Group, 2009. 224 pp. Illus. Notes. Appens. Bib. Index. $28.99.
Reviewed by David Curtis Skaggs
Fourteen-year-old David Wingfield of Windsor, in Berkshire, England, enrolled in the Royal Navy in 1806 as a second-class volunteer. His early naval experience in the Napoleonic Wars involved action during the Copenhagen campaign of 1807 and blockade duty along the European coast from Spain to Denmark. Wingfield rose steadily to first-class volunteer, ordinary seaman, and midshipman before being reassigned to the Great Lakes Squadron in 1813. In 1828 he wrote a memoir of his North American experiences between 1813 and 1816, apparently compiled from notes. In 1932 this 68-page manuscript was donated to the Archives of Canada by a British descendant, and its publication allows a much wider audience to see the war from the perspective of a junior officer.
Some of the most interesting commentaries concern the Battle of Sackets Harbor, on 28 and 29 May 1813; the so-called Burlington Races, 28 September 1813; and the author's capture by the Americans and imprisonment from October 1813 to June 1814. After he was exchanged, Master's Mate Wingfield commanded gunboats at the headwaters of the St. Lawrence River, where he captured the same American lieutenant who had earlier captured him.
A high point of his lakes experience was service in HMS St. Lawrence, the largest sailing warship ever to ply Great Lakes waters. His close association with Commodore Sir James Lucas Yeo undoubtedly contributed to his promotion to a lieutenancy in February 1815.
The final third of the manuscript describes in detail Lieutenant Wingfield's 1815
16 service on Lake Huron, where he commanded HM Schooner Surprise, formerly the U.S. Navy's Tigress. This postwar narrative contains some of the most interesting descriptions of sailing from the foot of Georgian Bay to Mackinac and Drummond Islands through inclement and fair weather, of Native Americans gathering maple syrup, of exploring and mapping the previously undocumented shores of Georgian Bay and the North Channel, and of wintering in the hostile environment of the Nottawasaga River in western Ontario. For these efforts he received a lasting memorial by having an inlet on Bruce Peninsula named Wingfield Basin.This intrepid sailor has a tendency to write long, Latinized sentences, but one cannot forget some of his detail, his glimpses into the daily life of junior officers in a distant land, his tales of American kindnesses during his confinement, and his perceptive record of life in the Canadian wilderness. For example, on the eve of the Burlington Races he writes how his messmates took advantage of a break, "some in writing letters
others in making a Midshipman's will . . . we now filled our glasses and shaking each other heartily by the hand, went on deck to our respective quarters."While the editors' transcription of the manuscript seems accurate in all but possibly one case, their notes are filled with minor and major errors of commission and omission. For instance, they do not correct Wingfield's mistake, on page 117, in which he confuses the career of American Brigadier General William Hull, who surrendered Detroit, with that of Major General James Wilkinson, an officer who never won a battle but never lost a court-martial.
These flaws aside, for experienced Great Lakes sailors Don Bamford and Paul Carroll this publication is obviously a labor of love. It was uncommon for a man to rise from the life before the mast to officer rank in His Majesty's Service, and consequently this memoir is unusual in its perspective. It will become a much-cited and treasured record of early Great Lakes maritime history.
Winston's War: Churchill 1940-1945
Max Hastings. New York: Knopf, 2010. 576 pp. Intro. Illus. Notes. Bib. Index. $35.
Reviewed by Jeremy Black
In recent months, World War II has re-emerged as a hot topic. Among British authors alone, there have been studies by prominent historians such as Michael Burleigh (Moral Combat: A History of World War II, HarperPress, 2010), Richard Evans (The Third Reich at War, Penguin Press, 2010), and Andrew Roberts (The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, Penguin Press, 2010)
each important and different in its focus. Max Hastings' latest book, Winston's War, provides a worthy addition to this list, not least because Hastings is an accomplished and much-published author on the war, but also because he adopts here what is, for him, a new perspective.He focuses on Churchill
again, scarcely an original topic presenting a man conspicuously thrilled by his own leading role in the greatest conflict in human history and who rejoiced in his proximity to the cannon's roar. Yet as Hastings sagely observes, Churchill never lost his sense of dismay over the death and destruction that war visited on the innocent. Whereas Adolf Hitler was indifferent to the sufferings his policies imposed on mankind, Churchill's purpose was to enable the guns to be silenced.The author's account deals with the war itself, foreign policy, and domestic politics. As he makes plain, Churchill had much greater faith in the people than did his ministers, which helps explain his bitterness when he lost the 1945 election. Domestic politics were linked to strategy in criticizing the government for not launching the second front earlier. As Hastings emphasizes, Churchill had his own frustrations. He was focused on the poor performance of the army in 1940
42 and particularly lacked confidence in his commanders. The failed Dieppe Raid on 19 August 1942 deepened his concern, but as the author points out, the Americans unjustly supposed that Churchill always shared the extreme caution of his generals.But unjust is too often a judgment that seems pertinent. The world's strongest economy, America, has avoided blame for its appeasement of Hitler in the late 1930s and 1940, but, once into the war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt found, in Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, a new dictator to mollify. As power must be flattered, it is unsurprising that criticisms of Roosevelt were soft-pedaled by Churchill, but it is difficult to read this book without appreciating the baleful consequences of Roosevelt's self-interested sanctimony.
Churchill's faults also emerge clearly, notably in the account of the Dodecanese campaign between 8 September and 22 November 1943. During this operation Allied forces attempted to capture and hold the Aegean Dodecanese Islands, then held by the Italians, in order to set up bases from which to attack the German-controlled Balkans. The campaign failed and resulted in significant Allied casualties. As Hastings tells it, the story merits analysis as an example of the consequences of Churchill's capacity for rashness, a triumph of impulse over reason that helped explain why strategists, both British and American, could despair of his judgment.
The same could be said of his support for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which Churchill and Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton created early in the war to conduct espionage behind enemy lines and serve as the backbone of the resistance movement. It was sometimes known as "Churchill's secret army" or nicknamed "the Baker Street Irregulars." Unfortunately, as Hastings comments, the SOE was more successful in furthering communism than in harming Germans.
Hastings has written an impressive book, full of judicious asides, and it deserves a wide readership.
Fire from the Sky: Surviving the Kamikaze Threat
Robert C. Stern. Barnsley, UK: Seaforth Publishing, 2010. Intro. Illus. Appen. Notes. 384 pp. $49.95.
Reviewed by Bill Gordon
Few books have attempted to cover the entire complex story of Japan's aerial suicide attacks during World War II. The Divine Wind: Japan's Kamikaze Force in World War II, by Captain Rikihei Inoguchi and Commander Tadashi Nakajima, remains the standard today, even though it was originally published in 1958. Both authors served as senior officers associated with the Navy's Kamikaze Special Attack Corps from its inception in the Philippines in October 1944. Their book provides few details on the Battle of Okinawa, when three-quarters of aerial suicide attacks took place, and the Army's Special Attack Corps, whose airmen comprised more than one-third of those who died in suicide attacks. But the authors' personal involvement makes their history by far the most influential. The Sacred Warriors: Japan's Suicide Legions (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982) by Denis and Peggy Warner also deserves high marks for its readable style and thorough research using both Japanese and English-language sources.
In Fire from the Sky, Robert C. Stern, the author of more than 20 books primarily on naval topics, makes extensive use of ship action reports and other U.S. Navy documents to chronicle all kamikaze attacks that sank or damaged Allied ships. His book focuses entirely on battle details rather than personal accounts. Each kamikaze attack is described in a generally standard format with ship location, numbers and types of aircraft, battle details, crewmen's actions after hits, ship damage, casualties, and what happened to ships after attack. The descriptions frequently include lengthy excerpts from action reports. These attack summaries provide helpful reference information for individual ships, but they make much of the book read like an encyclopedia. Fire from the Sky also lacks maps of the Philippines and Okinawa to identify kamikaze attack locations.
After the author briefly presents Japan's kamikaze pilots in the book's introduction, he goes on in Chapter 1 to discuss wartime precursors to organized suicide attacks. The first part of Chapter 2 explains the formation of the first kamikaze unit, and the rest of the book systematically describes, in chronological order, the kamikaze attacks from the Allied perspective. The book incorrectly uses Shinbu, rather than Shinpu, as the original Japanese name for the Kamikaze Corps. Stern states that his book's objective is to assess the impact and effectiveness of the kamikaze weapon. However, other than a few passing comments, only two short chapters directly address this purpose by examining kamikaze tactics in the Philippines and Okinawa. The author's rather straightforward conclusion is that the kamikaze weapon could not win the war or even soften terms of peace despite 16,000 total Allied casualties with 9.4 percent of kamikaze aircraft inflicting damage and an average of 40 casualties per hit or near-miss.
In comparison with other English-language books about Japan's kamikazes, Fire from the Sky stands apart with its excellent photo sequences and detailed captions of individual attacks. More than 20 attacks include three or more photos to display the approach, hit, and damage by kamikaze aircraft. In several places Stern mentions the difficulties in counting kamikaze attacks, since a Japanese pilot carrying out a conventional bombing or escort mission might decide to crash into a ship if his aircraft got hit and damaged. He argues convincingly that the first organized attacks took place on 25 October 1944, and previous attacks on the USS Sonoma (ATO-12), LCI(L)-1065, and HMAS Australia, considered by some to be the first kamikaze attacks, were crashes into ships by pilots who made individual decisions, rather than planned suicides by Special Attack Corps pilots.
Despite its 20 pages of endnotes and extensive primary and secondary sources, the book's descriptions of kamikaze pilots still contain errors, most arising from the oversimplification of the Special Attack Corps' complex history. For example, Stern writes, "All were volunteers, meaning they had been requested, but not ordered, to join a Special Attack Unit." Although many pilots volunteered, numerous Japanese accounts state that pilots in certain units received orders to join the Special Attack Corps with no request for volunteers. The author writes that in 1945 the Japanese no longer lined up pilots and asked for volunteers but rather gave them applications or surveys. Again, Stern oversimplifies the facts, since former kamikaze pilots state that even then they were lined up and volunteers were asked to raise their hand or take one step forward.
The Enemy in Our Hands: America's Treatment of Prisoners of War from the Revolution to the War on Terror
Robert C. Doyle. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2010. 496 pp. Illus. $34.95
Reviewed by Commander Harold H. Sacks, U.S. Navy (Retired)
Robert C. Doyle, professor of history at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, is the author of A Prisoner's Duty: Great Escapes in U.S. Military History and Voices from Captivity: Interpreting the American POW Narrative. He has been a consultant on films and documentaries, including Hart's War (2002), and served as a lieutenant (junior grade) on board the USS Steinaker (DD-863) during the Vietnam War.
The Enemy in Our Hands is an insightful and balanced work of history, supported by sound scholarship and written in clear, non-pedantic language. It gives the reader a comprehensive review of American foreign policy over six decades, giving a guided tour of America's battles and wars to get to the heart of the treatment of prisoners by the United States and, collaterally, the treatment of American prisoners by other countries.
One is tempted to turn immediately to his treatment of prisoners during the war on terrorism, from 2001 to the present, because of the continuing controversy over the categorization of Taliban prisoners as "unlawful combatants" as well as our abandonment of the so-called "Golden Rule" policy generally followed for more than two centuries (with noteworthy exceptions). That would be a mistake, indeed, as Doyle's timeline provides the reader with the background essential to understanding our current conundrum.
There has always been a kind of dualism in the way we separate the "honorable" enemy from the despised traitor. Thus, as far back as the American Revolution, George Washington decreed fairly gentle treatment for captured British officers, often placing them at liberty on parole, while at the same time Loyalists were treated cruelly, frequently beaten and even executed. Conversely, when regarded by the British as members of an insurrection, American prisoners were badly treated. During the War of 1812, however, treatment was better, although the British continued to exercise their right to conscript American seamen for duty in the Royal Navy. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, and both the North and the South exhibited inconsistent treatment of prisoners of war, from the horrors of Andersonville and Elmira, to a simple release allowing some prisoners to return to their farms.
Doyle acknowledges the uneven application by the United States of the Golden Rule during World War II, but it is clear that if an enemy captive survived the first hours of his surrender he would ultimately reach a POW camp at which his rights would be rigorously protected, securing him work, a modest salary, and even canteen privileges. Many prisoners preferred not to be repatriated after the war, particularly soldiers from the Soviet Union who faced imprisonment or death upon their return. Premier Joseph Stalin considered Soviet soldiers taken prisoner to be traitors and negotiated their repatriation at the Yalta Conference. President Harry S. Truman, on learning the ultimate fate of repatriated Soviet prisoners, abrogated the Yalta agreement, which had a further chilling effect on the Cold War.
Many analysts agree that negotiations to end the Korean War were extended almost two years because of North Korea's demand for repatriation when more than 80,000 enemy prisoners of war were offered a noncommunist future in either South Korea or Taiwan.
During the Vietnam War we permitted Communist Party members, through an "open door" (chieu hoi) policy, to switch sides. Communist retaliation against these soldiers was very harsh after the war, often resulting in execution.
Almost 70,000 Iraqi troops were captured in 100 hours of fighting during the Persian Gulf War. These prisoners were held by Saudi Arabia and managed by U.S. liaison teams.
Doyle is particularly expert in his coverage of our treatment of prisoners since 9/11. The Pentagon's announcement, in January 2002, that Taliban prisoners were "unlawful combatants" and ineligible to receive the protections of the Geneva Convention, represented the abandonment of our history of treating POWs by the Golden Rule. Classified as "detainees," they were sent to a detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Abuse of some prisoners at Guantánamo as well as at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has been well documented. President Barack Obama ordered the Cuban detention center closed; control of Abu Ghraib prison was transferred to the Iraqi government in 2009.
The Enemy in Our Hands is a definitive single volume, each chapter the distillation of material that could support its own book. Ultimately, the chapters on Iraq and Afghanistan will require updating as classified documents become available to scholars. Doyle's final chapter reflects brilliantly on our handling of POWs. Comprehensive and balanced, his treatise on the United States' handling of prisoners of war from the American Revolution to the present includes much new material supported by useful appendices and deserves a wide audience.