Sunk in Kula Gulf: The Final Voyage of the USS Helena and the Incredible Story of Her Survivors in World War II
John J. Domagalski. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2012. 237 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. Biblio. Index. $29.95.
Reviewed by Richard B. Frank
John J. Domagalski follows his Lost at Guadalcanal (2010) about the USS Astoria (CA-34) and Chicago (CA-29) with this account focusing on the final action of the USS Helena (CL-50) and the engrossing story of the multiphase rescue of her survivors.
The Helena was a modified version of the innovative Brooklyn-class cruiser, each armed with 15 rapid fire 6-inch guns, 8 5-inch guns, and an ever more numerous antiaircraft battery. Damaged by a Japanese aerial torpedo at Pearl Harbor, following repairs she participated in two savage night battles around Guadalcanal from which she emerged nearly unscathed. American naval officers preferred the gun to the torpedo and deemed the Brooklyn class ideally suited to the night battles in the Solomons. They believed—wrongly, it turned out—that the American storm of shells (each 6-inch gun could fire up to 12 rounds per minute) would disable or sink Japanese vessels before the latter could launch torpedoes.
The Helena’s actions during the Pearl Harbor attack and participation in no less than three major night surface actions in the Solomons put her in contention for the title of the “fightin’est” American cruiser of World War II. Domagalski, however, has not drafted a combat history of the Helena detailing events leading up the Battle of Kula Gulf. Instead his focus is on the ship’s last action, her fatal damage, and the multiple facets of the saga of her survivors. As with his earlier book about American cruisers, the author interviewed survivors (in this case ten) and diligently scoured primary and secondary sources.
About a third of the book introduces the Helena and the dozen or so officers and men through whose eyes Domagalski primarily narrates the Battle of Kula Gulf and the fate of her survivors. The battle itself covers just over 12 pages, and 5 pages recount the fatal damage inflicted by three Japanese Type 93 “Long Lance” torpedoes. Thus, just over half the book concerns the survivor ordeal and the radically divergent stories of their rescue.
The first Japanese torpedo hit the Helena at 0203, ripping off the bow forward of turret two. Such was the overpowering sound and fury of the Helena’s own gunfire that even Captain Charles Cecil did not at first realize the loss of the bow. This hit was survivable, but at 0205–6 two more torpedoes gored her hull almost exactly amidships. The massive detonations shredded her hull girder over such a wide swath that the ship jackknifed and sank by 0225.
Immediately after the battle, the destroyers Nicholas (DD-449) and Radford (DD-446), despite having to wheel twice to confront Japanese warships, picked up 735 survivors. They departed at daylight to escape air attack. Eighty-eight men in a whale boat and raft flotilla commanded by Cecil made landfall on New Georgia and were picked up there by the destroyers Woodworth (DD-460) and Gwin (DD-433) during the same day, 6 July.
Another large contingent of survivors remained adrift in the water for nearly three days until the current mercifully deposited 165 of them on the northeast coast of Vella LaVella. Friendly natives acting in concert with a New Zealand missionary, Reverend Archie Silvester, and a Coastwatcher, Henry Josselyn, took them in and hid them from the Japanese. Josselyn passed word back to Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner of the large batch of survivors now deep behind Japanese lines. Turner dispatched a rescue mission with four destroyers and two destroyer transports, the Dent (APD-9) and Waters (APD-8). During the night of 15–16 July, this mercy task group plucked the last surviving Helena men off Vella LaVella without loss.
Overall, Domagalski provides a solid recounting of what is inherently a great adventure story. While there are very few nits to pick, they do not detract materially. For example, he makes the common error of describing a destroyer’s 5-inch gun mount as a “turret.” This genre of books attempting to give us the tactile sense of the war from the bottom up can be very rich, but ultimately depends upon the quality and quantity of the memories recorded in the past or gathered recently in interviews. Sunk at Kula Gulf is an admirably earnest attempt at one more salute to those who served and fought, but it also underscores how few of these now remain to receive the salute.
The Challenge: Britain Against America in the Naval War of 1812
Andrew Lambert. London: Faber & Faber, 2012. 538 pages, Illus. Notes. Bibliog. Index. £20 hardcover; £10.99 paperback.
Reviewed by Frederick C. Leiner
Until recently, the War of 1812 has been of little interest to British historians, for whom the war was a sideshow for the war against Napoleon. Recently, however, three major British works have appeared, culminating in The Challenge by Andrew Lambert, Laughton Professor of Naval History at King’s College, London. Lambert’s explicit goals are to puncture the enduring American myths about the war and to explain how those legends evolved as part of the cultural construct of the new American republic. Lambert’s elegant, arch prose is an easy read, and he writes with utter confidence, even when his writing demonstrates bias and contempt.
For Lambert, when Britain was engaged in an existential conflict with Napoleonic Europe in 1812, the United States seized the opportunity to challenge British maritime dominance, but as a result of “three, titanic single-ship actions, the challenge was decisively met.” Centering the War of 1812 in a worldwide geopolitical context is important, and Lambert writes incisively about the wider dimensions of British strategy. Although Lambert recognizes that the United States went to war for its own interests, he thinks American political leaders were “remarkably naïve” for thinking they could alter the British practice of impressment. He dismisses impressment as an “occupational hazard,” noting that “only” one-tenth of the seamen on American ships were impressed. Indeed, Lambert suggests American complaints about impressment were hypocritical because they “rang hollow in the mouths of slave owners.”
Lambert’s conceptual arc of an American challenge met by three single-ship victories is dramatic as a story but dubious as history. His accounts of those British frigate victories are richly detailed, powerful stories of naval combat in the Age of Sail, but those battles—the Shannon’s capture of the Chesapeake, the Phoebe’s capture of the Essex, and the loss of the President to the Endymion—cannot fairly be said to have answered the “challenge.” Oceanic fights between single ships were important symbolically but, as Lambert himself remarks, did not affect the balance of power at sea. Rather, as Lambert observes in some of the best passages in the book, it was the inexorable effect of the close and continuous blockade of American ports that broke the back of the American economy and rendered the United States insolvent, forcing the Madison administration to abandon its goals for the war.
Lambert calls the Chesapeake-Shannon battle the “defining moment of the war,” even though had that battle never happened it is hard to think the war would have changed one iota. Although it is commonplace for American writers to question Chesapeake Captain James Lawrence’s judgment in fighting the Shannon, Lambert will have none of it. To Lambert, the two ships were evenly matched: Lawrence had the fight he wanted, and the ensuing slaughter is “Homeric.”
Writing with venom, Lambert deprecates American officers and combat successes. For instance, while he displays magnanimity toward Isaac Hull as a skillful seaman and Lawrence for his bravery, Lambert suggests that John Rodgers was a coward, characterizing his skill in taking his ship through the British naval blockade as “skulking out in a fog,” noting Rodgers was “[n]ever one for an even fight” (presumably Lambert wants him to have acted like Lawrence).
Although Lambert pays lip service to the notion that after two centuries it does not matter who won the war, it clearly matters to him: He refers to the British burning of Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1814 as “suitable punishment for the American stab in the back of 1812.” Perhaps Lambert’s bias is most readily demonstrated by the fact that he devotes 50 pages to the Chesapeake-Shannon battle, which lasted less than 15 minutes, and 2 pages to the Constitution-Guerriere battle (an American victory), professing not to understand why that engagement was significant.
Perhaps surprising for such a polemical book, the last 50 pages of The Challenge are exceptionally fine cultural history, dealing with how writers and artists portrayed American defeats as victories. Lambert analyzes the meaning of the war and the change of America’s focus from the sea to the frontier, concluding the war resulted in the cultural independence of the United States from Britain.
As an introduction to the War of 1812, The Challenge is a disaster, unbalanced and polemical. For those already familiar with the war, The Challenge contains remarkably fine writing, a history of the war at sea from a British perspective that is provocative, insightful, and biting.
The Battle of Midway: The Naval Institute Guide to the U.S. Navy’s Greatest Victory
Thomas C. Hone, Ed. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2013. 360 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. Index. $42.95.
Reviewed by Barrett Tillman
The Battle of Midway in June 1942 remains a subject of lasting interest. Therefore, Thomas C. Hone’s anthology represents a welcome collection of writings on the pivotal engagement, drawing upon first-person accounts, biographies, and official and unofficial sources. All come from Naval Institute publications—Press books, oral histories, and Proceedings and Naval History articles—and U.S. Navy documents.
Hone has assembled a richly varied assortment including 31 authors (7 Midway participants), and the most-cited contributor is John B. Lundstrom, with ten selections mainly from Black Shoe Carrier Admiral (2006), his excellent biography of Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, commander of Task Force 17 during the battle. Contributing four each are Commander Mitsuo Fuchida from his seminal 1956 book Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan and Mark Peattie, author of Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Airpower (2007).
Hone provides a short essay before each section, setting the stage and occasionally correcting author errors, such as Fuchida’s widely accepted statement that Japanese carrier decks were ranged with planes awaiting launch when struck by SBD bombs.
Commander Yahachi Tanabe’s detailed account of the submarine I-168 that sank the carrier Yorktown (CV-5) and destroyer Hammann (DD-412) enhances the Japanese perspective. Insightful biographical sketches are provided by E. B. Potter on Admiral Chester Nimitz and Hone’s original essay on Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance. The crucial subject of cryptanalysis deservedly merits a section, and Hone provides perspective in noting that neither the Navy nor Samuel Eliot Morison’s postwar series referred to the code-breakers’ essential role.
In “The End of the Battle” Hone states that Nimitz “had won a major victory but it had not been decisive. He was sure of that while being much less certain what the still-strong Japanese would do next.” This assessment is bound to draw argument, and not to appear lawyerly, but what is the meaning of “decisive”? In 1956 historian Fletcher Pratt included Midway in his 15 decisive battles, and in 2004 Joseph Mitchell updated Sir Edward Creasy’s 1851 study to rank Midway among the 20 most influential clashes.
Objectively, regardless of the victor at Midway, the war would have continued. Even without trying to define “decisive,” Midway marked the end of Japan’s strategic initiative, enabling America to take the offensive two months later at Guadalcanal. Absent a U.S. victory in June 1942, American warships still would have dropped anchor in Tokyo Bay, probably in 1946, but at greater cost.
It’s regrettable that the Naval Institute Press decided to limit the anthology to USNI sources. Most of the selections likely would make any Midway compilation, but some omissions stand out, none more so than Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully’s masterful 2005 assessment, Shattered Sword (Potomac Books). Hone includes Parshall’s Proceedings article about finding wreckage of the carrier Kaga, but Shattered Sword merits far more representation, especially the revelations about Mitsuo Fuchida’s selective writings. Two other Midway books deserving inclusion are Walter Lord’s Incredible Victory (Harper Collins, 1967) and Robert C. Cressman’s A Glorious Page (Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, Incorporated, 1990). The latter remains perhaps the finest short account.
Hone properly includes Midway historiography, beginning with Lieutenant Commander Ernest Eller’s original battle report for Nimitz. Retired U.S. Naval Academy historian Craig Symonds evaluates Captain Marc Mitscher’s gundecked Hornet (CV-8) action report, closely related to air group commander Stanhope Ring’s “Lost Letter,” which repeated the misrepresentation of “the mission to nowhere.”
Some contributions contain avoidable errors. Captain Wayne Hughes used Midway as an innovative mathematical model in Fleet Tactics, Theory & Practice.Yet he wrote, “In the Pacific, effective carrier-based air attack ranges were comparable, 200 to 250 nautical miles, and neither side could outrange the enemy’s carrier aircraft.” Not so. For instance, the Nakajima B5N with a torpedo outranged the Douglas TBD by about 33 percent. On 4 June 1942 Task Force-16 launched with an expected 155-mile outbound leg. Lieutenant Commander John Thach said he would push the Wildcat escort to 175, which bomber pilots knew “was giving a lot.” In fact, Japan’s carrier aircraft continued outranging America’s, a situation unchanged off Saipan two years later.
The book rightly concludes with essays on the meaning of Midway today. However, in the era of political correctness we should note that in 2009 the chief of Naval Operations’ Midway Night speech contained no reference to Japan. The next year there was one reference to the enemy.
The index has some peculiar omissions. Few of the authors are listed, which complicates finding specific essays, nor are USS Enterprise (CV-6) squadron commander Richard Best and Yogi Amari, pilot of cruiser Tone’s number four scout. Both played immensely greater roles than the oft-cited Ensign George Gay.
Overall, Hone’s book is a valuable reference on varied levels. Aside from the essays, there are 2 chronologies, 39 photos, and 3 maps. Hone also provides several tables including a listing of the Japanese forces and damage inflicted on both sides but, curiously, no U.S. order of battle. The Battle of Midway will find an enduring audience, but Naval Institute shortchanged itself and its readers by limiting content to USNI origins.
Battle for the North Atlantic: The Strategic Naval Campaign that Won World War II in Europe
John R. Bruning. Minneapolis, MN: Zenith Press, 2013. 300 pp. Illus. Maps. Index. $40.
Reviewed by Marc Milner
Few images of the Second World War are more iconic than a U-boat awash on the broad Atlantic, or a torpedoed merchant ship, burning furiously as she slips below the waves. If you like that kind of stuff, you will like John Bruning’s illustrated book Battle for the North Atlantic.
It is clear that Bruning’s book is pitched at a popular American market: large format, superb production quality with heavy bonded paper, and generally good quality photo reproduction. In the language of booksellers, it’s a beautiful book. This probably explains its rather idiosyncratic photo selection. Popular fascination with things Nazi is well served: Some 160 of the roughly 365 photos are of U-boats, German surface raiders, Adolf Hitler, the Eastern Front, and Karl Doenitz, including a sidebar with 3 photos of the Altmarck. Lots of smiling faces of U-boat aces and crews adorn this gallery.
Once the United States enters the shooting war, the coverage shifts to American activities in the Atlantic—roughly 90 photos that this reviewer could identify, ranging from battleships and cruisers, to dockyards, merchant ships, merchant seamen, and blimps and other aircraft. This is fair enough. There is a curious three-photo color spread of a PB4Y-1: tail plane, engine cowling (and a neat yellow jeep) and machine guns being loaded, and there are more than enough shots of Martin Mariners.
The Royal Navy, which carried the burden of the Atlantic war—including the Russian convoys that Bruning covers here—gets about 63 photos, mostly capital ships, cruisers, battleships, and aircraft carriers. Some of the photos of Brits are splendid, to be sure, although it is doubtful if the book needed three of HMS Hood on adjoining pages. Apparently there is just nothing “Gucci” about the Royal Navy’s escorts and their personnel: no sleek gray hulls, no tonnage tallies flying from the periscope, no cool leather jackets, weathered hats, scraggly beards, or neat insignia. They get just a couple of shots. The Royal Canadian Navy, which shouldered much of the Atlantic war and by 1943 provided half of the Allied escorts on the main convoy routes, gets one lonely photo, while the Soviet air force gets four. The rest is a smattering of images, many with generic captions. Overall it is an odd assemblage.
As for the text of Battle for the North Atlantic, Bruning writes well and has an eye for a story. He is at his best in describing major naval actions, which dominated the first 8 of the book’s 13 chapters: the hunt for the Graf Spee, the Norwegian campaign, the cruises of German warships in the Atlantic, battles around the Arctic convoys, etc. Unfortunately, the complexity of the campaign and especially the attrition war against Allied shipping escapes Bruning. One glaring example of this is the claim on page 165 (as a preface to the 1942 U-boat campaign in American waters) that “With the U.S. Navy in the fight, Doenitz’s chance to achieve victory in the Atlantic faded.” The description that follows hardly supports that assertion, and it is one that the U.S. Navy’s official historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, would never have thought to make. The caption under the photo of HMCS Barrie on page 269, noting that “The Canadians played an increasingly important role in the Atlantic starting in late 1942,” completely masks the critical role played by the Canadians in helping the United States deal with the 1942 crisis.
The more complex—and balanced—story is in the literature that Bruning mentions in his biographical notes, suggesting that the author learned just enough about the Atlantic war to write a book, but not enough to understand it.