Evans Carlson, Marine Raider: The Man Who Commanded America’s First Special Forces
Duane Schultz. Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2014. 256 pp. Biblio. Index. Maps. Notes. $26.
Reviewed by Colonel Dick Camp, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.)
With 17 acclaimed histories to his credit, Duane Schultz has built a first-rate reputation for producing thoroughly researched and richly detailed accounts of men in combat from the Civil War to World War II. The subject of his most recent book is Evans Carlson, a controversial Marine officer who led a battalion of elite Marine Raiders through the early campaigns of World War II.
The son of a Congregational preacher, Carlson left home at an early age and joined the Army. He adapted well to discipline and became a model soldier, one who worked hard to improve and expand his military skills. He left the Army in 1915 but stayed in the reserves, and when World War I broke out he was activated and commissioned. Attached to the 87th Infantry Division, his unit did not get to France until after the war ended. After resigning his commission, he tried his hand at business but found it boring, so he quit his job in 1922 and joined the Marines.
Carlson was commissioned and assigned to various posts and stations commensurate with his rank and experience—Quantico, San Diego, China, Nicaragua, and Warm Springs, Georgia, where he formed a lasting friendship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This assignment greatly impacted his career and caused him trouble with his superiors when they discovered he was writing directly to the president.
Carlson returned to China in late 1937 and was assigned to the U.S. Naval Intelligence Unit, where he had the opportunity to observe firsthand the fighting that was raging between the Japanese and Chinese. Carlson became enamored with the communist Eighth Route Army, “an experience I shall never forget,” and became determined to tell the American people about the Japanese threat. He was warned that it might damage his career but ignored the threat and continued to speak openly to the news media. Carlson received an official reprimand, and rather than be silenced, he resigned and returned to China, his fourth trip.
On the eve of the Pacific war, Carlson sought reinstatement, which was approved, and so on 28 April 1941 he was appointed to the rank of major and placed in command of a “special unit with carte blanche to organize, train and indoctrinate it as I see fit.” He immediately introduced methods that he had observed in the Eighth Route Army. “Gung Ho,” meaning “work together,” became the Raiders’ motto.
In early August 1942, Carlson’s 2d Raider Battalion (the 1st Raider Battalion was formed under Lieutenant Colonel Merritt Edson) was ordered to raid Japanese–held Makin, a small island in the Gilberts. Through the use of oral history, veterans’ associations, and personal accounts, Schultz’s telling of the operation is rich in details. His description of the voyage to the island on board two impossibly crowded submarines is spot-on (the reviewer served in a reconnaissance company and conducted a raid from a submarine). The fight ashore and subsequent withdrawal—battling rough seas, physical and mental exhaustion, and combat fatigue—is riveting. The “Long Patrol” behind Japanese lines on Guadalcanal, the battalion’s second mission, is covered with the same attention to detail. Schultz’s account perfectly describes the sights, smells, and sounds of a jungle battlefield.
Schultz portrays Carlson as a man committed to his beliefs, regardless of the cost. Seniors suspected him of communist leanings because of his experience in China and never really trusted him. The enlisted men, however, were staunchly loyal.
Evans Carlson is a finely woven historical book that captures the spirit of the man and illustrates his contribution to the Corps’ legacy.
Into The Dark Water: The Story of Three Officers and PT-109
John J. Domagalski. Havertown, PA: Casemate, 2014. 261 pp. Illus. Maps. $29.95.
Reviewed by Mark Felton
“Like a barroom brawl with the lights turned out” is how author John J. Domagalski vividly describes the brutal encounters between American and Japanese naval forces in Iron Bottom Sound off Guadalcanal in 1943. It is an arresting image, and one of many excellent descriptions in the book that capture both the excitement and the horror of close-quarters action and the bravery of the crews of the plucky little wooden patrol boats that carved out for themselves extraordinary reputations during the Pacific war.
Into The Dark Water is the gripping story of PT-109, written by an expert on the naval war in the Solomon Islands. But it is also the wider story of all PT boats in the Pacific. PT-109 gained such fame largely because of the later career of her third commander, the dashing Lieutenant (junior grade) John F. Kennedy. Domagalski has not, however, merely retold the story of Kennedy’s actions when his vessel was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer off Guadalcanal in August 1943. He has instead placed this saga into the wider story of PT-109’s complete career, and, significantly, of her first two commanders who took her to war.
Part One deals with the background history of PT boats, their design, development, and construction, with PT-109 the central character. Her service under Ensign Bryant Larson and Lieutenant Rollin Westholm is fully covered. These two officers used PT-109 to disrupt Japanese supply lines and conducted several brave rescue missions during the critical Guadalcanal campaign. PT boats were extremely vulnerable to heavy Japanese guns and were actively hunted by the imperial navy. It took a supreme form of reckless courage for PT boats’ crews to hurl their craft at Japanese convoys protected by large warships, engaging in a deadly game of cat and mouse throughout the Solomon Islands. Domagalski’s talent is to bring the boat’s early wartime service vividly to life, describing each action brilliantly, providing the reader with not only a fine history of PT boats, but also a tremendously exciting read, drawing the reader deep into the mostly nighttime battles. The human story is constantly presented throughout the book, making for an engrossing and powerful narrative.
Part Two tells the story of Kennedy’s captaincy of PT-109, culminating in the horrific moment when the boat was cut in half by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri. The PT’s flimsy construction is graphically demonstrated in the thrilling narrative of the boat’s destruction and Kennedy’s heroic efforts to save his crew with the help of Australian Coastwatchers in the Solomons. This section drives home just how easily American, and indeed world history, could have been changed had Kennedy been killed or captured. It also demonstrates that for all his privilege, JFK was a beloved and highly efficient PT boat skipper and a very brave man.
Part Three tells the later story of PT boats and what became of PT-109’s crew. Overall, Into The Dark Water is a concise account of two years in the life of PT-109, from construction to destruction. Domagalski has captured the stress of operating these vessels in the Solomons. The intricacies of the backstories of the three commanders and the boat itself are fascinating, and the book benefits from excellent maps and an extensive photo section. Vivid, well written, exciting, and very well researched, it is highly recommended.
Sextant: A Young Man’s Daring Sea Voyage And The Men Who Mapped The World’s Oceans
David Barrie. New York: Harper Collins, 2014. 287 pp. Biblio. Glossary. Illus. Index. Notes. $25.99.
Reviewed by Andrew C. A. Jampoler
In November 2013, The Atlantic published an article on “The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel.” Three of the selections are of special interest to maritime historians: the compass (number 17), the sextant (number 23), and the sailboat (number 40). David Barrie, the English author of Sextant, a notably readable quick history of maritime exploration, would likely have put the sextant much higher on the list. He argues that this relatively simple mechanical device for the precise measurement of observed angles made possible navigation on the open ocean. “Argues,” though, is too combative a word for what is an almost romantic look back at the instrument and the great age of sail that its invention in mid-18th century ushered in; “urges” would be better.
Thanks to Dava Sobel’s Longitude (Walker Publishing, 1995) many people would probably credit John Harrison’s H-series of chronometers for that breakthrough, on the basis that longitude and time are different ways of measuring and speaking about the same thing. Not so Barrie. He doesn’t ignore timekeeping, but he makes the interesting case that it was not the mechanical chronometer, liable to failure for all sorts of reasons, but the durable and reliable sextant and the development of the navigation technique of taking “lunars” to establish the local time that finally made navigation into science rather than an art form.
Barrie moves briskly through the 250- year history of the sextant, “a brilliant product of technical ingenuity,” dutifully describing along the way its predecessors: the quadrant, astrolabe, cross staff, back staff, and finally the reflecting quadrant, a miniature (its frame spans 45 degrees rather than the sextant’s 60) and simpler version of the final invention. At the end of the process in the 1750s we arrive at a design so good that it’s essentially unchanged to this day.
He’s wrapped some interesting stories, only one of them new, around his paean to the sextant. The new story is his own, a 24-day crossing in 1973 of the Atlantic from Portland, Maine, via Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Falmouth, England, in a 35-foot Saxon-class sloop, the Saecwen. He was 19 then, and the boat 10. (Her name, he tells us, means “sea queen” in Anglo-Saxon.) Paragraphs that could be extracts from the Saecwen’s log, but read like an abbreviated memoir, begin each chapter. We learn from them the special satisfactions of a summer North Atlantic Ocean crossing in a small sailboat, and that the third crew member, 17-year-old Alexa, was evidently along to cook and play the guitar. Barrie and the sloop’s owner, Colin (a retired Royal Navy officer and Alexa’s uncle), stood port and starboard watches through the crossing.
The old stories are those of Commodore George Anson in HMS Centurion; Captain James Cook in HMS Endeavour and later HMS Resolution; Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and Jean-Francois de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, two French naval officers in a narrative otherwise peopled almost entirely by the Royal Navy; Royal Navy Captain George Vancouver in the Discovery; Royal Navy Lieutenant Matthew Flinders in the Investigator; Royal Navy Captain Robert Fitzroy in HMB Beagle; and finally Joshua Slocum, the lone civilian. He took the Spray around the world alone in the late 1890s.
These historical sketches are bracketed by what are arguably the two greatest open-boat passages in sea history. One is Captain William Bligh’s astonishing post-mutiny, 48-day, 3,600-mile epic voyage over warm water from off Tahiti through the Torres Strait and into Dutch Koupang with 18 men in the Bounty’s launch. The other is Ernest Shackleton’s 16-day, 800-mile crossing of the near-freezing waters of the Southern Ocean from Elephant Island to South Georgia in a small boat with a crew of six. A desperate and entirely successful mission to rescue his crew, stranded when their ship, the Endurance, was crushed in the ice months earlier.
Barrie’s thesis and his personal story aside, there’s not very much that’s new here. Still, Sextant is an excellent book. The mostly familiar history is artfully condensed and illuminated with some well-chosen quotations. The technology is described equally clearly. The illustrations, charts, and photographs are valuable contribution to the text. I recommend Sextant enthusiastically.
The Tugboats: From A (A. G. Welles) to Z (USS Zuni)
Captain Walter W. Jaffee. El Cerrito, CA: Glencannon Press, 2014. 672 pp. Append. Illus. Index. $150.
Reviewed by Norman Polmar
When one considers navies and fleets one thinks of battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, and destroyers. Sometimes submarines, PT boats, and even landing ships also come to mind. But who thinks about tugboats?
Retired merchant marine Captain Walter Jaffe certainly has thought about them. He has compiled this massive, detailed, illustrated history of U.S. government tugboats from “the beginning” through the end of World War II. “Government” here means tugs operated by and for the U.S. Army, Coast Guard, Maritime Commission, and Navy. Also included are the war-built tugboats produced by the Defense Plant Corporation, a massive program to provide harbor tugboats for the United States, some of which served with the Army.
The entry for each tugboat provides her name, builder, key construction dates, engines, operator (e.g., Army, Navy, Coast Guard), and a brief service history. Navy tugboats have their armament and complement listed. The scope and detail of this work is impressive, and this level of reference for such a little-publicized ship (boat) type makes the book an invaluable volume. In addition to Navy–Coast Guard ships usually considered tugboats—AT, ATA, ATF, ATR, etc.—the book lists salvage ships (ARS) and submarine rescue ships (ASR). And there are more than 500 photos of tugboats, a remarkable collection.
However, this work has two major shortfalls. First, some of the service histories leave much to be desired. For example, the USS Vireo (AM-52 and, from 1 June 1942, the AT-144), is reported to have “soon received a summons to take the Yorktown in tow. The tug arrived on the scene and maneuvered to pass a towline, then proceeded at a speed of under 3 knots. On 6 June the Japanese submarine I-168 fired torpedoes at the nearly helpless targets.” Nowhere is it said that these events occurred during the decisive Battle of Midway, that the Yorktown was an aircraft carrier (CV-5), and that the I-168 torpedoed and sank the carrier (and an accompanying destroyer). These “details” should have been provided.
Second, while the service histories or photo captions provide most of the tugboats’ hull numbers, there is no master list of hull numbers so that a reader can, for example, quickly determine which tugboat was the AT-144. And several ships do not have their hull numbers provided, for example, the USS Cable (ARS-19), Chain (ARS-20), Curb (ARS-21), Deliver (ARS-23), and many other Navy tugboats.
These are serious problems in a reference work of this type. Still, the book is—so far as this reviewer knows—the only volume that provides the coverage of tugboats to this scale.
Beyond the tugboats themselves, the volume also provides a brief and useful description of all the shipyards that built these craft. Appendixes also provide a brief discussion of the reserve (“mothball”) fleets, and a discussion of—and data for—the concrete barges and wooden barges built for the U.S. Army and Navy during World War II. These latter appendixes seem out of place in this volume; they add nothing significant to the subject. Their space and ink could better have been used for lists of the hull numbers of Coast Guard and Navy tugboats.
If one has an interest in tugboats—and can afford the price—this book is a must.