The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea
John P. Craven. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. 290 pp. Index. $26.00 ($23.40).
Reviewed by Theodore L. Gaillard Jr.
Need to find a hydrogen bomb lost in the Mediterranean? Call John Craven. For the Navy he also located the Scorpion (SSN-589) following her tragic sinking in the Atlantic in 1968. Now, what about that Soviet ballistic missile submarine that disappeared in the Pacific?
In The Silent War, John P. Craven, tailed earlier by the KGB and spotlighted more recently in the best-selling Blind Man's Bluff, describes his role in these and other crucial events. From World War II battleship sailor to a Ph.D. with a J.D. in sea law, Craven was chief scientist in the Navy's Special Projects Office from 1958 to 1970, working on deep-sea research and U.S. submarine development during the key years of the Cold War.
In 1956 our first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus (SSN-571), faced imminent structural failure from resonance induced by high-speed boundary layer flow over her ballast tank blow vents. Craven found the cause—and a solution. Had the Nautilus broken up, our Polaris ballistic missile fleet, a vital Cold War deterrent, would have been dangerously delayed.
Nevertheless, U.S. and Soviet policies of mutual deterrence were sorely tested. During the Vietnam War, Craven asserts that Admiral William Raborn was asked to launch a thermonuclear A-1 Polaris missile "to destroy the key railroad bridge that carried Chinese war materiel to the North Vietnamese"—but declined because of the missile's not-yet-refined accuracy.
Craven also suggests that a surfaced Soviet Golf II-class diesel ballistic missile submarine may have sunk in 1968 when a fail-safe mechanism exploded during an attempt by a rogue captain to launch a liquid-fuel thermonuclear missile against Hawaii. For finding and photographing that sunken hull 16,580 feet deep and 1,700 miles northwest of Honolulu, Craven received the Distinguished Civilian Service Award, and President Richard Nixon presented the crew of the now-famous spy sub Halibut (SSN-587) with the first peacetime Presidential Unit Citation. But with Golf II subs and their SS-N-5 missiles both designed for submerged launch, why would the K-129's commander invite detection by surfacing—with his target 800 miles beyond his missiles' maximum range?
Back on the mainland, we get candid reactions to nuclear physicist Edward Teller and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. And in one amusing dialogue between Craven and prickly Admiral Hyman Rickover concerning the deep-diving NR-1 nuclear minisub, the admiral meets his match. He and Craven later conspire regarding a remarkably promising Annapolis midshipman for whom they have a vision. Although Craven labels him "Ensign Dole" because he still is on active duty, we are told he would later command the attack sub Hyman G. Rickover (SSN-709) before being appointed Chief of Naval Research. (The current Chief of Naval Research, Rear Admiral Jay M. Cohen assumed the position in 2000—having commanded the Hyman G. Rickover with distinction from 1985 to 1988.)
Craven's intriguing account begs for maps and photographs, and some areas need minor adjustment. When referring to Operation Dominic nuclear blasts in 1962 as "the last atmospheric tests to be conducted by any of the world's nuclear powers," he overlooks more than 40 such tests conducted by France and China between 1963 and 1980. He mentions the Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle as designed to fit in the C-140—but instead of the Jetstar (essentially a business jet), he must mean the C-141 Starlifter. Elsewhere he writes, "The Soviets were moving toward titanium hulls for their ballistic missile submarines." Although the massive Typhoons reportedly have pressure hulls whose HY-130 steel surpasses the tensile strength of the steel in U.S. subs, only selected Soviet nuclear attack submarines received titanium pressure hulls: four Sierras, three Uniforms, seven Alphas, and the Papa and Mike.
Such details aside, The Silent War is a must-read for those interested in technology, management, and intelligence-gathering challenges triggered by tense Cold War competition beneath the seas. A key catalyst for U.S. success during those gripping years, John Craven was there—and this is his remarkable story.
MAGIC: The Untold Story of U.S. Intelligence and the Evacuation of Japanese Residents from the West Coast during World War II
David D. Lowman. Provo, UT: Athena Press, 2000. 392 pp. Photos. Notes. Bib. Index. $29.95 ($28.45).
Reviewed by Stephen Budiansky
The contentious, even inflammatory, premise of David Lowman's posthumously published book is that secret intelligence provided a credible justification for the removal of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast during World War II, and that this evidence has been systematically ignored or distorted in an attempt to rewrite history and gain compensation for the wartime evacuees. In 1980, a U.S. congressional commission was established to look into the treatment of Japanese Americans during the war, and concluded that the decision to remove all West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry, aliens and citizens alike, was motivated by racism, war hysteria, and political cowardice. Congress accepted the commission's recommendation that evacuees receive a payment of $20,000 apiece, and in 1988 President Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law.
Lowman, who spent a career at the National Security Agency, became involved in the issue because he believed that the recently declassified "Magic" files—Tokyo's secret diplomatic messages, broken by the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service beginning in 1940—seriously challenged the commission's conclusion. These decoded signals, Lowman argues, gave ample reason for U.S. officials at the time to conclude that thousands of Japanese Americans, including some U.S. citizens, were prepared to help the emperor's cause through espionage and sabotage.
The greatest value of this book is the many original documents reproduced in facsimile form, making up more than half of the book. It makes for fascinating reading, and Lowman has organized and annotated it well: FBI reports, investigations of Japanese organizations by the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Magic decrypts themselves. Through this extensive use of primary sources, Lowman makes a persuasive case that it was not mere hysteria for the U.S. government to fear that at least some Japanese Americans posed a security risk. There has been a tendency to dismiss any suggestion that Japanese Americans were disloyal. Lowman points out that some 5,000 Nisei actually renounced their U.S. citizenship during the war. At one relocation camp in California, young Japanese Americans organized themselves into semimilitary brigades and demanded that they be allowed to go fight for the emperor.
Lowman is far less persuasive, however, in arguing that Magic intelligence provided the smoking gun to U.S. officials who ordered the evacuation. The messages that actually refer to attempts to recruit Japanese Americans for intelligence or sabotage purposes are few and vague. An equal number of messages are devoted to a totally harebrained scheme to recruit "communists, Negroes, labor union members, and anti-Semites" to the Japanese cause.
Of course the larger question is whether the sweeping, collective, and indiscriminate uprooting of 100,000 civilians ever could be justified, even if a few thousand Americans of Japanese ancestry were likely to engage in acts of treason. German and Italian aliens were interned on a case-by-case basis. Some German American U.S. citizens acted as spies for Hitler and were tracked down and arrested individually; others, more wisely, were left in place and monitored, their intercepted messages revealing how incompetent and harmless they were. Far better, the authorities concluded, to leave known incompetents in place than to arrest them and risk their being replaced.
Lowman seems simply obtuse at times to the suffering that the evacuees, the overwhelming majority of them loyal Americans, endured. He does not mention how they lost careers, farms, and life's savings when they were given 48 hours to dispose of their property. The $37 million paid out in compensation did not even begin to cover the irreparable damage done. One need not conclude that U.S. leaders were motivated by racism to conclude that they were guilty of a terrible act of injustice.
The Typhoon of War: Micronesian Experiences of the Pacific War
Lin Poyer, Suzanne Falgout, and Lawrence Carucci. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2001. 493 pp. Maps. Photos. Appendices. Notes. Bib. Index. $54.00 ($51.30).
Reviewed by Jonathan Weisgall
Pop quiz: What geographic area witnessed the beginning and end of U.S. involvement in World War II? Answer: Micronesia. Japan launched its attacks on Pearl Harbor, Wake, and Guam from these tiny islands, and the United States later ended the war from them, as two B-29s destined for Hiroshima and Nagasaki took off from Tinian Island in the Marianas. In between, Micronesia was the site of some of the bloodiest battles of the war, as the exotic, previously unheard-of islands and atolls—Kwajalein, Enewetak, Truk, Peleliu, and Saipan—became household names in the United States.
The capture of Micronesia—islands controlled by Japan since the end of World War I—was critical to the U.S. Navy's island-hopping strategy of liberating the Philippines. The Americans struck first at Kwajalein Atoll, in the geographic center of the Marshall Islands. The invasion of Enewetak followed, together with 30 air strikes on nearby Truk, each one more powerful than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Meanwhile, U.S. forces leapfrogged other islands and atolls, leaving Japanese and Micronesians isolated and starving until the war's end. Volumes have been written about these events, but until now virtually nothing has been written about the effects of the war on the islanders themselves. The Typhoon of War tells this story, as Micronesians were pressed into hard labor to defend their islands and died alongside their Japanese oppressors.
This valuable contribution to Pacific Islands history, written by three anthropologists, combines secondary research with stories from interviews with more than 300 Micronesian survivors, resulting in the first islander perspective on the war. A researcher easily can look up the statistics on the invasion of Kwajalein: 7,870 Japanese and 372 Americans killed. What military histories omit is the 200 Marshallese who died in the attack, or the more than 600 Chamorros killed or wounded on Guam. One Marshallese tells of walking on the bodies of the dead on Namur Island because there was no place else to put his feet. Another Micronesian describes the bombing of Truk, when civilians hid in foxholes covered with coconut logs: "When the bombing stopped ... all I could see were the intestines and other mutilated body parts of what was left of the soldiers. The guy to my left was missing his head."
An interesting theme underlying this book is the Micronesians' divided loyalties. "We really believed in the Japanese," recalls one, not surprisingly. Japanese residents greatly outnumbered Micronesians during the prewar military buildup. They spread their culture and turned the islands into profit centers by developing fishing, copra and sugar cultivation, and phosphate mining. In 1937 for example, the population of the Mariana Islands consisted of 4,100 Micronesians and more than 42,000 Japanese. As a result, more than half of Micronesia's children studied Japanese during the 1930s and formed close ties with their colonizers. As one interviewee recalled, many elders today "can still speak perfect Japanese and still consider Japanese as their brothers."
Others tell of Marshall Islanders serving as scouts for U.S. Marines and boat-loads of Marshallese trying to escape to the Americans at Jaluit Atoll. On Mili Atoll, Marshallese and Korean laborers organized a rebellion and killed some Japanese soldiers. They escaped to a small islet, but Japanese troops hunted them down and executed everyone, including 84 Marshallese men, women, and children.
How did liberation affect the Micronesians? The authors conclude that in some respects the Japanese way of life might have been more suited to Micronesians than the U.S. ideals of liberty and democracy, which clashed with many of the islanders' traditions, such as respect for hereditary tribal elders. Freedom, says one Micronesian, has come to symbolize all that is improper and wrong. "We become drunk and then destroy Marshallese customs because we say we are free to get drunk and then we do improper things. We are only 'free' improperly."