Light This Candle: The Life and Times of Alan Shepard, America's First Spaceman
Neal Thompson. New York: Crown, 2004. 464 pp. Photos. Bib. Index. $27.50.
Reviewed by David Hartman
It is hard to believe, with our celebrity-saturated media, a biography of the first U.S. astronaut in space has not hit the bookstores until now. More than 40 years after Alan Shepard blasted into space for a 15-minute historic flight, that book finally is here. There is no need for anyone else to write another one soon, because Neal Thompson's is so good.
Light This Candle is really a "twofer." It is storytelling at its best, about a larger-than-life naval aviator, test pilot, astronaut, and husband and father. It also is a riveting reminder, in emotional detail, of some 40 years of significant events of the U.S. military in combat, aviation history, and the space race with the Soviet Union.
Like all good journalists, Thompson is an exhaustive researcher who answers the who-what-when-where-why questions with an "all the facts, ma'am" accuracy, and then proceeds to totally suck the reader into the passions of one momentous event after another. There are life-and-death situations to be decided in sec onds or minutes, personal exchanges electric with personal and historical significance, an MIT computer engineer in his bathrobe who has less than 90 minutes to save the Apollo 14 moon landing, and supercompetitive astronauts who try to ace out each other nearly every second of their waking lives.
Thompson writes that for Shepard, "life was one big competition," and that word, "competition," might be the key to understanding, or trying to understand, Alan Shepard. Colleagues described him as "annoyingly competitive, the icy commander, charming and warm, aloof and remote, generous, a hard-cold egotist, hilarious, cocky and rude, a mystery and prankster, enigmatic and cool, happy-go-lucky, competent-and funny." (Watching one of the many early rockets blow up, crash, and burn, he said, "What do you expect from the lowest bidder? I hope they fix that!")
Fact was, people around him seldom knew exactly which Al Shepard would show up at any given get-together. Thompson suggests that he found "a more human, complex and complete man than the Corvette-driving stud" described by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979). New Hampshire born and raised by parents whose ancestry went back to the Mayflower, Shepard was a disciplined New Englander, committed to excellence and duty, and very smart. he had a 145 IQ, skipped both the sixth and eighth grades, was 17 his first year at Annapolis, and was commissioned at age 21 on 6 june 1944.
Over the course of his feverishly frenzied career Shepard was a superb aviator and test pilot, astronaut, and NASA manager. After the Freedom 7 flight, he came down with a debilitating ear infection that grounded him for nearly ten years. Hoping to go into space again, he stuck it out (another personality trait) and in 1971 was commander of Apollo 14. he became, at the time, the oldest astronaut and 1 of only 12 men to walk on the moon.
Along with the perfectionist at work there was the "bad boy, hot dogger" Shepard whose career somehow survived a near civil arrest and court-martial. And, given his personality and reported skirt-chasing, many suggest that Louise, his wife of 53 years, must have been a saint.
What makes this book hard to put down is the fact that Thompson puts the reader right there: with 21-year-old Ensign Shepard on the destroyer Cogswell (DD-651) on picket duty in "Kamikaze Alley" near Okinawa; in the cockpit of Shepard's Banshee jet, flying a very wounded airplane to the deck of the Oriskany (CV-34); with the astronaut candidates surviving their initial "sadistic" medical tests; in the first space capsule, after hours of launch delays, with Shepard peeing in his shiny silver space suit while all of NASA wondered whether he would short-circuit the entire rocket, as Shepard blurts out to launch control, "Why don't you fix your little problem and light this candle!" And on the moon, with Shepard hitting golf balls into the moon dust.
We know the outcomes of all the space launches of the 1960s and early 1970s. By making each of us a fly on the wall in capsules, mission control, and living rooms across America, Thompson describes several launches so dramatically, with such suspense, that we wonder, will this mission make it safely? he takes history from the textbooks and plants it firmly in our heads and hearts.
Mr. Hartman cohosted Good Morning America from 1975 to 1986. he served three years active duty as an officer in the U.S. Air Force.
Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea
Robert K. Massie. New York: Random House, 2003. 865 pp. Maps. Notes. Bib. Index. $35.00.
Reviewed by Andrew Wilson
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Dreadnought (New York: Random House, 1991) has done it again, producing a tremendous bit of storytelling while bringing to life the personalities, events, and ships involved in the Great War at sea. Castles of Steel is a clear, beautifully written history of a less-than-clear conflict told by a master biographer and historian.
Drawing on official sources, personal memoirs, and contemporary accounts, Robert Massie weaves together the inter secting lives of the players on both sides of World War I's naval conflict while simultaneously dissecting the battles and actions that made their names famous. Sir John Jellicoe, Sir David Beatty, Sir Christopher Cradock, Alfred von Tirpitz, Maximillian von Spee, Reinhard! Scheer, and Franz von Hipper-all these and others are brought to life within Castles of Steel.
From the assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in june 1914 to the scuttling of the German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow in june 1919, Massie covers the entire sweep of the conflict at sea. For the reader not familiar with the Great War, what Massie makes clear is that the war at sea was much more than the Battle of jutland. Massie also covers the battles of Coronel, the Falklands, Dogger Bank, Gallipoli, and the Yarmouth raid, in addition to discussing new weapons such as U-boats, Zeppelins, and the first operational aircraft carriers.
When the war ended in November 1918, neither the British Grand Fleet nor the German High Seas Fleet had been destroyed, or even decisively beaten in battle. On several occasions the Germans should have been destroyed. Why weren't they? Perhaps the most important reason a decisive battle never occurred was because of communications, or lack thereof. In more than one instance a total lack of communications kept key elements of a force out of an engagement, and therefore unable to influence the outcome of the battle. This failure was especially significant for the Royal Navy, as the Grand Fleet was superior in both numbers and firepower to the High Seas Fleet, and on at least two occasions the Germans escaped destruction by the British because of communications failures and a rigid adherence to the chain of command.
The British Admiralty, with the help of captured German codebooks, managed to decipher much of the High Seas Fleet's wireless communications. The office for such code work was headed by Sir Alfred Ewing and was known as Room 40. Unfortunately, in many cases the decoded message traffic was delayed in getting to the fleet at sea, sometimes by as much as two hours or more, severely reducing its benefits.
At the Battle of Dogger Bank, Admiral Beatty's ability to communicate effectively with his battlecruisers was greatly hindered by smoke, battle damage, and the speed of the ships themselves. This breakdown allowed a beleaguered German battlecruiser squadron to escape further destruction. Communications were an even greater factor in the Battle of jutland, as signal intercepts were ignored or given little credence by tradition-bound British officers (including some who did not appreciate the usefulness of code breaking).
While Massie introduces nothing controversial or ground breaking for the naval specialist, the issues and stories he does cover will be new to many simply because of superior writing and presentation. Castles of Steel blows a fresh breeze into the sails of today's naval literature. This work truly belongs on the shelf of everyone who is serious about understanding not only World War I, but also the technological change and complexities that were introduced and tested during the conflict. This work also illuminates for the nonspecialist the horror of modern naval warfare. In addition, Castles of Steel serves as an excellent introduction for those wishing to understand the naval history and literature of World War II. In the final analysis, Massie's work will be a classic of Great War and naval literature for years to come.
Mr. Wilson is a doctoral ,student in history at George Washington University and works for the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service as an intelligence specialist.
The Face of Naval Battle: The Human Experience of Modern War at Sea
Edited by John Reeve and David Stevens. Sydney: Alien & Unwin, 2003. 383 pp. Illus. Index. Aus$39.95 (US$30.87).
Reviewed by Commodore James Goldrick, Royal Australian Navy
This book can be purchased through the publisher at www.allen-unwin.com.au (U.S. and U.K. editions will be available in june 2004).
The Chief of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN), Vice Admiral Chris Ritchie, describes the purpose of this book in the foreword, to describe "the individual and group experience of maritime combat in twentieth century warfare." The Face of Naval Battle succeeds in doing this. It has its origins in the 2001 Australian Naval History Conference (a biennial event), but the book is much more than a collection of individual papers. It has been tightly edited by John Reeve and David Stevens, and the volume is presented as a coherent and well-written whole. The text is nicely laid out, easy to read, and comprehensively illustrated. It is a credit to its publishers.
The Face of Naval Battle has much to say to present-day naval personnel, as well as to those in other services. The Australian naval experience is historically one of worldwide operations, and not only in Australian ships. By one estimate, for example, Australian naval reservists serving on loan to the British constituted some 10% of the Royal Navy's antisubmarine specialists in the Battle of the Atlantic. That worldwide experience continues to today with operations in the Persian Gulf, where RAN ships have been serving side by side with those of the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other nations. The Face of Naval Battle also is much more than a book about the Australian naval experience, and it needs to be read by a wider audience.
Within the general theme of the human dimension of maritime warfare, there are contributions from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The subjects range from the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War, to the German East Asiatic Squadron's activities in 1914, to the Battle of the Atlantic, to the future of naval warfare. It includes submarine and antisubmarine operations, surface warfare, and naval aviation, as well as important but generally neglected subjects such as naval medicine. John Reeve's introduction is a masterly survey of the major issues and can stand on its own as a substantial contribution to the subject. The contributors also are not confined to historians or naval officers. One of the presentations that provoked the most interest at the conference, entitled "Stress in War," came from a psychologist, Dr. Colin Wastell.
A strength of the book is the emphasis, both explicit and implicit, on the fact that the strain of naval operations derives not only from actual combat but also from the continuousness of naval operations. Though the technologies of steam and electricity have combined to reduce some of its power, the sea always has been and always will remain a relentless enemy. The reality of 20th-century warfare was that the military threat became continuous and pervasive, coming unseen from under the sea or at little or no notice from over it. Michael Whitby's analysis of the diaries of a World War II destroyer and escort group commander who served with both the British and Canadians provides a particularly good insight into the strains and difficulties this created for individuals. Lee Cordner's thoughtful recollections of his command experience in the 1991 Gulf War and in later operations give a more recent perspective on this issue and convey very clearly the extent to which in both war and peace the maritime environment remains unforgiving.
This is a book for serving professionals as well as historians and veterans, although it is something that can be read and enjoyed by the layman. It is a first-rate addition to a small but increasing canon of literature dealing with a component of naval warfare that has, for too long, received too little attention.
Commodore Goldrick commanded the Royal Australian Navy task group deployed to the Arabian Gulf in the first half of 2002. he currently is Commandant of the Australian Defense Force Academy.