Scooter: The Douglas A-4 Skyhawk Story
Tommy H. Thomason. Manchester, UK: Crécy Publishing, 2011. 276 pp. Illus. Notes. $44.95.
Reviewed by Colonel Robert Hickerson, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)
Scooter, Tinker Toy, Mighty Midget, Bantam Bomber, and Heinemann’s Hotrod—the Douglas A-4 Skyhawk attracted what is surely a record number of nicknames for such a small aircraft. This plethora of monikers reflects the affection felt by the many pilots who strapped on the little jet (rather than strapped into it) during its successful half-century career in the U.S. naval forces. In fact, the Skyhawk, which enjoyed a production run of 2,960 aircraft, soldiers on today in the air forces of Israel, Singapore, Brazil, and Argentina, 58 years after its first flight in 1954.
The A4D was the ultimate expression of the genius of Edward Heinemann (although AD Skyraider fans may argue that point), chief engineer for Douglas Aircraft in the early 1950s when the A-4 project first surfaced. Heinemann believed the early jets of the day were too heavy and complex. Bucking the conventional wisdom, he proposed a simple design that would weigh in at half the anticipated heft, yet prove capable of meeting the Navy’s operational requirement for a lightweight, carrier-based jet nuclear bomber.
Heinemann designed the A-4 to incorporate two seemingly incompatible characteristics: the capability to externally carry the large Mk-7 nuclear weapon without exceeding a wingspan of 27 feet, 6 inches, the maximum that could be accommodated on Essex-class aircraft carriers without a complicated and heavy wing-folding mechanism. Despite its initial design to such specific requirements, the venerable A-4 proved extremely adaptable, and with the advent of the multiple-carriage bomb rack, performed capably in a wide range of conventional missions.
Thomason’s book enters a field crowded with excellent works on the A-4, and other reviewers have questioned the need for yet another treatise on this popular aircraft. Earlier works are more readable, more suitable as coffee-table decoration, or better sources on combat history and employment. Yet in my opinion, Scooter fills a niche not yet occupied by providing a comprehensive treatment of the Skyhawk’s engineering design and development, an aspect of A-4 history worth preserving. That the author chose this emphasis is not surprising, considering his background in fight-test engineering.
He describes well the many challenges encountered by Heinemann and his team, especially the tradeoffs and compromises required to meet the design specifications while stripping every possible ounce from the prototype. Especially well documented is the fact that early flight testing and operational evaluation demonstrated Heinemann’s team had gone too far with weight reductions and simplicity, resulting in the need for substantial changes in follow-on versions, especially in the flight-control systems. Indeed, the A-4 grew in weight and complexity throughout its lengthy career, yet maintained its well-deserved reputation for making it back to the ship or base despite significant combat damage.
There’s a lot to like about this book. Published in a large, attractive format, the work includes many unusual photos not found in other publications. To illustrate his technical points, Thomason provides many effective diagrams and graphs, some of which he created specifically for this publication. The inclusion of informative footnotes points the reader to additional background information. In addition, fascinating sidebars give first-person accounts, including a comparison of the A-4 to the A-7 from the standpoint of a pilot who flew the former in combat before transitioning to the latter. Finally, Thomason’s treatment of the nuclear mission is the best in print.
On the negative side, the volume of technical data provided on subjects peripheral to the design of the actual aircraft, such as comparing the A-4 to other aircraft that were considered for the carrier-based nuclear mission, is somewhat distracting. Additionally, the author allocates an inordinate amount of space to a discussion of the Navy’s 1960 VAX/VA(L) competition (the development of a replacement for the AD Skyraider and A4D Skyhawk), including a number of pages devoted to A-7 pictures and description. Moreover, there are some errors in the identification of ordnance in photo captions (which the author has acknowledged and corrected on his blog).
However, on balance the pluses far outweigh the minuses, and this book deserves a place in any complete Skyhawk library. It’s not a fast or easy read, but it rewards the enthusiast with an abundance of information not available in any other single work. It will prove invaluable to Skyhawk modelers, and any reader, no matter what his or her experience with the A-4, will learn something from virtually every page.
Final Victory: FDR’s Extraordinary World War II Presidential Campaign
Stanley Weintraub. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2012. 306 pp. Illus. Source notes. $26.
Reviewed by Jeffrey G. Barlow
In the spring of 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a desperately ill man, suffering from the effects of extreme hypertension and congestive heart failure. Long confined to seated positions by his continuing struggle with polio, the President had lost weight in recent months, and photographs of this period reveal a man with gaunt, haggard features. Yet FDR was a fighter, and he was determined to seek a fourth term as President of the United States. Broadcasting from his presidential train in San Diego to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago after he was nominated for a fourth term, Roosevelt remarked that as a “good soldier” he would comply with the delegates’ overwhelming request that he run again.
Stanley Weintraub’s Final Victory relates the fascinating story of FDR’s last campaign for office. The author, a professor emeritus of arts and humanities at Penn State, has written more than 40 books covering a variety of subjects, including both English literature and American history. Weintraub now returns to the Roosevelt White House that he last investigated in his 2011 book Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941.
While the Democratic Party’s nomination was a foregone conclusion, the decision of whom to select as his running mate was an altogether different matter, as the author makes clear in the book’s very interesting second chapter. Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s third-term VP, was a staunch member of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. However, his political liabilities with the increasingly vocal conservative Democrats of the Old South made FDR, always the pragmatist, unwilling to lend strong support for his candidacy this fourth time out.
Unable to come down strongly for any particular candidate, the President eventually was persuaded by suggestions from party leaders to pick Harry S. Truman, the senator from Missouri who had been heading the wartime Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. The so-called Truman Committee sought to assure that the country’s defense contracts were being carried out at acceptable costs. Weintraub notes that Truman, who had no interest in being vice president, had written his daughter, Margaret, in July, “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a nice address but I’d rather not move in through the back door.” Nonetheless, he was eventually persuaded to allow his name to be offered up. And on the final ballot, he won with 1,031 delegates to Henry Wallace’s eventual 66.
Weintraub also offers an interesting account of the political campaigning of FDR’s Republican opponent, Thomas E. Dewey. The governor of New York and former hard-charging district attorney for Manhattan, Dewey was 20 years the President’s junior. But for all his youth and vigor, the immaculately dressed Republican nominee lacked Roosevelt’s warmth and humor on the campaign trail. Weintraub comments at one point that Dewey avoided shaking hands at public gatherings and “remained unsmiling, even at press conferences.”
Despite the demands of campaigning, FDR could not ignore his wartime responsibilities as commander-in-chief. In the book’s fourth chapter, Weintraub provides a brief account of his trip to Pearl Harbor in the latter half of July 1944, on board the cruiser USS Baltimore (CA-68), to take part in a Pacific war strategy meeting with Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean Areas commander; and General Douglas MacArthur, the Southwest Pacific Area commander. During this detailed meeting, Nimitz explained to the President how the Navy hoped to move forward with its planned operations in the central Pacific that were moving ever closer to Japan’s home islands. MacArthur expounded on his plans to begin taking back the Philippines from the Japanese army by staging a landing there within three months.
In the book’s final chapters, Weintraub provides a varied account of both candidates’ hectic politicking during the campaign’s remaining weeks. In late October, while FDR hurriedly appeared in Philadelphia and then Chicago, Dewey spoke in Buffalo. In the end, despite a fairly close popular vote, Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term. Final Victory furnishes the reader with an informative look at the history of this wartime presidential campaign. It also serves as a reminder that however much some things in U.S. politics seem to change, others remain the same.
One Marine’s War: A Combat Interpreter’s Quest for Humanity in the Pacific
Gerald A. Meehl. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2012. 288 pp. Illus. Map. Notes. Bibliog. Index. $34.95.
Reviewed by Robert Fahs
In One Marine’s War, Gerald A. Meehl tells the story of Robert Sheeks, a Japanese-language officer and World War II veteran who served with the 2d Marine Division in the Pacific. Sheeks’ experiences range from childhood under the Japanese occupation of Shanghai to Harvard and training at the U.S. Navy’s Japanese Language School, and then to island combat and postwar reconstruction in East Asia. Writing in the third person, Meehl derives the narrative from interviews with his subject, and to a lesser extent from reading archival sources preserved at the Japanese Language School in Boulder, Colorado.
Opening with “a peculiar incident” from the 1944 battle for Saipan, Meehl develops a more telling perspective than if he had started Sheeks’ story in childhood, as a more conventional journey-to-war testament would. For although Sheeks began the war with a personal animosity against the Japanese, by 1944 his role as translator involved him in dramatic efforts to save individual Japanese soldiers and civilians, even as the Marines perfected their skills in particularly brutal forms of engagement that emerged with the slow and costly American advance across the Pacific.
At Saipan, the presence of civilian populations complicated the determined Japanese defense of islands that had begun two years earlier at Guadalcanal. As Japanese soldiers slowly retreated from U.S. Marines landing on the coast, they continued to resist from the caves that were also inhabited by thousands of local Japanese, Korean, and Chamorro civilians. The Japanese tried to prevent them from surrendering to the Americans.
Following a logic that might find support today in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Field Manual on Counterinsurgency (first released as a government document in December 2006, FM 3-24 MCWP 3-33.5 under the direction of then–Lieutenant General David A. Petraeus), the role of language officers like young Bob Sheeks was to weaken resistance and protect the civilian population , by using megaphones and broadcasting equipment to talk enemy soldiers out of their subterranean redoubts and into surrendering.
Aside from showing how Sheeks developed compassion for the Japanese after hating them for atrocities he witnessed as a child, another important strength of the book is that the story also demonstrates the practical rationale and early precedent for U.S. tactics that have only recently become part of mainstream counterinsurgency doctrine. Not only did Sheeks’ efforts to suborn the enemy at first yield only limited results, but even when they did succeed, they remained little appreciated and poorly understood by his superiors in the field.
For example, at the battle for Tinian Sheeks built on his experience at Saipan to gain the surrender of a Japanese warrant officer, who then re-entered a cave seeking others to join him. Unfortunately, shot in the arm by his own troops, the officer barely made it back out alive. And when an American colonel in Sheeks’ division interrogated the enemy officer, he also (typically) viewed him as a mere “traitor,” dismissing the potential of turning recalcitrant enemies in the midst of combat.
Meehl’s narrative becomes more frustrating when it turns to Sheeks’ subsequent career. After completing a graduate degree in Chinese studies from Harvard in 1948, Sheeks quickly moved in government from serving as a Pentagon China analyst to becoming the U.S. Information Agency director and U.S. Embassy public affairs officer in Taiwan. In 1952 he switched to an ostensibly private role as the Malaya/Singapore field representative for an anticommunist nongovernmental organization, the Committee for a Free Asia (CFA).
In Kuala Lumpur with the CFA, Sheeks participated in the British-led defeat of Communists in Malaya, which remains perhaps the single-most effective counterinsurgency campaign since 1945. However, Meehl fails to illuminate Sheeks’ transfers between government agencies, or to analyze how his wartime experiences might have benefitted the British counterinsurgency campaign in Malaya.
Indeed, scholars need to study more closely how the innovative roles of language officers and other nonconventional initiatives in World War II contributed to the extensive and poorly understood counterinsurgency operations that played a crucial role in U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, especially in Asia. In the meantime, Meehl’s presentation of Sheeks’ story comes as a welcome contribution to the body of evidence in this field.
Those Who Have Borne the Battle: A History of America’s Wars and Those Who Fought Them
James Wright. New York: Public Affairs, 2012. 331 pp. Bibliog. Index. $27.99.
Reviewed by Michael S. Neiberg
This book is more sympathetic than argumentative. It emerged from the desires of the author, a former Marine, history professor, and college president, to tell the story of American veterans. Having met with many former combatants in Iraq and Afghanistan, James Wright sought to understand their situation in its historical context, while explaining to readers the relationship between the nation’s wars and the men and women who fight them.
Especially in an era when medical care for veterans is inconsistent and their suicide rates alarmingly high, the topic of these people and how the United States has cared for them is critical. Wright’s approach is personal, with a great deal of first-person writing and harkening back to individual experience. Not for nothing does the book begin with Wright’s recollection of what the military meant to those in his childhood hometown of Galena, Illinois. However, as a scholar he rejects much of the mythology Americans have created about their wars; Wright strives to see those conflicts as they really were.
Each chapter begins with a historical survey of a war or era of hostilities. The general outlines will be familiar to students of warfare, which the author makes no attempts to sanitize. This provides a framework within which to contextualize the veterans’ role in the years that followed. His treatment of World War II is particularly relevant to this point, as Wright highlights the privileging of white males by virtue of the U.S. system developed to prosecute the war. Particularly galling is that German prisoners of war were invited to a performance by Lena Horne—whereas African-American soldiers were not. This also stands as an apt metaphor for many U.S. shortcomings during that period.
Wright sees the true watershed moment not in 1941–45, as do many historians, but in the Korean War that began in 1950. The United States could not even agree on what to call it, symbolizing the new intellectual terrain the nation had entered. President Harry S. Truman’s positive reply to a reporter’s question as to whether Korea was a “police action” didn’t stick. Neither did the “Korean conflict.” It was not until 1998 that Congress officially named it the Korean War.
In Wright’s formulation, with Korea began the modern American understanding of war: limited in the force deployed and the political objectives sought, fought far from home at low intensity but long duration, and involving only a small percentage of the U.S. population. While some served, most were able to go ahead with life as usual. But since that time, these wars have also been a watershed for veterans, who rarely have come home to public acclaim (or even acknowledgment), often have had inadequate post-service care, and, with the notable exceptions of the Vietnam and Korean Veterans’ Memorials in Washington, have even lacked commemoration.
But if American veterans are largely ignored or held at arm’s length, Wright notes that the rhetoric and money have been effusive. Even during the Vietnam period, the author observes, no American politician—and few citizens—blamed soldiers for the mistakes of their leaders. Funds for veteran’s care have been sacrosanct, even if the money is often buried in a mass of red tape that prevents veterans from getting the resources they need. The pattern mostly holds true today, with Americans reporting even in these austere times that funding for veterans should not be cut.
And yet, judging by Wright’s book along with Rachel Maddow’s Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (Crown, 2012), the previously noted trend of involving only a fraction of the population has resulted in a system that pushes the burden for military service onto ever-fewer people while at the same time demanding unreasonable sacrifices of those in uniform. Americans want their wars far away from civil society. As Wright notes, for too many Americans supporting the troops substitutes for asking one’s own son or daughter to join them as part of a volunteer force. Unlike Maddow’s book, Wright’s does not propose a quick-fix list of solutions. Instead he asks the reader to think, to reflect, and to empathize with those who have borne the battle.