Islands of the Damned: A Marine at War in the Pacific
R. V. Burgin. New York: NAL Caliber, 2010. 296 pp. Maps. Illus. $24.95.
Reviewed by Robert K. Krick
Praise for Eugene B. Sledge’s memoir of his Marine Corps service, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (Presidio Press, 1981), has become so universal that it has attained the texture of an established verdict. Sledge’s classic seems sure to have the longevity of Homer’s epics about the Trojan War, composed more than three millennia ago.
R. V. Burgin’s Islands of the Damned vividly records war on the front lines with the same unit in which Sledge fought—not just the same regiment or company or even platoon, but the very same small mortar detachment, in Company K, 3d Battalion, 5th Marines. Through his two campaigns, Sledge took orders from Corporal Burgin at Peleliu and Sergeant Burgin on Okinawa.
Islands of the Damned also describes Burgin’s earlier experiences on Cape Gloucester, New Britain—the first of the author’s three “damned” islands. The New Britain passages seem to me to be the book’s best section, perhaps because less primary material on that campaign exists.
Candor shines through the memoir repeatedly and to strikingly good effect. Sergeant Burgin expresses calm scorn for rampant rumors of a “Mad Ghoul” running amok in the Pavuvu rest camps, and he insists that he saw none of the suicides widely rumored among Marines who received “Dear John” letters from faithless wives. The battle chapters recount dreadful tragedies affecting confused and disoriented men who injured friends. Burgin describes the events with compassion and invokes a warrior’s code: “As long as any of us is alive, none of us will reveal who it was . . . . When we get together, the last few of us, we don’t talk about it.” On Peleliu, Burgin admits drawing a bead on a craven officer, a “yellow son of a bitch” who “flat out ran”—but he did not fire.
Good maps, always essential for military narratives, illustrate Burgin’s book. They serve their purpose well in most instances, although it would have been useful—and easy—to identify Hill 140 above Peleliu’s Horseshoe, given its prominence in the narrative. The maps provide the necessary context to untangle some of the text’s orientation errors.
Well-proportioned chapters describe Burgin’s youth in Texas and the Australian interlude between campaigns, where he found romance with a girl who became his wife after the war.
Inevitably, given the towering reputation of Sledge’s memoir, Burgin’s book will resonate primarily as an echo of that renowned narrative. In some degree that is a bit unfair. On the other hand, the connection will draw far more attention to this book than it otherwise would have garnered. In combination with the profile resulting from the much-discussed HBO miniseries The Pacific, which features Sledge and includes a Burgin character, Islands of the Damned will benefit from substantial collateral publicity.
Sledge clearly admired Burgin, calling him “as fine a sergeant as I ever saw.” Burgin’s narrative reciprocates some of the same spirit, but he also pointedly criticizes Sledge’s lack of appreciation for two officers. One of those lieutenants “did pull some dumb things,” Burgin admits. He describes some astoundingly feckless behavior, but a bit later the lieutenant would “have me laughing about something so hard I’d forgotten all about it.”
The prose in Islands of the Damned flows gracefully, but that constitutes an uneven blessing. Dallas journalist Bill Marvel (not to be confused with William Marvel, the Civil War historian and author of books on the Appomattox campaign and Andersonville Prison) served as amanuensis for Burgin’s memoirs. Marvel’s considerable skill adorns the book but at the price of seeming to remove the narrator from direct connection with the reader. Short brisk sentences and other literary devices accomplish their goals. In the process, though, much of the frankness and stark candor that makes Sledge’s account so moving goes missing from this smoothly professional text.
Islands of the Damned is a good book—a very good book—but it does not warrant a niche in the pantheon of stellar memoirs about the Pacific’s bitterly won beaches.
Mr. Krick was chief historian of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park for 31 years and is the author of 18 books, including Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain (The University of North Carolina Press, 1990), winner of the Douglas Southall Freeman Prize, and more than 100 articles.
John Barry: An American Hero in the Age of Sail
Tim McGrath. Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2010. 513 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. Bib. Index. $35.
Reviewed by Frederick Leiner
Tim McGrath’s biography of Captain John Barry (1745-1803) is so substantial that a prospective reader will inevitably wonder if Barry’s life could possibly be interesting enough to warrant embarking on such a long literary voyage. Those who do will be rewarded. McGrath writes in a lively fashion, he is obviously enthralled with his subject, and he energetically drives through Barry’s life and times, moving, as it were, under a topgallant breeze. Drawing on original sources and a wide reading of the secondary literature, McGrath is equally at home describing the tactical sequences of Barry’s sea battles, the tableau of the China trade at Macao, and a brawl in Philadelphia. After reading John Barry: An American Hero in the Age of Sail, one has a nuanced sense of Barry’s personality and character as a man and naval officer.
Barry led a full life. Born to a poor Irish family probably in 1745, he went to sea to escape the dreadful life of landless Catholic farmers in County Wexford and came to America in 1760, where he made Philadelphia his home. He first became master of a vessel at age 21, trading with Barbados. He was entrepreneurial as well, eventually investing in consortiums that owned ships. The great merchant Robert Morris became his employer and patron, sending Barry to the West Indies as master of the Black Prince. Barry returned to Philadelphia the day he heard the news of the battles of Lexington and Concord, and although he made one more “peacetime” trading voyage to London, on his return, he was made a captain in the Continental Navy.
His service is the stuff of legend. McGrath captures it all: every storm, every battle, all the political maneuvering behind the commands. As commander of the Lexington, Barry captured the Edward, the first Royal Navy ship to strike her colors to the Americans. On a suspenseful riverine mission, Barry transferred his men onto barges, rowed downriver at night past the British army ensconced in Philadelphia, burned their forage supplies along the Delaware River in southern New Jersey, captured and burned two small British transports coming upriver, made a narrow escape, and sent some confiscated oysters to General Washington. Given the frigate Raleigh, Barry escaped with some of his men when two British warships took her after a difficult battle.
Most famously, Barry then commanded the frigate Alliance in the last three years of the war, on voyages to France, through mutinies and near-mutinies (which he intelligently and ruthlessly suppressed), storms, battles, and logistical difficulties. Barry proved an energetic and resourceful commander, dedicated to the patriot cause. McGrath brings all that to life in fantastic detail, and illustrates the battles using a number of excellent phased diagrams.
With the coming of peace and independence, Barry commanded one of the earliest Philadelphia ships to trade in China and supported the adoption of the U.S. Constitution—unafraid to use a gang of waterfront toughs and seamen to compel two recalcitrant delegates to be physically present, thus ensuring a quorum for the Pennsylvania legislature’s vote. In the 1790s, Congress consulted Barry about recreating the navy, and when continuing Barbary outrages finally prompted the construction of the service’s first six frigates, George Washington’s administration made Barry the first on the list of new captains, in charge of building the frigate United States. Barry commanded her throughout the Quasi-War with France (1798-1801), and nurtured a new generation of officers named Decatur, Stewart, and Somers.
McGrath weaves into the story of Barry’s life his relationships with his wife, impoverished Irish relatives, and many friends. Barry must have been a gregarious man, expressing himself with brio in an Irish brogue; McGrath notes that if Barry’s “distinctive spelling” indicates a phonetic approach, his accent was shown by phrases such as a “Grate dale of Art.”
The book contains glitches. First, McGrath has not mastered naval usages and makes many distracting mistakes: cannon did not fire out of “portholes”; sailors in the cross-trees were lookouts, not “mast-headers”; a defeated captain did not come aboard on a “gangplank”; the “code of naval warfare” did not mean combat typically “began with a polite hail”; and British tactics were not to aim their cannon high to dismast, but to fire into the hulls of the enemy. Second, sprinkled throughout the book are factual errors: Tench Coxe was never Secretary of the Treasury; the Constitution was not launched into the Charles River; James Barron did not outlive all of Barry’s officers (Charles Stewart did). Third, McGrath’s colorful writing sometimes verges on bombast or cliché: For McGrath, a ships’ bell tolled “ominously . . . as if for a funeral.” Barry could not have found “himself literally dry-docked,” because he was not put in a dock, and America in 1776 had no dry dock. Finally, McGrath constantly resorts to assertions about what Barry was feeling or thinking about events, and despite extensive footnotes, it is scarcely possible that the evidence supports McGrath’s assumptions, however sensible they may be.
These mistakes are minor blemishes. John Barry: An American Hero in the Age of Sail is a great read and an absorbing account of a drama-filled life.
Mr. Leiner, an attorney and historian, is a frequent contributor to Naval History. His most recent book is The End of Barbary Terror: America’s 1815 War against the Pirates of North Africa (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Fortress Rabaul: The Battle for the Southwest Pacific, January 1942-April 1943
Bruce Gamble. Minneapolis, MN: Zenith Press, 2010. 398 pp. Illus. Intro. Notes. Bib. Index. $28.
Reviewed by Barrett Tillman
Bruce Gamble has carved a niche among World War II historians. His books on the Southwest Pacific theater have been uniformly well received, including a biography of Marine Corps ace Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, a history of the Black Sheep squadron, and the story of Australia’s “Lark Force” on New Britain. A former naval flight officer, Gamble understands aviation, and his expertise shows in his latest offering, a survey of Japanese and Allied air operations in the region through April 1943. The fact that one of his uncles flew B-17 missions in the area adds a sense of immediacy to the telling.
The 15 months between January 1942 and the historic downing of a plane carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto spanned not only time but considerable geography. From the Japanese naval air facility at Rabaul, New Britain, the 435 nautical miles to Port Morseby, New Guinea, were exceeded by the 575 to Guadalcanal. Those were serious distances for combat aircraft of the era, let alone over open ocean and mountainous terrain. Yet American, Australian, and Japanese aircrews routinely flew combat missions in the region, often exchanging blows in turn like pugilists slugging toe-to-toe.
Naval readers will be familiar with two incidents in Fortress Rabaul: the defense of the USS Lexington (CV-2) in February 1942 and the Battle of the Coral Sea in early May. The author places both in context of the developing regional conflict as both sides sought to defend their existing bases while planning offensive operations.
Gamble dissects the strengths and weaknesses of both sides, providing an American audience with rare insight into the Australian effort. They lived, worked, and flew in a miserable environment. Living conditions ranged from poor to terrible, with a perennial shortage of aircraft, parts, food, housing, and personnel. Weather was the common enemy to all airmen, as tropical storms claimed victims without regard to nationality, equipment, or experience. Gamble’s analysis includes some revelations: the Japanese insistence of building up men and supplies at the expense of food, and the debilitating conditions for the Allies at Port Morseby. The “shoestring” operation at Guadalcanal often was no better.
As bad as conditions were for friend and foe at operating bases, by far the worst situation was that of Allied prisoners. The Japanese, who practiced routine brutality on POWs, often outdid themselves at Rabaul. The prisoners’ dolorous story comprises a book within a book, as Gamble describes the perpetrators and victims of wartime atrocities.
Yet despite the shortages and hardships, the Allies made progress. The often convoluted command structure under General Douglas MacArthur was much improved with the arrival of Lieutenant General George C. Kenney, who took over the Fifth Air Force in September 1942. Though Kenney got results, Gamble is objective in his assessment of MacArthur’s air chief, who perennially overstated his command’s achievements, even in the face of contrary evidence. Similarly, MacArthur’s reliance on self-important sycophants did nothing to alleviate inter-Allied tensions.
One of the most intriguing developments in the Fifth Air Force was the emergence of low-level antiship bombers. Incredibly, early skip bombing experiments involved B-17s, but innovators such as Major Paul “Pappy” Gunn perfected the technique with B-25s and A-20s (though Kenney tried to take most of the credit). Gunn also developed the “gunship” concept, cramming heavy batteries of .50-caliber machine guns in the noses of bombers to suppress enemy antiaircraft fire. Both developments were successful.
But as the author demonstrates, success always came at a price. Gamble traces the fortunes of two prominent officers—Brigadier General Kenneth N. Walker and Captain Harl Pease Jr., both of whom received posthumous Medals of Honor.
Fortress Rabaul concludes with the Yamamoto interception of 18 April 1943. Gamble combines previous investigations with his own work to dissect the controversial claims regarding which P-38 pilots downed the two bombers carrying Yamamoto and his staff. Despite decades of conflicting stories from then-Captain Thomas Lanphier Jr., the author presents solid evidence that only Lieutenant Rex T. Barber was positioned to destroy the admiral’s aircraft and shared in downing the second one.
Fortress Rabaul is well illustrated with 5 maps and 16 pages of photos. Serious students will appreciate the 26 pages of notes and extensive bibliography. Meanwhile, Gamble’s next book will take the Rabaul story through V-J Day. Pacific theater enthusiasts and historians alike will await it eagerly.
Union Combined Operations in the Civil War
Craig L. Symonds, editor. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2010. 240 pp. Illus. Notes. Index. $45.
Reviewed by Robert M. Browning Jr.
This collection of ten essays edited by Civil War scholar Craig Symonds conveniently pulls together information on a rarely discussed topic. Since the 1978 publication of Rowena Reed’s seminal work, Combined Operations in the Civil War (Naval Institute Press), little has been written separately on the subject. All but one of the essays were presented at a conference held at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, in 2008.
The first four articles assess combined operations in the Eastern theater. David Long examines Brigadier General Ambrose E. Burnside’s 1862 campaign in eastern North Carolina. He notes that the war’s first amphibious operation was plagued by its leaders’ lack of practice with this type of undertaking or doctrine. Long relates that the U.S. Navy’s role became one of support and not a fundamental part of the expedition—a central theme throughout the book. David Skaggs’ subsequent article complements Long’s. He reevaluates Reed’s work, arguing that the Burnside expedition failed to develop into a strategic component to Major General George B. McClellan’s Peninsula campaign. He asserts that McClellan lost an opportunity to cripple the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, thereby creating a huge logistical problem for the Confederate troops in the Eastern theater. That early failure, Skaggs believes, tied the hands of Burnside’s successors, who proved reluctant to exploit the weakness.
The Peninsula campaign is examined in essays by Mark Snell and Robert Sheridan. Snell offers readers a close look at one of the few model amphibious operations of the war—the arrival of Brigadier General William B. Franklin’s troops at Eltham’s Landing. Unlike most other Union combined efforts, the two armed services had planned the move in advance and the troops practiced landing operations. Only bad timing kept the Union forces from achieving their tactical objective. Sheridan assesses the Drewry’s Bluff expedition and presents an alternative historical take on it. He, like Skaggs, questions McClellan’s strategic decisions.
In the next two essays John Fisher and Francis DuCoin discuss operations that had broad political and strategic implications. Fisher’s essay is the only one to examine joint operations along the Gulf coast, specifically Texas. Again, disjointed movement, poor planning, and little coordination yielded diminished results. The Union forces’ successes there were made possible only because the Confederates had so few resources along the extensive coast to engage them. DuCoin analyzes the lost opportunities and poor coordination during the operations against Charleston. Here the Union forces had a clear advantage and several choices for attacking the Confederates. Only the complete lack of harmony among Union forces kept them from taking Charleston before 1865.
In their respective essays, Symonds and Chris Fonvielle survey combined operations late in the war. Symonds appraises Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant’s 1864 operations along the James River, and Fonvielle examines the Union efforts to close the port of Wilmington, North Carolina. Both operations suffered from confusion and missteps, affected by a lack of a unified command. Fonvielle, however, relates that once the Union leadership changed, the efforts to capture Wilmington became a model campaign.
The last two chapters glance at subsequent joint doctrine. Howard Fuller considers British reactions to Civil War joint operations. After assessing Union combined actions, the empire’s defense establishment did not make changes in the wake of the Union failures. The large-ship, large-gun, blue-water-fleet advocates believed that no changes were necessary.
The final article by Edward Wiser is the most cogent of the essays. He views factors that led to the unraveling of many of the operations and the reasons that change was not possible. He points out that the Union leadership failed to organize, train, and plan for amphibious operations. Wiser believes that had they done so, it would have shortened the war.
While most of the essays collected here synthesize material already available, they feature fresh interpretations throughout. Unfortunately, none of them cover joint operations along the Western rivers, which would have made the study more complete. Nevertheless, as a group, the authors have treated this frequently overlooked topic in a stimulating manner. This book is a starting place for further discussion on this important subject.