If Mahan Ran the Great Pacific War: An Analysis of World War II Naval Strategy
John A. Adams. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. 472 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. Index. $34.95.
Reviewed by Robert Love
History is the most vexing of academic disciplines. Unlike the hard sciences or engineering, its practitioners cannot know all, or even most, of the evidence that provides the basis for their arguments and conclusions. Historians possess no laws or axioms from which to draw results or explain outcomes, and they cannot replicate their findings through experiment. Histories written by academics therefore tend to be maddeningly unassertive and annoyingly tentative.
Historians also tend to be leery of counterfactual hypotheses—the "what if" propositions that are tested in the physical sciences by holding most variables constant while examining the results of adjusting a single input. Counterfactuals may be useful to the historian in reconstructing the past, but only to deduce which events-a decision, a defeat, or a victory
altered subsequent events and which did not. And while counterfactual hypotheses may illuminate turning points, they do not explain outcomes.If Mahan Ran the Great Pacific War departs from many of the important strictures characteristic of serious histories. John A. Adams, a businessman with no evident training in the historian's theory or methodology, aims to use Mahan's "teachings" or "lessons" as benchmarks to evaluate the conduct of the participants in the naval struggle in one theater of World War II. His readers should thus expect the text to reflect at least a thorough understanding of Mahan's career and more than a glancing familiarity with the extant scholarship and archival findings on the Pacific conflict. Neither expectation is wholly fulfilled.
It is to the author's credit that he provides a coherent and mostly accurate outline of the naval struggle in the Pacific, an account that is accessible and exploits some of the more recent secondary scholarship. However, the text is often inappropriately chatty and cliched, referring at one point to "sending it to Davy Jones' locker" and "pesky Americans." And Adams' citations reveal that he relied excessively on outdated U.S. Army official histories, undocumented secondary studies, and early postwar memoirs. Neither the text nor the bibliography suggest even a rudimentary grounding in the scholarly periodical literature; moreover, the author inexplicably failed to consult the U.S. Naval Institute's wonderful oral history collection.
A deeper understanding of the war in the Pacific theater—and some research of the archives—would have enabled Adams to avoid the errors that riddle this book. For instance, the author criticizes the prewar Royal Navy's preference for armored carrier decks over larger air groups without realizing that the British expected to fight their naval war in the North Sea and elsewhere within the range of land-based air. At no time did Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner serve as Admiral Ernest King's "operations officer." Rather than enjoying "incredible power" after his appointment as prime minister, as the author claims, Hideki Tojo complained bitterly about his lack of authority. Admiral King did not abandon the Orange Plan in 1942 owing to a lack of strength to implement that strategy, but because Orange always envisioned a simple bilateral conflict, whereas after Pearl Harbor the United States was a member of a large coalition at war with a large, opposing coalition. The campaign in the South Pacific in 1942 had less to do with American strategic preferences than with a formal agreement between London and Washington transferring responsibility for the defense of Australia and New Zealand from Britain to the United States.
Although If Mahan Ran the Great Pacific War promises an intriguing approach, the effort is undermined by a lack of historical and academic rigor and inadequate research, which results in many factual errors and conceptual misunderstandings.
Patriot Pirates: The Privateer War for Freedom and Fortune in the American Revolution
Robert H. Patton. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008. 243 pp. Illus. Notes. Bib. Index. $26.
Reviewed by Frederick C. Leiner
Patriot Pirates is a fast-paced, colorful account of American privateers during the Revolutionary War. Privateers were privately-owned ships, commissioned by the government in wartime to sail out and capture enemy vessels and their cargoes which, if brought into port and declared "good prize" by an admiralty court, were sold at auction and the proceeds distributed by fractional shares among the owners, officers, and crew according to "articles" drawn up before the cruise.
Robert Patton, grandson of World War II General George S. Patton Jr., tackled this relatively neglected subject in an effort to bring the Revolutionary War generation to life. He tells a series of vivid stories about the maritime feats of the privateersmen and the commercial exploits of the men who syndicated their ships. Privateers sought profits, not glory, in naval battles, and the tension between private entrepreneurship and the national purpose is Patton's underlying theme. The Continental Congress recognized that tension, too, with all the conflicts of interest privateering created. But Congress also realized that attacking British trade on the high seas was the chief method by which the costs of far-off war in America might be brought home to mercantile Britain. They knew that there was no alternative to privateers, despite their dubious reputation, because a beleaguered America and a financially strapped Congress could not pay for a sufficient navy.
Much of Patriot Pirates focuses on the syndicators of the privateers, particularly the Brown family of Providence, Rhode Island, whose brothers endowed the great university, practiced ruthless capitalism, invested in privateers and slave ships, and chiseled the government. For all the privateering fortunes won by the nouveau riches of Salem who soon became Boston Brahmins, there were disastrous losses for investors as well, such as those suffered by financier Robert Morris and General Nathaniel Greene. Thousands of privateersmen faced the far greater risk of being captured and tossed into British prison hulks moored in the East River. Many died from malnutrition and disease, their bodies buried in mass graves along the Brooklyn shore.
Despite Patton's ability to spin a good story and to weave privateering into the military and diplomatic arc of the Revolution, Patriot Pirates is not altogether satisfying. Passive voice, annoying contractions, and anachronistic jargon mar the writing. Patton has resurrected for modern readers the salty and sometimes poignant stories of privateersmen such as Gustavus Conyngham, John Manley, Christopher Vail, and Andrew Sherburne, yet readers surely would prefer a better overall sense of the privateers' war. Moreover, there are swaths of narrative that, however interesting, have little to do with privateering, such as Silas Deane's diplomatic mission to France or Nathaniel Greene's service and profiteering as quartermaster general of the army. Patton also occasionally stumbles over some of the basic maritime facts of the era.
More disappointing is Patton's lack of interest in and misunderstanding of prize law and cases, the crucial back-end of the privateering story. A "libel" was not a trial, as Patton asserts, but rather the initial written pleading in a prize case; there was no "international license" for privateers, which were "licensed" by their own country. A prize court case was not a "settlement trial" but rather adjudication on the validity of the capture. He mentions that early in the war, some American privateers went to sea without a commission. Yet what that meant if the British captured them (presumably they might be hanged as pirates), what it meant for the title (marketability) of the ships and cargo they captured, and conversely, how and when the revolutionaries adopted and practiced the international law of privateering, is of no concern to Patton. Yet Congress considered the rules and courts so important to the privateering enterprise that it created a federal appellate prize court to provide a uniform body of law over the local prize courts, as described in Henry Bourguignon's The First Federal Court (American Philosophical Society, 1977).
Despite these omissions and issues, Patriot Pirates is a lively read and succeeds in its goal of making the men and motives behind Revolutionary War privateering accessible to 21st-century Americans.
Gallipoli: Attack from the Sea
Victor Rudenno. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. 338 pp. Illus. Maps. App. Notes. Index. $45.
Reviewed by Holger H. Herwig
The battle of Gallipoli refuses to go away. From General Ian Hamilton's Despatches from the Dardanelles (George Newnes, 1917) to Robert Rhodes James' classic
Gallipoli (Macmillan, 1965) to Tim Travers' Gallipoli 1915 (Tempus, 2001), a seemingly endless flood of works on this epic battle continues to inundate the bookstores. Australia celebrates the day the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landed at Gallipol—25 April—as a major national holiday with dawn services. A search on Google for the word "Gallipoli" recently produced more than three million hits.What's new to tell? Victor Rudenno, an engineer and a fellow of the Securities Institute of Australia, argues that most scholars have given short shrift to the naval war in general and to the submarine campaign at Gallipoli in particular. In powerful, moving prose, he recreates in particular the tribulations of the Allied submariners in the Sea of Marmara in 1915. In all, 13 slender 625- and 662-ton British, French, and Australian submarines armed with only four or five 18-inch torpedo tubes completed 27 successful passages through the Dardanelles. They lost eight of their own and destroyed two antiquated Turkish battleships (the Mesudiye and Barbaros Hayreddin), one destroyer (the Yarhisar), and a host of steamers, tugs, and dhows.
Their strategic importance, Rudenno acknowledges, was relatively negligible: contrary to popular myth, the Turkish 5th Army never ran out of ammunition or food. There simply were not enough E-class boats on hand to mount a sustained campaign in the Sea of Marmara, and the Turks were able to use alternate land routes via the Asiatic side of the Straits and Thrace to compensate for the estimated 25 percent loss of their supplies that moved by sea. The primary value of the submarines was moral. The history of the Royal Navy, Winston Churchill later wrote, "contains no page more wonderful" than the "prowess of her submarines at the Dardanelles . . . in skill, in endurance, [and] in risk." Rudenno has successfully translated those words into a highly readable and gripping account of the Allied "attack from the sea."
Rudenno also considers the land war and its terrible toll. Of the 500,000 Allied troops that landed at Gallipoli in 1915, Britain suffered 205,000 casualties, France 47,000, Australia 26,094, and New Zealand 7,571. The enemy lost about 216,000. The author lists the customary causes for defeat: the Turks were motivated to defend their country, were more disciplined fighters than expected, held the high ground, and had plenty of reserves and water. In addition, the Allies lost the element of surprise by their massive naval bombardment on 19 February. Difficult terrain, inadequate staff planning, lack of space, lack of men and materiel, and weakened navy support thereafter impeded the Allied landings. So did the presence of several senior German officers such as General Otto Liman von Sanders, commanding the Turkish 5th Army, and Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, commanding the battle cruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau, "sold" to the Turks and renamed Yavuz Sultan Selim and Midilli, respectively.
Gallipoli's main flaw is its seeming lack of German sources. While Rudenno acknowledges the help of his mother, Christa, in translating German documents, these are never identified. The pertinent military and naval records, both official and personal, remain at the Federal Military Archive at Freiburg, Germany. These would have given the view from the "other side of the hill" and made this compelling narrative even more authoritative.
A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja
Joost R. Hiltermann. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2007. 346 pp. Notes. Bib. Maps. Index. $29.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel William Thomas, U.S. Air Force
Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Darfur are notorious names in the history of genocide, but ask a Westerner about what happened at Halabja and you'll likely get a blank stare. Joost Hiltermann fills this gap with A Poisonous Affair, a well-researched examination of Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons against Iranians and his own countrymen during the 1980s. Using Saddam's campaign against the Kurds as his point of departure, Hiltermann explores the entire Iraqi chemical weapons program during the Iran-Iraq War and tries to determine why Western governments essentially turned a blind eye to Iraq's use of these weapons.
Thanks to his work with Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group, which offered him increasing access through years, the author managed to gather the bits of information he needed to compile the story. Digging through official reports and interviewing Iranians, Kurds, and after 2003, Iraqi military and political officials, he determines what happened and why. His book gives us a detailed account.
A Poisonous Affair is not a chronology and can be a little difficult to follow. The reader must keep track of the different actors and events, as a minor incident in one chapter becomes the major focus of another. Eventually, however, the pieces come together.
In exploring the United States' response to Iraqi chemical weapons, Hiltermann acknowledges the dangers of Monday-morning quarterbacking. He reminds the reader of the geopolitical context and describes the fractious debate within the government. Questions about conflicting values and competing ideals permeate the book. It becomes clear early on where his sympathies lie, although that is not necessarily a criticism. Given the facts he presents, it would be hard for anyone not to be uncomfortable with the American response.
Hiltermann takes pains not to get drawn into Iran's propaganda machine. While he obviously sympathizes with the Iranian and Kurdish victims of these attacks, he still addresses Iran's actions and the myriad accusations against them. In the process, however, he provides ample evidence to challenge those who accuse Iran of also using chemical weapons. He makes his primary point very clearly: if using these weapons is wrong, it is no less wrong simply because the targets are people you don't like.
In 2007 the former chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali," was convicted of war crimes, including the use of chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s. Hiltermann briefly touches on the irony of the United States acquiescing and enabling Ali to use these weapons, then later effecting the regime change that led him to be sentenced to death for the same crimes. The author keeps this discussion brief, however, leaving it to the reader to think more about it, or perhaps simply avoiding injecting the politics of the current war into his research.
A Poisonous Affair leaves the reader with some provocative questions. For example, how do you "manage" a necessary partner whose actions you find abhorrent? The United States at the time had a history of dealing with unsavory heads of state, including former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos and Mobutu Sese Seko, the former president of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). When the Cold War ended, it seemed that so did the need for such relationships. One wonders whether the United States might feel it necessary to be "holding its nose. . . while closing its eyes" again, this time in the name of combating the threat of terrorism.
War crimes like the ones Hiltermann recounts are horrendous acts, which may be why so many know so little about Halabja. With A Poisonous Affair, Joost Hiltermann ensures we will not be able to ignore it.