Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb
George D. Fiefer. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992. 622 pp. Append. Bib. Ind. Maps. Notes. Photos. $29.95.
Reviewed by Colonel Brooke Nihart, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)
Tennozan was the name of a decisive 16th-century battle in which the Japanese commander staked his entire army on a chancy victory—and won. Okinawa, a glacis protecting the approach to Japan, was to be such a battle. And the final defense of Japan itself was considered the ultimate Tennozan; in the language of its Nazi ally, Japan’s own Gotterdamerung.
Fiefer has crafted a powerful and compelling tract on war. A tract on its heroism, of course, but also on its cruelty, baseness, terror, inhumanity, and ultimately its futility. Okinawa was the last battle of the Pacific War. As an island on Japan’s southern approaches, it was defended fiercely, with the butcher’s bill being 110,000 Japanese soldiers, sailors, and airmen, plus 150,000 Okinawan civilians. Japanese forces defended the island with skill and tenacity. Waves of kamikaze aircraft battered the U.S. invasion fleet while an equally suicidal sortie was launched by the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Yamato—the world’s largest battleship. The Yamato was hardly under way when she was pounced upon by several U.S. carrier air groups, which sent her to the bottom—but only after she had suffered terrible punishment.
U.S. forces suffered proportionately less but still extremely heavy casualties—more than 12,000 killed—by their standards. It was a bloodless landing. The Japanese had wisely avoided defending the beaches because their experience on other islands taught them that U.S. naval gunfire would pulverize beach defenses. Instead, they chose to defend inland a series of coral ridges roughly parallel and running across the island. With little maneuver room, Army and Marine divisions were forced to fight from ridge to ridge; the valleys in between and each consecutive ridge became killing zones. This technique proved deadly to the Americans.
Airfields were quickly seized and expanded. Fighter sweeps suppressed Japanese kamikaze fields, and combat air patrols shot down hundreds of kamikaze planes. Still, many trickled through to be shot down by the fleet’s antiaircraft guns and occasionally, but all too often, to be destroyed upon hitting a Navy ship.
Okinawa was to have been the penultimate battle, with the invasion of Japan the final act. Two atom bombs changed that scenario, and Japan surrendered. Fiefer tells this story by moving back and forth from his American protagonist, a Marine from the 22d Regiment; the young Japanese captain who commanded the 22d Infantry Regiment, 24th Division, 32d Japanese Army; and a young Okinawan civilian drafted into the Japanese forces. His descriptions of ground combat and the living conditions of the men of both sides is stark. Blood, mud, offal, body parts, and rotting bodies are described in vivid terms. Reading is recommended for all militant feminists—including Senators and Representatives—who would send their sisters into such a hell.
The description of kamikaze hits on our ships, as well as the depiction of torpedo and bomb sinkings of Japanese ships, should serve to dissuade those women who may think of sea duty as clean sheets, hot chow, and avoidance of foxholes and attendant inconveniences.
Fiefer empathizes with the Japanese by showing how the samurai code and Bushido spirit drove them to war and sustained them through the worst experiences. He sympathizes with the Okinawans, who, not being ethnic Japanese, were victimized by their masters and suffered cruelly from both sides.
The author also thoroughly discusses— pro and con—the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, setting forth all the well-known arguments. He avers that the Japanese would have defended their home islands just as they had fought for Okinawa, which would have meant hundreds of thousands of U.S. casualties and millions of Japanese. He comes down on the side of President Harry Truman in dropping the bombs. Drawing on his study of the Japanese character, he feels the horrendous immediate effect of but one atomic bomb short circuited Japan’s samurai code and Bushido spirit, in effect giving them a way out, an honorable excuse for surrender.
Fiefer suggests that that Bushido culture continues to impel the Japanese today toward economic supremacy. I concur. An East European friend has told me that during his three visits to Japan in recent years, his Japanese contacts, thinking him to be anti-American, assured him that, although they failed militarily to conclude World War II to their satisfaction, they continue the war with their economy, and this time they expect to win.
North of Gallipoli
George Nekrasov. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. 145 pp. Illus. Photos. $44.00.
Reviewed by Commander Carl O. Schuster, U.S. Navy
The Imperial Russian Navy came out of the disastrous Russo-Japanese War with its fleet, reputation, morale, and discipline destroyed. Beset by mutinies and corruption, the fleet spent the immediate postwar period reflecting on the lessons learned and implementing reforms. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Black Sea Fleet, which had been a hotbed of revolutionary activity and, despite its not sharing in the naval disasters of that war, was the first to suffer mutiny. Morale and discipline remained a serious problem through 1912, when Admiral Andrei Eberhardt brought new energy and a fresh spirit to the job of commanding the fleet. By the start of World War I, he had completely reformed the fleet and imbued it with a renewed esprit de corps and tactical proficiency that served him and his successors well during the next four years.
In contrast to the Baltic and Northern fleets, the Black Sea Fleet sustained an active and aggressive naval campaign against its Central Power rivals until the rot of the revolution set in. Even then, in contrast to 1905, the Black Sea Fleet was the last of Russia’s western fleets to suffer the depredations of mutiny.
North of Gallipoli is the story of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in the Great War. As such, it is a rare tale of innovative tactics and operations conducted in a heretofore unknown “sideshow” theater. Denied permission to conduct a preemptive raid on the Turkish fleet at war’s outbreak, the Black Sea Fleet found itself facing a numerically inferior but qualitatively superior naval force when the German battle cruiser SMS Goeben brought Turkey into the war as a German ally by attacking Sevastopol on 29 October 1914.
Admiral Eberhardt initially employed a defensive strategy that concentrated his three predreadnought battleships in one squadron and limited his offensive operations to minelaying off the Bosporus. He became increasingly vigorous by mid-1915, however, as the addition of new destroyers enabled him to interdict Turkish coastal convoys supplying their forces on the Caucasian front. He shifted to power- projection operations a year later, following the commissioning of his first of three dreadnought battleships, the Imperatrista Maria. Her commissioning gave him a qualitative as well as a numerical superiority over his opponent, and he tried to make the most of it, conducting several major and minor amphibious-assaults against Turkey’s northern coast and devastating its coastal traffic. He even built specialized amphibious assault ships to land his troops directly onto the beach. He also employed seaplane carriers to attack Turkish ports and shipping.
Unfortunately, Eberhardt was not popular with the Czar’s court or the Army General Staff, and he was relieved of command before he could fully exploit the new capabilities of his expanding fleet. Fortunately for fleet morale and effectiveness, he was replaced by another energetic forceful leader, Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, who is best known as the last White Russian leader to fall to the Bolsheviks. Under Kolchak, the Black Sea Fleet continued to conduct amphibious landings in Turkey and Bulgaria, as well as an effective offensive minelaying campaign against Turkish and Bulgarian ports. Kolchak even continued Eberhardt’s efforts to obtain Army troops to conduct a multidivision assault to open the Bosporus.
But it was all for naught. By the time approval was gained in late 1916, the only available troops were considered unreliable. It was another case of too little, too late.
In North of Gallipoli, Nekrasov provides an interesting perspective on a little-known theater of World War I. Although not a definitive history (the author did not have access to original sources), it will interest those who study the development of naval tactics and operations. Admirals Eberhardt and Kolchak each understood the growing importance of naval air power and organized their maneuver, or task, groups to include seaplane carriers as well as “big- gun” ships. In fact, their tactics and operations will appear remarkably familiar to anyone who has studied Allied naval operations of World War II.
Unfortunately, the editor missed many typing and spelling errors which detract from an otherwise excellent text. The book also contains the periodic Russian propaganda statement (“We were the first to use carriers,” et cetera), but that may be due to Nekrasov’s sources: a mixture of Soviet published materials and the memoirs of former Imperial Navy officers.
Finally, the price seems a bit high for such a small book, but perhaps the inclusion of so many rare photographs will justify that price in the eyes of some. Despite these shortcomings, North of Gallipoli is an excellent book suitable for both the serious and the casual student of naval history.
A Hell of a War
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. 278 pp. Ind. Photos. $22.95 ($18.36)
Reviewed by Rear Admiral Kemp Tolley, U.S. Navy (Retired)
The beginning quarter of Fairbanks’ autobiography is a condensation of the author’s earlier The Salad Days, which takes him through the divorce of his parents when he was eight, a haphazard childhood until seduced in Paris at 17 by his tutor’s girlfriend, a marriage to Joan Crawford at 18, divorce five years later, followed by torrid affairs with Hollywood actresses Marlene Dietrich and Gertrude Lawrence in England, and finally, marriage to his true love, Mary Lee, in April 1939. The soap opera fans will love it.
The history minded, however, will go for the remainder of the book, which is filled with anecdotes, practical jokes, as sociations with biggies—like President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and good friend “Dickie” Mountbatten— and sound accounts of history as it was being made, written with a people’s-eye view rather than the sometimes glorified and generally flat official histories, where one’s own mistakes are minimized and the enemy are beastly cads.
Joining the Navy as a lieutenant junior grade in April 1941, “Doug” was called to active duty in October. Overnighting at the White House as a reward for his national promotion of FDR for a third-term bid, he found his reception at the Bureau of Naval Personnel less cordial; he was too hot a celebrity for Washington duty. He would train “on the job” on board the new destroyer USS Ludlow (DD-438), convoying to Britain. Rolling and pitching, seasick, apprehensive of the constant “ping” of the ASDIC listening gear, aware of his inadequate training, Doug was happy for a transfer in three months to the battleship USS Mississippi (BB-41), in Europe. That, too, was short, however. “Ole Miss” went into extensive overhaul after just three months, and Doug was sent to the Office of Naval Intelligence, a short stop (not the place for a celebrity) before becoming executive officer of “a grubby, weatherbeaten old tub,” the minesweeper USS Goldcrest, an ex-trawler with one 3-inch gun, based at Staten Island, New York. This ended shortly, too, with a minus-40o ride in the bay of a bomber to Britain to join the staff of Rear Admiral Robert “Ike” Giffen, the commander of Task Force 99—the U.S. ships attached to the British Home Fleet.
Here commences Doug’s climb to Navy fame, first by riding the carrier USS Wasp (CV-7), down Hellfire Alley for a fly off of 50 Spitfires to beleaguered Malta, then on board the cruiser USS Wichita (CA-45), riding shotgun for Murmansk convoy PQ- 17, in the face of probable contact with the great German battleship Tirpitz. The British cautiously withdrew, while PQ-17 lost 24 of her 35 ships. Doug saw the fringes of the action and wrote an excellent report, as he had for the Malta bash. Both are in the book.
Following this is a short assignment to “Dickie’s” supersecret Combined Operations, then to its U.S. equivalent, still in infancy, the Beach Jumpers of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet Amphibious Force. It was in this outfit—subsequently in the Mediterranean—that Doug’s further naval career was concentrated. Up the Italian boot, from Sicily on, Doug was more or less independently involved against island and southern French targets, with much gunfire.
Clearly, Doug’s forte was strategic and tactical deception, commanding operations with occasional international units that won him the U.S. Silver Star and Legion of Merit with combat “V,” the French Croix de Guerre and Legion d’Honneur, and the British Distinguished Service Cross.
This book—especially the naval activity part—is informative and entertaining, written in an upbeat, humorous style by a chap who obviously enjoyed life. Also, it has a very good index and eight pages of photographs. Most of them show Douglas, as dashing as his story. He managed to integrate himself into a wartime lifestyle of blood-and-thunder as easily as if it were a role in another one of his 75 or more adventuresome movies.
Books of Interest
The Battle Book: Crucial Conflicts in History from 1469 B.C. to the Present
Bryan Perrett. New York: Sterling Publishing, 1992. 350 pp. Append. Bib. Ind. $24.95 ($22.45).
Arranged alphabetically by battle names, each of the more than 500 entries in this encyclopedic book provides the dates and location of the battle, the war and campaign of which it was a part, the opposing sides and their objectives, the actual forces involved, the casualties sustained, and the outcome and its effect on the participating nations.
The Harper Encyclopedia of Military History: From 3500 B.C. to the Present
R. Ernest Dupuy and Trevor N. Dupuy. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. 1654 pp. Bib. Illus. Ind. Maps. Photos. $65.00 ($58.50).
This well-known reference appears in a fourth edition updated through 1991 to cover the all-too-numerous crises and conflicts that have occurred since the publication of its predecessor in 1985. In addition, the treatment of ancient Chinese weapons and warfare has been thoroughly reworked. A welcome cosmetic change is also evident; the rather crowded look of earlier editions has been eliminated by the use of larger type and a more open design.
Military History and the Military Profession
David A. Charters, Marc Milner, and J. Brent Wilson (eds.). Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1992. 264 pp. Bib. Ind. Notes. $47.95 ($43.15).
Leading scholars in the study of military history illustrate the utility of history in real-world analysis and decision making. Included among the 15 different essays are “Naval History: The State of the Art,” “Low-Intensity Conflict: Its Place in the Study of War,” “The Search for Principles and Naval Strategy,” and “The Utility of History to Modem Navies.”
Women with Wings: Female Flyers in Fact and Fiction
Mary Cadogan. Chicago, IL: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1992. 288 pp. Bib. Illus. Ind. Photos. $30.00 ($27.00).
From the days of the hot-air balloon to today’s space vehicles, women always have been a part of aviation. Their exploits— and the fictional ones that they have inspired—are recorded in this excellent historical account. Included are the aviatrixes of the early 20th century who performed death-defying stunts the equal of anything their male counterparts dared; the British, American, German, and Russian women who flew in a variety of important roles during World War II; and the astronauts who have become an integral part of the U.S. space program.
