Ironclads and Paddlers
Ian Marshall. Charlottesville, VA: Howell Press, Inc., 1993. 108 pp. Bib. Illus. Ind. Notes. $34.95 ($33.20).
Reviewed by Dr. Kenneth J. Hagan and Major Grant H. Walker, U.S. Army (Retired)
This wondrous collection of paintings graphically relates the history of the early decades of steam-driven, iron-hulled navies as no book of mere words can possibly do. As a bonus, Ian Marshall complements his brilliant 38 watercolors and 15 charcoal drawings with an enlightening text. To reflect the furious pace of experimentation in ship design which marked the second half of the 19th century, Mr. Marshall has chosen for his subjects an irresistible collection of ships. They range from obscure paddle-driven gunboats to cruisers, such as Germany’s ill-fated SMS Konigsberg, to the grandest battleship of all, Great Britain’s epochal HMS Dreadnought.
More than any other ship, HMS Warrior symbolizes the dawn of four decades of European dominance over the development of naval technology. Launched in 1861, the Warrior was built to counter the threat that a new generation of French ocean-going ironclads posed to Great Britain’s insular security. In Plate 11, Mr. Marshall aptly portrays her as she steams out of Devonport, about to overtake—literally as well as figuratively—an aging three- deck line-of-battle ship.
As Ian Marshall’s watercolors and drawings reveal, the Europeans’ race to deploy invincible warships gave rise to fantastic, bizarrely shaped platforms with guns arrayed in every conceivable combination. Two French ships, FS Courbet of 1866 and FS Dupuy de Lome of 1897 (Plates 22 and 24, respectively), are outstanding examples of a remarkable and perhaps ephemeral willingness to experiment with new forms.
The ships of Europe capture most of the attention of the illustrator-author of this intelligent volume, but there is plenty here to delight and inform students of U.S. naval history. The earliest U.S. ships depicted are four small side-wheelers whose steam propulsion and shallow draft ideally suited them for riverine operations against Mexico in 1847 (Plate 5). A few pages further on, in Plate 8, a larger side- wheel frigate, the USS Powhatan, makes her appearance near Yokohama as part of Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s 1854 expedition to “open” Japan.
Eight years later, the duel between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia at the Battle of Hampton Roads confirmed the United States’ role in advancing naval technology during the first half of the 1860s. In Plate 13, the lowering sky and towering masts of the stricken screw frigate USS Minnesota add dramatic emphasis to the squat, low silhouettes of the Monitor and the Virginia. This is the only battle scene in this fine book, a clear index to its historic importance.
Mr. Marshall depicts only one new U.S. warship from the period between the Civil War and the Spanish-American Wan the USS Wampanoag (Plate 23). Completed in 1867, this experimental speedster broke all records but was quickly decommissioned because of her excessive coal consumption. She was less representative of the interwar U.S. Navy than the “ABC” ships of the early 1880s. Those light, steam-powered cruisers—the Atlanta, the Boston, and the Chicago— marked the U.S. Navy’s first post-Civil War flirtation with steam-driven ironclads. Unfortunately, they do not appear.
The absence of major U.S. warships for the period 1865 to 1898—in contrast with the numerous behemoths of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy—does not reflect the artist’s preconceptions so much as the geopolitical reality of the era. The United States simply did not need massive, thickly armored, and heavily gunned warships because the Atlantic Ocean provided an adequate barrier against any conceivable European naval or military threat.
For Europe, if not initially for the United States, the late 19th century was the Age of the New Imperialism. The author-artist addresses this reality by placing fully one-third of his paintings in the rivers and ports of European colonial possessions. A striking example is Plate 7, in which HMS Jackall, a typical gunboat of the 1850s, steams on Nigeria’s muddy Benue River. Scanning the Jackall from across the veranda of a British colonial administrator’s bungalow, the artist visually conveys the same message as that recounted in the accompanying text: the near-total subjugation of Africa and Asia by Europe’s major powers was made possible in large measure by shallow-draft, steam-powered gunboats. They penetrated both continents by steaming up great rivers like the Nile and the Yang-tze.
For most of the period, Americans watched warily as Europe carved up Africa and Southeast Asia and threatened China’s integrity. By the mid-1890s, however, a new spirit of bellicosity had risen in the United States and it quickly became apparent that the North American giant soon would issue a military and naval challenge to some European power. As a warning, the U.S. Navy began to build warships that were major combatants by any European standard.
Ian Marshall picks up this story with his paintings of the protected cruiser Olympia and the armored cruiser New York—respectively the flagships of George Dewey in Manila Bay and William T. Sampson at Santiago de Cuba in the war of 1898. The historic merger of U.S. and European naval and geopolitical policies is strongly suggested by Plate 32, which shows the New York arriving in Bermuda soon after the Spanish-American War. Admiral John Fisher’s HMS Renown flies the portentous signal: “Welcome to the United States Navy.”
Mr. Marshall carries his illustrated narrative to 1906, with a representation of HMS Dreadnought. Nevertheless, as he admits, the book conceptually ends with Plate 37: HMS Illustrious in the Grand Harbour of Malta in 1898. He observes that the Majestic class, to which the Illustrious belonged, “was the culmination of Victorian warship design.”
A paean to the Victorian era, Ironclads and Paddlers resonates with a tender nostalgia for the warships of Pax Britannica. It deserves a wide and appreciative audience.
Good Night Officially: The Pacific War Letters of a Destroyer Sailor
William M. McBride. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1994. 307 pp. Gloss. Illus. Photos. $24.95 ($23.70).
Reviewed by Vice Admiral William P. Mack, U.S. Navy, (Retired)
In Good Night Officially, the letters of a young sailor to his wife provide a detailed view of a year on board the destroyer Howorth—here, shown in Puget Sound a month after her commissioning.
From April 1944 to April 1945, a young sailor—Yeoman Second Class Orvill Rains—on the USS Howorth (DD-592) wrote a series of letters to his equally young wife, Ray Ellen. Some 50 years later, William M. McBride, a professor of history at James Madison University, carefully and skillfully assembled and edited these letters and, in doing so, created a touching and haunting record of Orvill Rains’s service as his ship prepared for war in the United States and then sailed to the Western Pacific to fight against Japan.
Orvill Rains was a newspaperman in Dallas,Texas, before enlisting in the Navy, and his writing skills are apparent in his excellent descriptions of both the grueling daily life on a destroyer and the dramatic moments of combat. One of the privileges of Rains’s yeoman rating was that it allowed him to observe both the officers and enlisted men of his ship carefully and at close range. Also, his yeoman’s battle station called for him to be stationed on the navigation bridge during general quarters and to man a telephone over which he could hear the reports from and orders to all parts of the ship.
These combined circumstances allowed him to produce a series of letters of great interest to anyone interested in naval history and, particularly, to those who like its human side. Yeoman Rains describes life and the action on board the Howorth in terms his wife—and, therefore, other laymen—could easily understand. An understanding and liberal censor deliberately permitted a good many items concerning the employment of the ship to be included in the letters that would otherwise have been deleted.
During the period covered by the book, the Howorth participated in the reconquest of the Philippines and the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It was during these actions that the Japanese used kamikaze aircraft. Thousands of aircraft of every description were manned by young pilots trained only well enough to take off and fly to the invasion areas. Once they sighted enemy ships, their mission was to dive into them, aiming for vulnerable areas such as the navigation bridge and smoke stacks. The Howorth was the target of many kamikazes. Rains describes well the terror of young sailors as they watched this almost certain death hurtling toward them and tried desperately to shoot down the aircraft.
Orvill Rains was killed shortly after writing a letter to his wife. In seven minutes of pure hell on 6 April 1945, the Howorth was attacked off Okinawa by five kamikazes. The crew shot down four but one crashed into the gun director just above the navigation bridge where Yeoman Rains was stationed. He and six others were killed in the explosion and subsequent fire.
Yeoman Rains wrote a particularly poignant letter for his wife that was to be read only in the event of his death. It is a beautiful letter that anyone who has served afloat in dangerous waters would have liked to have written. Ray Ellen Rains received it soon after his death. As Rains wished for her in his letter, she remarried in 1947.
William McBride is an eminent historian and an accomplished author; he also is a Naval Academy graduate and served three tours in the Western Pacific—including one as chief engineer of a destroyer. These skills and experience obviously helped him bring Orvill Rains’s letters together in a well- integrated manner. Dr. McBride also wrote a splendid introduction in which he describes life in a typical destroyer in wartime and gives a brief summary of the life and actions of the Howorth.
Those who prefer straightforward accounts can skip the sentimental and often overwrought openings and closings of the letters. Some might wish that Dr. McBride had edited most of them out; on the other hand, some readers will appreciate them as expressions of love between two well-adjusted young people. All in all, however, Orvill Rains’s well- crafted letters and Dr. McBride’s superb editing make Good Night Officially a very readable account of a year of exciting action in the Pacific, on a destroyer that fought often and well.
Sampan Sailor: A Navy Man’s Adventures in WW II China
Clayton Mishler. McLean, VA: Brassey's (US), 1994. 215 pp. Ind. Maps. $22.00 ($19.80).
Rear Admiral Kemp Tolley, U.S. Navy (Retired)
Clayton Mishler shows his readers what his book is all about by plunging immediately into some hot action: a well-executed ambush of a 15-man Japanese patrol by Mishler, a Chinese-soldier, and Mishler’s 12-year old Chinese servant on 6 July 1945. Without a scratch on the bushwhackers, all but one of the enemy were killed.
Readers will ask almost immediately the same question posed by many in the Far East during the war: “What in hell are all these sailors doing, spread from Mongolia to Hong Kong?” The Introduction explains why: Formed in the spring of 1942 on the orders of the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Ernest J. King, the Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO) was charged with setting the stage for any U.S. landings in China, establishing weather stations for the Pacific Fleet, mapping the Chinese coast, placing coast- watchers for spying on Japanese ship traffic, training Chinese guerrillas and, as Admiral King wrote in a postscript to the order, “ . . . kill more Japs!” Was SACO a success? Well, consider that from June 1944 to July 1945, the roughly 100,000 SACO-trained guerrillas killed more than 23,000 Japanese, destroyed 200 bridges, 84 locomotives, and 141 ships and craft, and mapped the Chinese coast from Shanghai to Hong Kong.
As arranged by Chiang Kai-shek and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the unique outfit was headed by General Tai Li, the chief of Chinese intelligence, who was considered by many to be the equivalent of Hitler’s Himmler and Stalin’s Beria. Tai Li’s deputy at SACO was Commander Milton E. Miles, U.S. Navy, who had served five years in the Far East before the war. By 1945, Commander Miles would be a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy and a lieutenant general in the Chinese Army.
Although he was exempt from the draft (because he was a husband and father), in August 1943 Clayton Mishler enlisted in the Navy and finished boot camp as a storekeeper. In October 1943 he volunteered again—for “hazardous duty” so secret that en route to their Virginia training site the candidates were forbidden to peek out under the tarpaulin of the truck in which they traveled from Washington, lest they see the route they took. The strenuous training regimen focused on physical training, weapons handling, clandestine warfare, and survival skills.
By mid-December 1943, Mishler, 19 other sailors, and two officers—all in Army khaki without rank or rate insignia—were zigzagging out of San Francisco on board HMS Patroller, a British escort carrier bound for India with a cargo of 20 P-40s. Mishler’s disaffection with the British began at that point:
The British crew, for the most part, were a sad lot, but very capable seamen. They looked bedraggled, unkempt, and sort of hopeless .... [T]he men who dished up the mess . . . were a dirty lot ... . They were a discredit to His Majesty’s service .... More and more I lost respect for the majority of British officers.
Mishler and his comrades happily departed the carrier at Cochin at the southwest tip of India and then spent a grueling week creeping by train to Assam in northeast India, the take-off point for the flight “over the Hump” to China. The heat was suffocating, the food intermittent and dreadful, and the mosquitoes torturous. Mishler was appalled at the filth, poverty, listlessness, and degradation of so many of the people of India. In Calcutta, the starving and dead lay everywhere on the streets, and vultures often performed the duties of undertaker. At one railway stop, a sharp young boy entrepreneur about nine years old offered to sell his seven-year- old sister to Mishler’s party for two rupees; a price he eventually lowered to one rupee, roughly 31 cents. Also in Calcutta, Mishler saw how India’s wealthy dined and lived sumptuously, and he met a U.S. Army Air Force pilot who was “very rich, with six servants, and a beautiful mistress.” The source of the pilot’s wealth was “a smuggling business on official flights in and out of China.”
After a frigid trip at 21,000 feet over the Himalayas, Mishler’s group landed in Kunming, China. There, Mishler and eight other sailors boarded a two-truck caravan manned by two Chinese drivers and a Chinese captain of enormous vigor and purpose. What was supposed to be a four-day trip to Chungking stretched out to 16 days. Mishler slept in dirt-floored Chinese inns, was devoured by lice and bedbugs, and, after the party’s C-rations ran out, lived off the land. Not for the last time, Mishler also saw first-hand the omnipotence of General Tai Li. A posse of heavily armed bandits was turned away by the captain’s mention of the general’s name.
Mishler’s arrival at SACO’s headquarters—named “Happy Valley"—near Chungking inaugurated almost two years of near-constant danger and a close-knit relationships with his Chinese and American comrades during which he forged an understanding of the Chinese mind and philosophy which most of us in the old Asiatic Fleet never attained.
Serving in groups from 2 to 20 Chinese and Americans and traveling through the Chinese countryside from central China to Fukien (near Amoy), Mishler carried payroll—sometimes 5 million Chinese dollars—helped maintain some of the 160 SACO stations, and met General Tai Li, finding him to be a dedicated, simple family man with powerful loyalty to his American cadres. But he also saw how cruel the Chinese could be. For example, the punishment for stealing a pair of spectacles was 100 switches with bamboo rods on the back of a man’s hand, daily for two weeks, by which time the hand had been cut to the bones and rendered near useless.
SACO trucks carried homing pigeons to communicate with the base in case of breakdowns in the sparsely settled countryside. Sampans with local crews also furnished transportation, often through roaring rapids. Near the coast, Japanese planes and patrols were everywhere; therefore, movements were at night. The training of guerrilla units as large as 600 men, however, proceeded under the Japanese noses. Mishler was paymaster for such a group.
Mishler proved to be very adaptable. Peanuts in the shell were soaked in horse urine, but “a salting process is a salting process,” he observed philosophically. He approved of the Chinese soldiers but had less respect for their officers; Mishler found them “. . . fatuous, vain, pompous—only a few worthy of a salute.” Unfortunately, he found that the same was true for a number of U.S. officers.
As for the British he encountered, they were all too much like the sailors of HMS Patroller. After the Japanese withdrawal from Amoy,
[a] flotilla of English minesweepers arrived to replace the Aussies. The Limeys were a sad lot, completely different from the Aussies. They were dirty and unkempt when they came ashore and proceeded to get drunk and lie around in the street. They fought with the Chinese as well as each other, and I avoided them as much as possible.
Recreation was sparse; keeping alive demanded most of the effort. But there were bright spots; possibly with mild innuendo, Mishler wrote that “[t]here were some natural hot springs where young Chinese girls soaped and washed the bathers—popular with the men, and a short relief from prickly heat itch.”
Throughout his time in China, Mishler never lost his cool and upbeat outlook, possibly because as a foot soldier he was unaware of the bickerings of the generals and the competing half dozen U.S. intelligence agencies. A keen observer, however, Mishler produced a travelogue of intimate glimpses of a totally strange land and people; where cigarettes were the soundest currency, and where Americans displayed their uncommon adaptability and pluck. It all makes instructive, very entertaining reading.
Books of Interest
By Lieutenant Commander Thomas J. Cutler, U.S. Navy
The Last Patrol
Harry Holmes. Shrewsbury, England: Airlife, 1994. 212 pp. Append. Bib. Ind. Photos. $32.95 ($26.36).
Although they represented only 2% of all U.S. Navy personnel, the percentage of U.S. submariners lost was the highest of any branch of the U.S. armed forces during World War II. Fifty-two boats— nearly one in five—failed to return. This book provides concise operational histories of these submarines and, whenever known, the details of their losses. Photographs and detailed appendices complement an informative narrative.
Speed on the Ship!: A Centennial History of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, 1893-1993
William duBarry Thomas. Jersey City, NJ: The Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, 1993. 221 pp. Append. Bib. Illus. Notes. Photos. $30.00 ($30.00) Paper. Order from publisher: 601 Pavonia Ave., Ste. 400; Jersey City, NJ 07506.
This account of the first century of this important professional association sheds new light on U.S. maritime history. Today, when the future of U.S. merchant fleet seems dim, it is worthwhile to look at where we have been before we can shape a new course for the future.
Breaching the Marianas: The Battle for Saipan
Capt. John C. Chapin, USMCR (Ret.) Washington, DC: Marine Corps Historical Center, 1994 37 pp. Bib. Maps. Photos. Free. Order directly from: Superintendent of Documents, Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402. Paper.
Another in the Marines in World War II Commemorative Series, this pamphlet describes the bloody fighting for Saipan. Photographs and maps enhance the excellent narrative that concisely captures this important battle in June 1944. A half century has neither dimmed the sheen of heroism nor softened the harsh brutality that marked this struggle for a distant but strategically significant island.
The Devil’s Anvil: The Assault on Peleliu
James H. Hallas. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1994. 320 pp. Bib. Ind. Maps. Photos. $27.50 ($26.12).
Although it is largely forgotten in the pantheon of World War II battles, Peleliu was one of the most hard-fought campaigns of the war. The human side of this bloody battle—which was supposed to last two days but dragged on for two months—is captured in vivid detail by this well-researched account. One of the most tragic ironies of this battle was that it was deemed by many to be strategically unnecessary. Today, however, as the author points out, Peleliu has “taken on a strategic significance which may ultimately surpass that of 45 years ago. With the abandonment of the huge U.S. base at Subic Bay in the Philippines, the Palaus are being eyed as a potential naval base. . . . Such are the vagaries of world politics.”