Divided Waters: The Naval History of the Civil War
Ivan Musicant. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. 473 pp. Maps. Photos. Illus. Sources. Bibliography. Index. $30.00 ($27).
Reviewed by Robert J. Schneller, Jr.
“At all the watery margins they have been present,” said Abraham Lincoln of the Navy. “Not only on the deep sea, the broad bay, and the rapid river, but also up the narrow, muddy bayou, and wherever the ground was a little damp, they have been and made their tracks.” Awardwinning historian and master storyteller Ivan Musicant’s narrative of these aquatic peregrinations reeks of gunpowder. In chapters with such catchy titles as “Cheese on a Raft” and “Stinkpots and Turtles,” Musicant recounts all of the Civil War’s well-known naval operations: the Fort Sumter relief expedition, the loss of the Norfolk Navy Yard, the capture of Port Royal, the sinking of the “stone fleet” off Charleston, the Trent affair, the actions at Hatteras Inlet and in the North Carolina sounds, the Monitor-Virginia duel, the capture of New Orleans, the battles of Forts Henry and Donelson, the fall of Vicksburg and the opening of the Mississippi, the ill- starred Red River expedition, the battle of Mobile Bay, the saga of the Confederate commerce raiders, the siege of Charleston, and the fall of Fort Fisher. Musicant also discusses Union and Confederate naval strategy and how both sides acquired and manned their ships. Divided Waters provides deeper coverage of Atlantic coast operations and greater overall detail than its two most recent predecessors Bern Anderson’s By Sea and by River (1962) and William Fowler’s Under Two Flags (1990).
Because Musicant believes that “the Confederate Navy, remarkable as some of its achievements were, never had a chance,” he writes largely from a Northern perspective. His colorful and lively prose, chock full of dialogue, will entertain and enthrall his readers.
Musicant is not afraid to express his opinions. The Navy’s officer corps was “stagnantly somnolent” on the eve of the war; the Monitor “was nothing less than the most revolutionary warship of the nineteenth century;” Confederate cruisers “permanently destroyed the predominance of the American merchant marine.” His character sketches will inflame some readers—Confederate cavalry leader Nathan Bedford Forrest was a “negrophobic psychopath;” Rebel commerce raider Raphael Semmes was “annoying in his self-righteousness.” His insistence on referring to the Confederate ironclad Virginia by her former name because “virtually no one on either side called her anything but Merrimack" will also outrage many southern and naval historians.
In Musicant’s view “the Civil War caught the United States Navy at the nadir of one of its periodic dark ages.” In fact, the 1850s were something of a renaissance for the Navy, which adopted the Dahlgren gun as its standard shipboard ordnance, and thus shells and shell guns largely supplanted solid shot in ships’ batteries, began developing rifled ordnance, and built the Merrimack class of frigates and the Hartford and Mohican classes of sloops, all featuring steam engines and screw propellers. Many historians will differ with his view of the impact of the blockade, which, he says, “slowly strangled the Confederacy, denying the South the war materials and foreign intercourse without which it could not—and indeed, did not—survive.”
Few would dispute Musicant’s evaluation of the importance of the Mississippi. “For the Union,” he declares, “conquest of the lower river . . . holds equal strategic rank with the coastal blockade and Sherman’s march from Atlanta to the sea in winning the war. . . . For the Confederacy, its control of the Mississippi at any point was as good as holding it all.” Such bold statements, undiluted by qualifications and caveats, enhance the book’s readability. For a popular audience uninitiated in Civil War naval history, Divided Waters is a fine introduction to the subject.
But for the scholar, Musicant’s familiar litany of battles has less to offer. Instead of footnotes, Musicant lists the sources he uses for each chapter at the end of the book. He relies on older secondary accounts and published primary sources, ignoring manuscripts and much of the latest and best scholarship on the war’s naval side. Absent from his citations, for example, are Bob Browning’s From Cape Charles to Cape Fear (1993), with its groundbreaking chapters on logistics; George Buker’s Blockaders, Refugees, and Contrabands (1993), a study of the previously neglected East Gulf Blockading Squadron, and its role in fomenting civil war in Florida; and Steve Wise’s Gate of Hell (1994), which offers the most authoritative and comprehensive examination of the Union campaign against Charleston in 1863. Also Missing are Rod Gragg’s Confederate Goliath: The Battle of Fort Fisher (1991) and Benjamin Franklin Cooling’s Fort’s Henry and Donelson— The Key to the Confederate Heartland (1987).
Musicant’s focus on neat stories comes at the expense of analysis of issues that would interest naval professionals. He largely ignores logistics, particularly how the various squadrons were supplied. Although the war’s naval annals brim with experience in joint and amphibious operations, Musicant offers scanty analysis of these subjects. For example, he devotes a mere paragraph to the mechanics of amphibious assaults during the war in describing Ambrose Burnside’s assault on Roanoke Island. He explains that soldiers embarked in transports scrambled down specially designed ladders into surfboats, steamers towed the boats in strings of 20 to a point just offshore and cast them off, then the boats were rowed the final yards through the surf. But he fails to mention whether the Confederates opposed the landing or how the joint force established the beachhead.
Divided Waters contains several errors, particularly with regard to ordnance. In one instance, Musicant perpetuates the myth that the Monitor’s 11-inch Dahlgren Guns were fired with “half-charges” during her famous duel with the Virginia. Actually, they were fired with their full 15- pound service charge as three of his sources indicate. After the battle, experiments demonstrated that the 11-incher would safely bear a 30-pound charge under extreme circumstances, but 15 pounds remained the standard service charge. Rear Admiral John Adolphus Bernard Dahlgren is correctly identified early in this book, but appears later as “John Augustus Dahlgren.” There are several other errors and a few typos as well.
These strictures aside, Divided Waters is a good book. It will not set Civil War naval historiography on its ear, nor does it offer startlingly new information, but it does provide an entertaining summary of an important and oft-neglected aspect of the central event in U.S. history.
Clash of Titans: World War II at Sea
Walter J. Boyne. New York: Simon &. Schuster, 1995. 381 pp. Photos, Illus. Bib. Ind. $27.50 (24.30).
Victory at Sea: World War II In the Pacific
James F. Dunnigan and Albert A. Nofi. New York: William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1995. 612 pp. Append. Bib. Gloss. Ind. Maps, Tables and Chrono. $25.00 ($22.50).
Reviewed by Captain Kenneth J. Hagan, U.S. Naval Reserve (Retired)
The last two years have witnessed a celebratory explosion of books dealing with the military and naval history of World War II. The flood of data on naval leaders, battles, and technologies now overwhelms and daunts any reader who would like to integrate the tactical with the strategic, the specific with the general. The two present volumes, both published in 1995, add to this bibliographic and substantive burden without providing appreciable additional illumination to the search for a comprehensive understanding of the greatest sea war in history.
Victory at Sea is physically the thicker of the two books, but interpretively it is by far the thinner. Conceived originally as an electronic script for a computer war game, the compilation suffers from its transformation into a conventional book. Chapter one, “The Campaigns,” attempts to synthesize accounts of the naval war of the Pacific, but its narrative makes huge leaps over critical periods in the rapid evolution of U.S. naval warfare, most disturbingly from the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands in October 1942 to the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944.
The irregular discussion of battles is punctuated with glib and sometimes questionable generalizations, most notably the casually made assertion that Admiral Raymond A. Spruance should be faulted for not aggressively pursuing the Japanese fleet during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The authors refuse to indulge in a careful analysis of critical questions. For example, did the deliberate Spruance or the irrepressible William F. Halsey, Jr. represent the style of leadership most suitable for the navy of a democratic republic? Or, was the costly invasion of the Philippines strategically or politically ordained? Dunnigan and Nofi cold-bloodedly refuse to criticize a leadership that cost the Americans 10,000 casualties on Peleliu because to do so constitutes an exercise in “hindsight.” This abdication of judgment certainly does not help anyone looking to history for guidance on how to conduct warfare in conformity with the nationally avowed principle of maintaining respect for U.S lives.
Even an attempt to treat Victory at Sea as a reference work yields disappointment. On one page the authors inconsistently list two different classes of warships as the “largest heavy cruisers ever built.” Their index cites two pages on which to find the ill-fated cruiser Indianapolis (CA-35), but apparently she was torpedoed before she got there, because neither page mentions her. A ship whose history has been the subject of so much recent review might deserve more than just passing mention. So, if one wishes to use this book as a reference work, he or she ought to validate the contents by recourse to a second source.
Clash of Titans approaches its global topic in a systematic, analytical, and narrative fashion, and as a result it fills in many of the gaps left by the other book. Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Walter J. Boyne provides some often neglected insights into the Pacific campaign. He thoughtfully emphasizes the importance of land-based air to both sides fighting in the Pacific, especially the impact on Japanese shipping of mines laid by B-29s, an economic devastation exceeded only by the commerce-raiding U.S. submarines.
Boyne offers an extremely helpful exposition of the role of Midway-based aviation in the battle that is almost always seen by Americans as a purely seafaring enterprise. In reality, as Boyne drives home, the United States possessed an unsinkable island aircraft carrier, and this inescapable fact shaped the Japanese Navy’s conduct of the battle. The ships of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s Striking Force were immobilized by the fixed location of the island and by their primary mission to soften it up in preparation for an immediate invasion. For all their decisive brilliance in determining the outcome by pouncing on the Japanese carriers as they rearmed, the naval aircraft of retired Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher and Spruance were in some ways secondary to the engagement. It was the island of Midway, not the American carriers lurking off-screen, that inhibited the Japanese from roaming about freely in pursuit of the much-desired decisive fleet engagement.
Several other important thematic interpretations are stressed in this book. Allied leadership at all levels is held to be superior to that of the Axis powers. The preponderance of the Allied—and especially the American—industrial output permitted a two-ocean war, two distinct and separate high commands in the Pacific theater, and construction of a naval-military establishment whose incomprehensible volume of modern weaponry totally invalidated all prewar assumptions about the nature and level of the Allied forces. Unprecedented breakthroughs in intelligence, especially the breaking of the operational codes of the German U-boat command and those of the Imperial Japanese Navy, gave the Allies an almost unfair advantage over their adversaries. Finally, but not least, the author underscores the remarkably universal heroism of the thousands of men in the prime of their youth who went to sea to die.
These useful themes help tie it all together, and they are repeated throughout the book. But they are offered prematurely and without a rigorous examination of whether they are perhaps too one-sided, possibly a bit simplistic. They are weakened by the author’s inclusion of material that fundamentally undercuts several of them. For example, he repeatedly contends that Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill, allegedly a “master of emotion,” was besotted by blood-lust and temperamentally predisposed to interfering in the tactical operations of the Royal Navy. Yet he un- stintingly praises Churchill equally with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, because both “were basically navy men at heart.” Similarly, if Boyne admits that Admiral Ernest J. King was in fact largely to blame for the lack of preparedness for antisubmarine warfare, a delinquency that proved so costly to the East Coast oil tankers in early 1942, how can he enshrine him in the pantheon of the war’s greatest leaders?
It is equally impossible to reconcile Boyne’s insistence on the superiority of Allied high-level leadership with his derisive comment about how the British found and sank the German surface raider Bismarck: “As would happen so often during the war, the individual acts of common sense that compensated for the ill-laid plans of the commanders would be largely unacknowledged and unrewarded.” Elsewhere the author contends that the dual commands of General Douglas MacArthur in the southwest and Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz in the central Pacific were “mutually supportive rather than destructively competitive.” But he later confesses that the Joint Chiefs of Staff authorized the U.S. invasion of the Philippines not because of strategic necessity but out of deference to the “force of General MacArthur’s emotion and rhetoric.”
These inconsistencies of interpretation suggest a regrettable haste to get into print before expiration of the year marking the 50th anniversary of the victory in the Pacific. They do not mortally wound Boyne’s book, but they do cripple it. Together with the disorienting flaws induced into Victory at Sea by its metamorphosis from an electronic game script, they suggest that what we need most is a moratorium on syntheses of the naval history of World War II, a breathing space to permit absorption of new monographs and quiet reflection on whether the currently popular generalizations really hit the mark.
Books of Interest
By Lieutenant Commander Thomas J. Cutler, U.S. Navy (Retired)
The Spanish-American War at Sea: Naval Action in the Atlantic
A.B. Feuer. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. 280 pp. Append. Bib. Gloss. Ind. Maps. Notes. Photos. $55.00 ($52.25).
Using diaries, letters, scrapbooks, and rare privately printed memoirs, Feuer has pieced together an engrossing account of the U.S. Navy’s war with Spain at the end of the last century. There is more here than the traditional look at the Maine disaster and the great rout at Santiago. Names less familiar, like Manzanillo, Guanica, and Ponce, come to life, to present a unique view of the Atlantic component of the Spanish- American war.
Chronicles of the Frigate Macedonian, 1809-1922
James Tertius de Kay. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. 336 pp. Append. Illus. Ind. Notes. $25.00 ($22.50).
In the preface to this book, de Kay writes that “she is barely remembered today, but in her time the Macedonian was recognized the world over as the most important prize of war ever taken by the American Navy—a distinction she holds to this day.” Her amazing capture from the British during the War of 1812 is only part of the colorful story of this impressive and unusual frigate. Her long history includes a role in ending the piracy along the Barbary Coast, transporting food to Ireland and ending her days as a seaside hotel in the Bronx. Publisher’s Weekly writes that “de Kay masterfully reconstructs the dynamics of life on board a sailing warship at a time when spending months beyond sight of land was the norm.”
War at Sea: A Naval History of World War II
Nathan Miller. New York: Scribners, 1995. 592 pp. Append. Bib. Ind. Maps. Notes, Photos. $32.50 ($29.25).
Many comprehensive histories exist of the naval aspects of World War II, but this one is unique in that it details the operations of the four primary navies involved: United States, British, German, and Japanese. Miller has combined archival material, such as intelligence documents, ship’s logs, and official reports, with interviews of surviving servicemen to create this work that retired Vice Admiral William P. Mack describes as “a first-rate work and . . . best history of its kind yet written.”
