The Grand Strategy of Philip II
Geoffrey Parker. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. 446 pp. Photos. Notes. Bib. Index. $35.00 ($31.50).
Reviewed by Carla Rahn Phillips
Running a tenuously connected world- wide empire, and beset by rivals and enemies on all sides, Philip II of Spain had his desk full in the late 16th century. In this broad overview, Geoffrey Parker addresses one of the enduring questions of early modem history: how and why did Spain lose its hegemony in European affairs? Parker focuses on that failure, though he mentions in passing various instances in which strategy, planning, diplomacy, logistics, and decisive leadership came together successfully to further Philip’s agenda.
Parker’s earlier books on Habsburg politics and diplomacy, including several on Philip’s reign, are well known and respected. In The Grand Strategy, he visits the old neighborhood once again, armed with perceptions from corporate management theory and analogies from studies in 19th- and 20th-century leadership. Throughout the book, he compares Philip—a thoroughly 16th-century king— with Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and modem CEOs—though it is not always clear what lessons one should draw from these sometimes jarring comparisons, or whether they enhance our understanding of the 16th century.
The king’s guiding principles were clear and fully formed at the beginning of his reign: to defend the Catholic faith and preserve and rule effectively the lands that he had inherited from his father, Emperor Charles V. Philip’s relations with his far- flung subjects and with his allies and enemies were all defined in terms of those overriding objectives. It was not a lack of coherent goals, but their implementation that spelled trouble.
Parker organizes his analysis into three parts. Part I on “The Context of Strategic Culture” is by far the freshest and most satisfying. He portrays brilliantly Philip’s working life as a crowned paper-pusher, whose meticulous attention to detail and reluctance to delegate authority left him continually overwhelmed by the flow of paperwork. Parts II and III provide case studies of failure that the author has analyzed in detail before: the Netherlands rebellion and Philip’s vexed relations with England. Fully one-third of the book deals with the great armada of 1588, adding little to the author’s earlier monographic treatment of the subject. Nonetheless, scholars will be grateful for the meticulous documentation that Parker supplies the reader. Philip surely would have approved.
Throughout, the author faces a classic interpretive dilemma: how much did circumstances determine the successes and failures of the reign, and how much can be attributed to the character and actions of the monarch? Parker argues that Philip II left the Spanish monarchy weaker than it was at his accession, and attributes that outcome to the king’s authoritarian personality. Many scholars will have a difficult time accepting that assessment. Although the author provides a richly detailed political and diplomatic portrait of the reign, the broader context of economic and social circumstances is missing. So also is the “kinder, gentler” Philip of Henry Kamen’s recent biography. Reserved, enigmatic, and self-contained, Philip II will continue undoubtedly to fascinate and confound us.
Gyrene: The World War II United States Marine
Wilbur D. Jones. Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Books, 1998. 249 pp. Photos. Appendices. Glossary. Notes. Bib. Index. $29.95 ($26.95).
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Merrill L. Bartlett, USMC (Ret.)
Between 1991 and 1995, the 50th anniversary of the participation of the United States in World War II was commemorated with a wide variety of historical materials. This glut of material included studies, revisionist histories, movies, and self-serving memoirs. Serious analyses—while few in number—took senior commanders to task on occasion. But in all of these attempts to remember the greatest clash of arms in modern history, the role of enlisted men and women received generally short shrift.
Wilbur Jones takes on this shortcoming with a detailed study of the smaller of the naval services. A retired civil servant with more than four decades of service in the Department of Defense, Jones obtained his insightful material by conducting hundreds of personal interviews and examining letters, oral histories, and published works written by the men who were privileged to wear forest green during the war.
The author has divided the book into 19 chapters, sorting his thoughtful conclusions into such topics as: why they joined; boot camp; relationships with the opposite sex; the horrors of combat; decorations and heroism; and the adjustment to peacetime. For the uninitiated, there is a useful glossary of “gyrene” vocabulary minus, of course, the vulgarity.
Several appendices are included to synthesize the sizeable amount of information collected by the author. One of them contains Wilbur’s prototype enlisted Marine. Not surprisingly, most enlistees were well- scrubbed sons of God-fearing mothers when they entered the Corps; three or four years later, many had gained a fondness for alcohol and tobacco, cursed with studied persistency, and sampled (if available) the sins of the flesh.
A select bibliography and list of reunions are testaments to the author’s research. An extra appeal of the book is the addition of cartoons, posters, circulars, and sketches that Marines mailed home— and even a copy of the dreaded telegram informing a wife or mother that a husband or son had fallen. However, the publisher (or more likely, its printer) did a mediocre job with the printing, leaving the selection of photographs looking rather dull.
There are no surprises in Gyrenes for Gyrenes. But to the uninitiated, or the readership who cannot fathom what two or three years as an enlisted Marine fighting through the maelstrom of the Pacific was all about, Gyrenes is a good read.
The Royal Navy in European Waters During the American Revolutionary War
David Syrett. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 1998. 213 pp. Notes. Bib. Index. $24.95 ($23.70).
Reviewed by Dewey Lambdin
It has been said that the Seven Years’ War (the French and Indian War to Americans) was the first world war because of its span of events and the involvement of so many powerful nations. It was a war Great Britain won by sweeping its foes from the world’s seas, and the powerful Royal Navy won victories nearly at will.
It is puzzling indeed, then, why a mere 12 years later in 1775 it was the British who were stretched thin and stymied during the American Revolution. The onus had fallen on the First Lord of the Admiralty, the eccentric Lord Sandwich—but he can hardly be labeled the scapegoat, according to David Syrett’s new book.
According to the author, the blame should be placed on the Prime Minister— Lord North—and his cabinet, who initially wished to fight “war on the cheap.” They underestimated badly the strength of colonial maritime resources, and ignored Lord Sandwich’s recommendations to expand the fleet, cut costs, and keep members of Parliament quiet and happy. Lord North was unable to imagine that France and Spain, sulking after their defeats in the previous war, would get involved sooner or later. The North administration also never had a master plan, and ended up merely reacting to events with hesitant, half-baked directives that changed from one season to the next.
In the previous war, Syrett shows, the Royal Navy won crushing victories against its enemies, then blockaded their shores. But in the Revolution there was only one real victory in European waters—Admiral Rodney’s rather minor moonlit battle off Gibraltar. This time, France and Spain had the chance to send their fleets overseas, and ship troops, artillery, and untold tons of supplies to the American colonies—and even threatened the British Isles with invasion. Smugglers, privateers, and merchantmen carrying naval stores to support the French and Spanish fleets were able to sail with near impunity. To cut the flow of naval stores, the British almost cut their own throats by inciting the specter of a League of Armed Neutrality among the Baltic states, and ended up declaring war on the Netherlands—demanding even more efforts from their thin-stretched fleet.
If there is anything lacking in this book, it is the promise of describing the depredations of American Continental Navy ships and privateers, which wreaked havoc with British shipping in European waters. Likewise, we see nothing of battles fought in American waters, such as the Battle of the Saintes or the Battle of Cape Henry that doomed Cornwallis’s army at York- town—actions that exacerbated British problems closer to home. Overall, though, this new book helps to reveal why the Revolution turned out as it did.
Lost Ships: The Discovery and Exploration of the Ocean’s Sunken Treasures
Mensun Bound. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. 184 pp. Photos. Maps. Index. $35.00 ($31.50).
Reviewed by James P. Delgado
Human exploration of the undersea world over the last four decades has revealed an incredible number of shipwrecks, ranging in age from antiquity to more recent losses. Often, these discoveries are the subject of notice by the press, occasionally as front-page news when the fantastic—or well-remembered—ships of the past are revealed on the ocean floor. Increasingly, the explosion of interest in things historical, the allure of the ocean discovery, and the proliferation of avenues of dissemination— from the many cable channels, to the electronic medium of the web site—allow the stories of formerly “lost ships” to resurface.
Falkland Islands-born underwater archaeologist Mensun Bound, now at Oxford University, has worked on shipwrecks for nearly two decades. Three wrecks that he has dived on form the basis for a documentary series he made recently. In Lost Ships, the companion book to the Learning Channel series, Bound examines the histories of, and his dives on, these wrecks: the ancient Mahdia wreck off Tunisia; and off Uruguay, the 1809 wreck of HMS Agamemnon (one of Horatio Nelson’s commands) and the 1939 wreck of the German “pocket battleship” Graf Spee.
This is more than just a book about the wrecks and their histories. The story of Mensun Bound, how he grew up in the graveyard of the “ghosts of Cape Horn”— the well-preserved wrecks that litter the shores of the Falklands—and his fascination with the ships featured in the book, form the narrative thread that links each story together.
While this is not a book for the died- in-the-wool naval or maritime historian seeking fresh insights, it is a delightful read with broad appeal, wonderful illustrations, and a very clear sense of the passion, travails, and triumphs of those who are able to locate and touch the remains of the past. For Mensun Bound, it is the thrill of raising a gun from the remains of Agamemnon that once belched shot and fire at Trafalgar, or of holding in his hands the binoculars of Kapitan Langsdorff, or of diving on the broken, scuttled remains of the Graf Spee that makes the diving worthwhile. Thanks to the documentaries and this book, viewers and readers alike now can join him in the adventure.