No Higher Honor: The USS Yorktown at the Battle of Midway
Jeff Nesmith. Atlanta, GA: Longstreet, 1999. 280 pp. Illus. Index. $24.00 ($21.60).
Reviewed by Thomas Allen
Reading about a single ship in a battle is like trying to listen to one voice in a chorus. Perhaps, if you try very hard, you can hear that voice and even admire it. But you lose the music, you lose the overall composition. By focusing on the York- town (CV-5) at Midway, Jeff Nesmith forces the reader to lose sight of the epic battle. Little, for example, is said about the U.S. cyptanalysts whose code cracking gave Admiral Chester W. Nimitz the knowledge that a Japanese fleet was heading for Midway. Nor is there an overarching prelude that puts this pivotal battle in perspective.
But readers who know the basics of the June 1942 battle and the events leading up to it will find that the book delivers something not supplied in descriptions of tactics and strategy. Here are narrations of battle minutes by the men who lived through them. Woven together by Nesmith, the recollections produce a panoramic view of an aircraft carrier at war.
Nesmith tells the stories of pilots who ditch, of the men who bleed and the men who bind their wounds, of men like Water Tender First Class Charles Kleinsmith. He kept his crew at Boiler No. 1 when a bomb ripped into the Yorktown’s engine room. They got her moving again—and two hours later Kleinsmith was killed when the ship was hit by two torpedoes. Other men, like Pete Montalvo, survived because shipmates saved them. Montalvo was grievously wounded and unable to climb down a rope when the Yorktown’s crew abandoned ship. “I’ll get you down,” a shipmate said, “You can stand on my shoulders.”
Anyone who has studied the battle knows about the ordeal of the Yorktown and her courageous crew. But the Yorktown’s efforts were not as crucial as the action of Wade McClusky of the Enterprise (CV-6). Finding no Japanese fleet where he was supposed to look, he spotted a destroyer that led him to his target. In minutes, McClusky’s dive bombers—joined by others from the Yorktown and the Hornet (CV-8)—sank three Japanese carriers. Because No Higher Honor keeps its focus on the Yorktown, McClusky’s deed gets little space. Instead, Nesmith takes the reader to that Japanese destroyer, the Arashi, and tells a story that relatively few Americans know.
The Arashi spotted a swimmer while speeding toward the Japanese carrier force. The captain of the Arashi ordered him taken aboard. He was Ensign Wesley Osmus of the Yorktown’s Torpedo Squadron Three. He was tortured, interrogated, and murdered, possibly by being beheaded with a fire axe. What little is known about Osmus comes from war crimes investigators. As Nesmith points out, no one ever was brought to trial for the murder of Osmus.
Yachting’s Golden Age, 1880-1905
Edited and with text by Ed Holm. New York: Knopf, 1999. 208 pp. Photos. Bib. Index. $65.00 ($61.75).
Reviewed by Captain John Bonds, U.S. Navy (Retired)
This is a particularly lovely coffee table book with 125 magnificent photographs of yachts of this period. These alone are worth the price of the book, as they are mostly contact prints from the original glass plates. The result is a series of razor- sharp images with remarkable detail. The yachts themselves are wondrous things, of course, built in an era before income taxes took a substantial bite from the fortunes of the captains of industry in the United States. Here are the schooners that followed the model of the America, the first one-design sailing yachts, and the highspeed commuter steamers built to transit Long Island Sound to the Battery in New York. There is a chapter on the significant characters of the age, from legendary skipper Charlie Barr to J. Pierpont Morgan; another on the great steam yachts, of which Morgan’s Corsairs are representative; yet another on Great Lakes and West Coast yachting (both were quite different). A chapter describing the New York Yacht Club’s Yacht Squadron annual cruises will be of interest to veterans of one of these events, which still fulfill the description penned in 1890 by J. D. Jerrold Kelley:
Refined to perfection during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the annual squadron cruise incorporated into one program of events all of Grand Yachts’s most appealing ingredients. The contentment of sailing under fresh breezes and over sparkling seas; the emulous thrill of racing, as both participant and spectator; the bliss of luxuriating in somnolent idleness on an awning-shaded afterdeck; the enjoyment of participating in social events with congenial fellow yachtsmen both afloat and ashore—all these pleasures were rendered manifest in a series of port-to- port runs, cup races, fleet receptions, grand illuminations (fireworks), and other nautical diversions.
The final chapter is focused on the America’s Cup competitions, which saw designs evolve from the America-model schooners through the Starling Burgess “compromise” designs into the Herreshoff era, and culminating in the Reliance— which dwarfed the subsequent J-Boats at some 143 feet in length and a mast height of 189 feet. Each of the matches is discussed in some detail, with proper emphasis on the evolution of design. All of this is displayed in those wonderful photographs, only one of which shows any deterioration at all. For his narrative accompaniment Mr. Holm has scoured the contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts of yachting activity, and supplemented this information with a wide of secondary sources. The photographs constitute the major strength of this book, but they are ably supported by an interesting narrative. Some of the information will be familiar to many modern yachtsmen, but few of us have seen images like these.
Gunfire Around the Gulf: The Last Major Naval Campaigns of the Civil War
Jack C. Coombe. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1999. 288 pp. Photos. Notes. Bib. Index. $23.95 ($21.55).
Reviewed by William N. Still, Jr.
“The Last Major Naval Campaigns of the Civil War” is a somewhat misleading subtitle, as more than a half of this book deals with naval activities during the first year of the Civil War, through the fall of New Orleans in April 1862. Also, much of this has nothing to do with the Gulf of Mexico. The final 75 pages of the book chronicle naval activities in the Gulf, from fall 1862 until the Battle of Mobile Bay and the fall of the forts defending the bay in August 1864. These pages stress military actions around Galveston, Texas, and Mobile, Alabama. The campaign of Union military forces to take the port of Mobile, a campaign that lasted until April 1865, is mentioned in one brief paragraph. In short, the book’s title and subtitle are not representative of what it is about.
Unfortunately, this is not all that is wrong with this book. It is poorly written and inadequately researched, with conclusions that are not proven or acceptable. It also is replete with mistakes. For example, the most famous of the Confederate cruisers was not the Florida, but the Alabama. The author on page 43 implies that the blockade runners were Confederate owned and operated. There were a few Confederate and state owned blockade runners, but the overwhelming majority were owned, operated, and manned by British subjects. On page 128 the author writes, “Perhaps the most famous encounter with a Confederate cruiser took place on Mobile Bay on September 4, 1862: the successful run of the CSS Florida.” What about the fight between the Alabama and Kearsarge? The USS Harriet Lane did not “explode with a thunderous roar,” but was converted into a blockade runner. The USS Hatteras’ action with the Alabama lasted 13 minutes, not 20. I strongly question the author’s conclusion that after the Battle of Mobile Bay, “The Confederate Navy had faded into history.” The Confederate Navy still had relatively powerful squadrons in Savannah, Charleston, and on the James River. He is incorrect in saying that the Confederacy produced 29 ironclads, as opposed to 60 for the Union. The Confederacy commissioned 24, nor did the Union have anywhere near 60 during the war.
At times it is difficult to determine what sources he has examined, as he cites some items in notes not found in the bibliography, and a sizable number in the bibliography not cited in the notes. He lists manuscripts, but they come from only two repositories (New Orleans, and Fort Morgan, Alabama). He used the standard published Official Records of the armies and navies, but unfortunately made no effort to examine the large number of records in the National Archives not included in these works.
I am sorry, but service in the Navy during World War II does not make the author an “expert” on the naval side of the Civil War as he implies in his preface. I am a former “whitehat,” but this certainly does not make me an expert on the subject—or any other for that matter. The author is right in saying that more should be written on naval activities during the Civil War, but this book adds nothing to the literature of the war.