The best history articles, as well as books, are generally based on primary sources-official reports, letters, and interviews, for example. And occasionally, the long hours a historian spends mining dusty archives yields information that alters the way we view the past.
An article in this issue, "TR's Plan to Invade Colombia," features such a find. While researching his Ph.D. dissertation, Commander Henry Hendrix uncovered evidence that during the tense weeks after the 1903 Panamanian revolution, President Theodore Roosevelt sent his commanders on the scene plans for the U.S. capture of the Colombian port of Cartagena if Colombia tried to forcibly recover its former province. A Marine brigade led by the commandant of the Corps was to have spearheaded the operation. As Commander Hendrix points out, the Cartagena plan reveals the President's mental agility in using his naval "big stick" to protect Panama from outside aggression.
Plenty of well-researched naval history books have been published of late, and in "Recent Additions to the Naval History Bookshelf," William Dudley, former director of the Naval Historical Center, provides a look back at some of the best to hit the market over the past year or so. A trio of articles, meanwhile, offers looks at some of the best fall 2006 releases.
"The Hero of Lake Erie Assessed" is an excerpt from historian David Curtis Skaggs' Naval Institute Press biography, Oliver Hazard Perry: Honor, Courage, and Patriotism in the Early U.S. Navy. Evan Thomas, an assistant managing editor at Newsweek, has followed up his biography of John Paul Jones with Thunder at Sea: Four Commanders and the Last Great Naval Campaign 1941-1945. In his article, "Writing Thunder at Sea," he gives possible explanations for the puzzling actions taken by two opposing admirals at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. And James D. Hornfischer's article, "Street Fight in Sunda Strait," is excerpted from his latest work, Ship of Ghosts, which is the story of the USS Houston (CA-30) and the fate of her crewmen who survived the cruiser's sinking.
One of those Sailors, Howard Brooks, was among the veterans and historians who spoke at the National Museum of the Pacific War's 16-17 September symposium, sponsored by the Admiral Nimitz Foundation. Titled "Desperate Days," the conference focused on the early months of the Pacific war. In a soft and emotional voice, Mr. Brooks likened the 27 February 1942 Battle of the Java Sea to a carnival shooting gallery—"If you see all those ducks they shoot at, that's what we felt like"—and he later recounted his hellish years as a POW building the infamous Thailand-Burma railroad. His recollections of the Battle of Sunda Strait are included in the Ship of Ghosts excerpt.
The World War II recollections of two other Navy veterans are featured in this issue's two naval aviation articles. Randolph Bartlett's "The Big E's Impatient Virgins" is partly based on the author's interviews with one of his father's U.S. Naval Academy classmates ('35), Captain Richard Harmer, USN (Ret.). Author Carl LaVO, meanwhile, was attending a reunion of the crew of his father's destroyer, the Halford (DD-480) when he met Bob Schiller, who flew a scout plane off the tin can. The result is "The Destroyer Aviator." These articles are further proof that often the best stories about war come from the mouths of veterans who lived through the experience.
—Richard G. Latture, Editor-in-Chief
