Passport Not Required: U.S. Volunteers in the Royal Navy, 1939-1941
Eric Dietrich-Berryman, Charlotte Hammond, and R. E. White. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010. 186 pp. Illus. Index. $27.95.
Reviewed by John Hattendorf
All Americans who have visited the famous Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich, England, during the past 70 years will probably have noticed the intriguing floor stone with the inscription, “15 June 1941. On this day came three citizens of the United States of America, the first of their countrymen to become Sea Officers of the Royal Navy.” The three authors of Passport Not Required have long been enticed by the unanswered questions that the inscribed stone has posed: Who were these officers? Were there others? How did they manage to do this? What became of them?
For most naval historians, the story of the Americans who volunteered to serve as officers in the Royal Navy at the outbreak of World War II has been known only through the single account that one of them, Alex Cherry, published in 1951 titled, Yankee, R.N. This new slim volume provides further valuable information about this fascinating episode in Anglo-American cooperation during that war.
The authors show that there were 22 American citizens commissioned in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) during the period of American neutrality in the first phase of the war. The June 1941 date on the Greenwich stone merely indicates when three of them came to Greenwich for training. The first of those who joined the RNVR was William Taylor, who was commissioned on 14 September 1939; the last of the group was Peter Morison, commissioned on 10 November 1941.
The Americans’ personalities, backgrounds, experiences in the Royal Navy, and subsequent careers were as diverse as those of any group of naval volunteers. The one who went furthest in the U.S. Navy on his return was Draper Kaufman, who subsequently became famous for organizing the first U.S. naval underwater demolition team that became the forerunner of present-day SEAL teams and eventually became a rear admiral in 1960. Peter Morison was the only son of the famous Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison.
John Parker, one of the three commemorated on the Greenwich stone, was commissioned 7 June 1941. Parker was quickly assigned to serve in HMS Broadwater (H-81), originally the American-built Clemson-class flush-deck four-piper USS Mason (DD-191) that had been transferred to the Royal Navy in the Destroyers for Bases Agreement in 1940. On 17 October 1941, U-101 sank the Broadwater 400 miles south of Iceland while she was guarding an American convoy. Among those who lost their lives was Parker, the first American citizen to die in combat as a British naval officer.
The authors also relate the subsequent commemoration of these Americans through a supplementary memorial, which was dedicated at Greenwich in October 2001 to record the names of all 22 Americans and a memorial to the Broadwater in Chichester Cathedral.
This useful work is a welcome contribution to the literature on Anglo-American naval cooperation that serves both as an excellent supplement to Cherry’s classic 1951 account, as well as a remembrance of all the men who volunteered for this unusual service.
Guadalcanal, Tarawa and Beyond: A Mud Marine’s Memoir of the Pacific Island War
William W. Rogal. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2010. 214 pp. Illus. Bib. Index. $29.95.
Reviewed by Richard Frank
If I were asked to identify a model combat memoir, this would be it. William W. Rogal has a great story, and he tells it deftly. He shrewdly incorporates other sources for essential background to his personal experiences. He is ever mindful of his comrades, often detailing the exact circumstances of wounds and deaths. Finally, he comprehends that it is far better to leave the reader wishing for more than to leave him looking ahead to see how much more there is left to read.
As did so many Marines of that era, Rogal grew up during the Depression in humble circumstances. Contemporary adventure stories stoked a lust for travel that he thought pointed him to the Navy in 1940, with no thought of the coming war. But a friend redirected him into the Marine Corps with the bit of misinformation that the Marines on ships “boss the Sailors around.”
He warmly recalls his “all business” Parris Island boot camp instructors. Initial duty with the 5th Marines morphed into service in Merritt “Red Mike” Edson’s embryonic raider battalion. He then found himself among a detachment sent from Edson to help establish Evans Carlson’s raider battalion. Carlson and Rogal instantly achieved a mutual dislike. Hence, Rogal swiftly found himself in the newly forming A Company, 1st Battalion, 2d Marines.
Now-corporal Rogal took charge of a Browning automatic rifle squad as his regiment loaded out for what proved to be Guadalcanal. Here Rogal airs a major motivation for his memoirs: a well-founded conviction that the Guadalcanal contribution of 2d Marines rarely gets its due. Yet even as his outfit’s champion, he is ever careful with the facts of both his and his regiment’s actual experiences.
In smooth prose, Rogal candidly narrates the relatively peripheral role his starving battalion played on Florida and Tulagi islands prior to permanent transfer to Guadalcanal in November 1942. While his combat experiences are amply riveting in themselves, his narrative affords a thoughtful study on combat psychology and particularly combat leadership. He identifies the overarching aspiration of his comrades as “survival with honor.” It was the “with honor” that fueled the engine of effectiveness. His saddest day of service occurred when his first platoon leader proved a coward.
In his initial encounter with face-to-face combat, he killed five Japanese. This evokes no shame or sorrow, but likewise no sense of elation or victory. As his unit’s roll dwindled alarmingly from combat losses and disease, Rogal found his assignments increasing in responsibility, but he acknowledges that “[a]s a troop leader I felt obligated to exhibit unconcern and a savoir-faire I certainly didn’t feel.” He earned his highest personal decoration, the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, by rescuing a pilot from the sea. As to this, he confesses, “I have always been apathetic about it, for Marines get paid to kill people, not save them.”
There followed a period of recuperation in New Zealand before Tarawa. Rogal, now a platoon sergeant, was wounded on the harrowing run into the beach in an LVT (landing vehicle tracked) where one man was decapitated by a Japanese shell. On that famous beachhead replete with chaos he did his best at least to get his small command moving beyond the breakwater to engage the enemy.
After a protracted hospitalization, Rogal returned to his unit. He narrates the campaigns on Saipan and Tinian in roughly the same space he gives Tarawa. Just as he sensed his relative luck was running out (he was wounded again on Saipan), Rogal benefited from the policy of returning men with two years of overseas service to the States. There he trained new Marines for combat and married the wonderful woman he met before shipping out to the Pacific. The service memoirs conclude with his postwar tour in China. After discharge, he went on to secure an undergraduate and law degree and worked for decades as a lawyer.
Anyone who has read many personal accounts of World War II service will find this one truly outstanding, not just in its intrinsic interest but also in the care and craft of the author.
Perilous Fight: America’s Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812-1815
Stephen Budiansky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. 422 pp. Maps. Illus. Bib. Index. $35.
Reviewed by Commander Tyrone G. Martin, U.S. Navy (Retired)
Stephen Budiansky’s book is on the leading edge of what undoubtedly will be a wave of works about the War of 1812. His opus may not be forgotten in the crowd, for he has taken an unusual approach: Sea battles are not its focus. Instead, he traces the course of the war through the politics and strategies of each side and the impact of events on them, as well as the logistical and financial problems, the changing public attitudes, and the personalities of those involved. The actual combat is a sideshow.
Opening with a brief review of the combat origin of the U.S. Navy during the First Barbary War, the author takes up the British perception of America as a crude, embryonic nation with little to recommend it and certainly unworthy of respect, and contrasts it with the young nation still finding its way but with the revolutionary fires still smoldering. The two views inevitably cause tensions and incidents, particularly as Britain is in a life-and-death struggle with France and will go to almost any length to ensure victory. And so the course is set for confrontation over “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights.”
Britain began the war with the hope of bringing it to an end through diplomacy. The United States began with the expectation of gaining Canada. Both sides were mistaken. Not surprisingly, the British turned to a strategy of blockade, with which they had had so much success against France. The coastline to be blockaded and its distance from home bases made that almost impossible and required much greater resources than had been anticipated. For the Americans, the incompetency of their generals aside, the unwelcome truth was that the Canadians weren’t interested in leaving the empire. Budiansky paints a number of interesting portraits of the reactions of political and military leaders on both sides and their responses to the realities of the situation.
When the author turns to actual operations his treatment becomes sketchy, perhaps betraying a lack of understanding of the details of ship duels. With regard to the opening U.S. victory of the war over HMS Guerriere, he has chosen to repeat the story that appeared in most newspapers of the time, one that may have been “good press” but bears little relation to history. In retelling the Battle of Lake Erie, the American brig Lawrence is said to have been fighting on both sides simultaneously, when she actually faced two foes on the same side. About half of the battles are ignored. And at no time is the point made that, among the American captains, none had fought a sea battle before.
This is an easy book to read and so may gain a wide audience. Unfortunately, the author treats the facts rather cavalierly—as when he states the Royal Navy outnumbered the U.S. Navy 100 to 1—and so the phrase, “a good read” must be viewed with caution in terms of its being an authoritative text.
The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945
Edited by Mark Peattie, Edward Drea, and Hans Van De Ven. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. 614 pp. Maps. Illus. Index. Notes. $65
Reviewed by Major Robert S. Burrell, U.S. Marine Corps
The title of this book implies a degree of ambiguity concerning those who fought over the territorial integrity and cultural identity of China. The interplay of imperial Japan, nationalist Chinese, communist Chinese, Great Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, France, and the United States from 1937 through 1945 creates a challenging labyrinth to navigate with accuracy and objectivity. Consequently, the editors have avoided attempting to define the facts of the matter and instead have offered essays from the perspectives of scholars from China, Taiwan, Japan, and the United States.
Editors Mark Peattie, research fellow at the Hoover Institution; Edward Drea, former chief of the Research and Analysis Division of the U.S. Army Center of Military History; and Hans Van De Ven, professor of modern Chinese history at Cambridge University, are leading authorities on the Pacific war. The volume’s 17 other contributors range from unknown doctoral candidates to historian heavyweights such as Ronald Spector. Despite this diversity, the result is a text firmly grounded in analyses of events from the perspective of military affairs.
The book is organized in six parts: an overview; opposing armies organization, training and equipment; initial hostilities (1937–38); a stalemate in strategies (1938–42); the Burma and Ichigo campaigns (1943–45); and conclusions. One innovative theme is the attention given to the challenges facing Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalist party Kuomintang (KMT). While not excusing its failures, the authors provide context for understanding the KMT’s weak position in an agrarian society with undeveloped state organization facing a growing communist insurgency, tepid Allied support, and a vicious campaign of destruction carried out by an industrialized opponent. The deprivations the Chinese endured and the sacrifices they made over seven long years of some of the most brutal warfare in history does much to explain the KMT’s precarious situation at war’s end. Spector provides excellent context to these essays, placing the scholarship within the framework of the Pacific war, World War II, and the history of warfare.
The book provides important insights into the Imperial Japanese Army. At a tactical and operational level, the Sino-Japanese War validates Japan’s emphasis on offensive tactics to overcome the numeric superiority of its opponents—successful in this case against the Chinese rather than the Soviets, for whom it had prepared. Although in most cases materially superior to the Chinese, Japan’s ability to keep them off balance through limited offensives was perhaps the primary factor in surmounting overwhelming odds in manpower.
The book also emphasizes the importance of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s operations in central China, particularly the considerable efforts of its naval air forces in supporting the army and the vital consequence of controlling inland waterways for transportation and logistics. Naval forces proved critical in the amphibious landings at Shanghai. The book offers additional lessons on how Japan’s unclear strategy and inability to focus resources toward ending the war dragged the military deeper into a quagmire from which it could not emerge.
The Battle for China is a ground- and air-centric study from which it is difficult to extract naval lessons. Japan’s ability to attain sea control between its main islands and the Chinese coast gave it great advantages in maneuverability and sustainment. In addition to controlling the major islands of Formosa (Taiwan) and Hainan, Japan seized every major seaport in China. Early in the war, the Imperial Japanese Navy initiated its 4th Fleet to maintain China Sea lines of communication and deny vital maritime logistics to the KMT. Because China could not oppose Japan with any significant sea denial, the authors may have chosen to avoid the subject of sea power. The Peoples’ Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), however, has not forgotten the naval lessons of the war, in which its coastline and waterways became the highways for imperial aggression.
My only major criticism of The Battle for China stems from the inadequacy of its maps. Those unfamiliar with Chinese, Japanese, and Burmese geography will find the places described difficult to locate. For instance, the prominent province of Chahar in Inner Mongolia is not named on any of the 14 maps—even on the map of the Battle of Pingxingguan Pass, which took place in Chahar. The Burmese map shows fewer than half of the important locations discussed in the readings and no indication of the Burma Road, for which the forces were fighting.
While I am not certain that Chinese or Japanese audiences will gravitate to this English work, and despite its targeting a small niche of Sino-Japanese War history enthusiasts in North America and Europe, nevertheless I cannot praise the editors enough for their effort in publishing this important book. The Battle for China is a rare treasure that will likely renew interest in this underdeveloped field. For those interested in the Pacific war or greater insight into modern Chinese history, I highly recommend it.