Pacific Air: How Fearless Flyboys, Peerless Aircraft, and Fast Flattops Conquered the Skies in the War with Japan
David Sears. Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2011. 372 pp. Illus. Notes. Bibliog. $27.50
Reviewed by Douglas V. Smith
Pacific Air tells of the struggle in the skies over the Pacific between the pilots and aircraft of the Japanese and Americans during World War II. David Sears has provided a most useful, readable, and far-reaching account of how Grumman Aircraft and other manufacturers conceived of and produced the aircraft for the war, the tactical development by and air exploits of the men who flew them, and the essence of the combat they engaged in in their deadly duel with a capable and competent Japanese adversary.
Arguably, the three best books on the Pacific War in the last 20 years, War Plan Orange (Edward S. Miller), Shattered Sword (Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully), and Downfall (Richard Frank), have been written by nonprofessional academics. It appears that David Sears, a former U.S. Navy officer, amateur historian, and author, brings a similar vitality and dedication to fully understanding the events about which he writes.
While it must be pointed out that the book reviewed was a prepublication printing of page proofs, with no preface or introduction and without any indication of where end notes provided would be placed in relation to specific passages in the chapters, it is obvious that Sears bases his findings on many personal interviews, oral histories, and a plethora of excellent and scholarly secondary sources. Concentration on two obscure but illustrative characters, petty officer and pilot Saburo Sakai of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s land-based air wing, and U.S. Navy pilot trainee and combat aviator Alex Vraciu, with whom Sears has obviously formed close friendships and whom he has interviewed extensively, bear out his reliance on personal accounts.
Sears starts with a consideration of how Grumman Aircraft Corporation established itself and its design team as the primary supplier of prewar Navy aircraft. He continues through the great carrier battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, the Eastern Solomons, Santa Cruz, and the Philippine Sea. He then moves on to Leyte Gulf and the subsequent conversion of carrier focus to attacks on land as well as naval targets, always concentrating on the accompanying air combat action that led to Japan’s surrender.
Sears weaves in the land-based naval air action that complemented the progressive naval thrust toward the Japanese home islands. In the process, he interjects perspectives on individuals who wore the Navy wings of gold, considering their contributions from the point of view of their tactical innovations, victories, and defeats in air combat with the enemy. While covering the impact on the air war of aviation technological advances, Sears personalizes the experiences of those faced daily with the possibility of death.
He accomplishes this in a most odd and unusual way, moving between completely unrelated people and events in succeeding paragraphs. For instance in chapter 15, without transition, he follows a paragraph on VF-3’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Butch O’Hare, and aviation innovator Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Flatley’s position regarding the advantages of four- versus six-plane divisions in combat, with a discussion of the first U.S. flight of a Japanese Zero fighter aircraft recovered from Akutan Island, Alaska. Yet somehow Sears carries this off in a way that makes it hard to put the book down.
Admittedly, chapter titles such as “A Bag of Gold through a Lonely Forest” for the Battle of Midway are less than helpful, particularly for potential buyers trying to determine whether the book will be of interest. But Sears has covered a huge amount of useful and interesting information in a concise and extremely readable narrative.
Pacific Air is obviously crafted for a general readership, primarily of those with an abiding interest in World War II in the Pacific, particularly the air war. Lacking detailed bibliographic information about the original source materials, what could have been an excellent source for scholars “mining” for resources is diminished in this important area.
Tirpitz and the Imperial German Navy
Patrick J. Kelly. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011. 585 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. Bibliog. $45.
Reviewed by Holger H. Herwig
In 1970 Patrick Kelly, present-day professor of history at Adelphi University, completed a dissertation titled “The Naval Policy of Imperial Germany, 1900-1914.” After four decades of further research, he has recast that work into a study of the fleet’s architect, Alfred von Tirpitz. Kelly has remained as constant in his major thesis as Tirpitz was in maintaining his Navy Law: namely, that the fleet was the product solely of bureaucratic power politics (Ressorteifer). To buttress this claim, he has used Graham Allison’s governmental, or bureaucratic, politics model from Essence of Decision (1999). Thus, the High Seas Fleet was the result not of rational choices based on the national interest, nor of established organizational behavior, but rather of “bargaining games among players within a national government.” He cites Admiral Hyman Rickover and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as American equivalents of Tirpitz in this regard.
Kelly has wisely chosen to concentrate his research on the creation of the fleet. The accepted wisdom is that Tirpitz built his Mahanian battle fleet step-by-step “against England and against the Reichstag.” A series of navy laws and supplementary bills were to create a main fleet of 61 capital ships by the mid-1920s, when it would be a sufficient “deterrent” to force London to accord Berlin a “great overseas policy” (Weltpolitik). Tirpitz invented screens such as the “alliance value” of the fleet and its role as “risk factor” in British politics to cover his true intentions.
Conversely, beginning with Eckart Kehr in 1930, a group of historians has argued that a “system stabilizing” grand design lay behind fleet building: Massive shipbuilding contracts would benefit workers and industrialists alike, thereby stabilizing the neo-feudal Prussian agrarian establishment. And by an eventual “eternal law” (Äternat), Tirpitz would have his battle fleet automatically replaced every 20 years (the Novelle of 1908), thereby removing it from parliament’s budgetary control.
Kelly rejects these lines of argument and posits instead a mono-causal explanation: Ressorteifer. Tirpitz’s only desire was to champion and then defend whatever office he held. The “bureaucratic warrior” stayed in power for two decades by a clever combination of defiance, ruthlessness, resignation threats, weeding out of potential rivals, and downright obstinacy. He defended his turf (the Navy Law) against all opponents, for no other purpose than “to preserve personal and institutional power.” He eventually succumbed to the ever-escalating costs of especially dreadnought construction. The “eternal law” was constantly threatened by the fact that the Reichstag controlled the purse strings. And at no time did Tirpitz ever explain what his 61-ship fleet, once completed, was to do.
Tirpitz’s post–World War I political career, highlighted by his ability to convince Paul von Hindenburg to run for the office of president in 1925, was straightforward—to do all in his power to undermine the Weimar republic and help a dictator seize power in Berlin. His memoirs, written with Professor Fritz Kern and published in 1919, were equally straightforward: First the peace and then the war had been lost by the “bungling” Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg and the “erratic” Wilhelm II.
Anglo-German antagonism had been caused not by naval building but by economic rivalry. The fleet had rusted in port 1914-18 against his specific orders to sally out, and U-boat warfare had been delayed against his express wishes to the contrary. In answer to the storm of protest that the Memoiren aroused, Tirpitz in 1924 and 1926 published two volumes of carefully selected documents that he had taken with him upon leaving office in 1916. It was more self-justification and vilification of Bethmann and the kaiser.
Finally, Tirpitz acted as a consultant to Eberhard von Mantey, editor of the multivolume official history Der Krieg zur See, to make certain that there would be no deviation from the pro-Tirpitz line. That “deviation” had to wait until the return to West Germany of the naval records in the 1960s and a rush of fresh archival scholarship from the pens of Volker Berghahn, Wilhelm Deist, Paul Kennedy, Werner Rahn, Michael Salewski, and this reviewer.
Though I do not agree with Kelly’s mono-causal thesis, the book is stellar. It is based on decades of research in federal, regional, and private archives and takes into account a flood of scholarship on Tirpitz and the fleet. Well written and sensibly organized, the book allows English-language readers their first in-depth look at one of the men who helped shape the 20th century. Its major flaw is its dogged insistence on a single explanation—Ressorteifer—at the cost of a more nuanced multi-causal analysis.
Preparing for Victory, Thomas Holcomb and the Making of the Modern Marine Corps, 1936-1943
David J. Ulbrich. Naval Institute Press, 2011. 336 pp. Illus. Notes. Bibliog. $35.95.
Reviewed by Colonel Dick Camp, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)
David Ulbrich has done yeoman service in detailing the contributions of Marine General Thomas “Tommy” Holcomb during the critical period leading up to World War II and in the two years following the start of the war (1936-43). Ulbrich’s convincingly documented book provides a great deal of insight into this relatively unknown Marine officer and his leadership during this pivotal period of the Corps’ history.
The book is divided into three principal sections. The first covers Holcomb’s early career at the turn of the century after being commissioned. At a time when many Marine officers were graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy, Holcomb, who never received a baccalaureate degree, entered the Corps by passing an entrance examination.
The lack of a degree did not hinder his rise through the officer ranks. His service as a battalion commander during World War I in the legendary 4th Marine Brigade at the battle of Belleau Wood and in the Meuse-Argonne campaign cinched his professional reputation. He emerged as a highly decorated veteran, recognized as a “comer” by the senior officers of the Corps. He was assigned high-visibility positions that prepared him professionally for increasingly responsible assignments. As a colonel, he served directly under Major General John A. Lejeune, known as the “greatest of all Leathernecks” and the “Marine’s Marine.”
In 1935, after receiving his first star, Holcomb became commandant of the Marine Corps Schools, where he was directly involved in the development of the service’s three key doctrinal publications: the “Tentative Manual for Landing Operations,” “Tentative Manual for Defense of Advanced Bases,” and the 1940 edition of the “Small Wars Manual.” These three became the foundation for the development of amphibious doctrine, the blueprint for the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific. Ulbrich lays out in detail Holcomb’s influence on the individuals who developed the doctrine and credits him with ensuring “that the Corps could fulfill its dual mission of amphibious assault and base defense.”
The second section explores the prewar years. Ulbrich shows how Holcomb oversaw the growth of the Corps from a small force of 18,000 officers and enlisted men, whose primary focus was on maritime intervention and the State Department’s “Dollar Diplomacy,” to a powerful amphibious assault force of more than 385,000 Marines. He outlines the steps that Holcomb took, after becoming the major general commandant, to deal with myriad internal and external problems relating to the economic and political conditions faced by the nation. Ulbrich points out how Holcomb cultivated a good working relationship with Congress, the Roosevelt administration, and the American public to ensure the Corps had a legitimate place in the national defense.
In the third section, Holcomb’s activities during the first two years of the war are analyzed. Ulbrich points to his effective personnel management policies, reorganized command structure, effective resource allocation, and deft handling of interservice rivalries as evidence that Holcomb was an adept administrator as well as a warfighter. However, in the area of race relations and gender, Holcomb was slow in adopting change, only grudgingly accepting women and non-whites once this became mandated. A true Washington insider, Holcomb never lost sight of the reason for the Corps’ existence. His total support for the Guadalcanal campaign highlighted his “coordination of the Corps’ war effort at Headquarters Marine Corps and in the Pacific theater of operations.” Upon retirement, he was promoted to the rank of general, the first Marine to achieve that rank.
Holcomb was recalled to service as the U.S. minister to the Union of South Africa. During his time there, he observed firsthand a policy of “unimpeded” racism, which transformed his previous racial views. In 1948 he again retired and spent his remaining years as a gentleman farmer.
Ulbrich’s work is extremely well researched and documented. He has captured General Holcomb’s qualities and contribution.
Maritime Dominion and the Triumph of the Free World
Peter Padfield. New York: Overlook Press, 2010. 369 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. Bibliog. $30.
Reviewed by Jeremy Black
To look at recent naval history from the perspective of the present is particularly helpful when considering Peter Padfield’s book, for it raises important and relevant questions about the linkage between naval power and freedom. He emphasizes a struggle between liberal maritime cultures and autocratic army-based systems, an approach that makes sense of both the present world and the last century.
Indeed, it is the naval strength of the free world that is now in decline. The United States, the world’s foremost naval power and protector of the global commons of the sea, has a smaller navy than after the Reagan build-up and is considering substantial further cuts. Britain has grievously cut its navy, Canada is no longer an important naval power, and so on. In contrast, China is developing a significant navy that may well become a strategic challenge to the United States, as is certainly the intention.
But if the intellectual conspectus of Padfield’s work is relevant, its contents could be improved. We are, too much, essentially in the familiar waters of the late 19th century and the early 20th. The discussion of the First World War is particularly promising, not least as it draws together Padfield’s particular interests, notably both battle and British naval power. However, it has to be said that there is little that is really original here.
Moreover, there are better recent works. For the Victorian Royal Navy, it is better to read Andrew Lambert; for the First World War, Andrew Gordon; for the U.S. Navy, Ronald Spector; and for the period as a whole, Larry Sondhaus, whom Padfield appears not to have read. Indeed, the great quality of work on naval history from 1845 to 1945 is a welcome feature of the historiography. For the Second World War, I recommend the excellent essays in On Seas Contested: The Seven Great Navies of the Second World War, edited by Vincent O’Hara et al. (Naval Institute Press, 2010).
More disappointing in Padfield’s work, and, in my mind, a crucial feature, is the failure to provide more than superficial coverage of the Cold War, let alone the situation elsewhere in the world post-1945. So the role of naval power in the Korean and Vietnam wars or the Cuban Missile Crisis does not attract attention. In each case, U.S. Navy power played a key role and one that deserves explication and analysis. Nor does the role of naval power in the Iraq wars, the Arab-Israeli wars, the Indo-Pakistan wars, or the Falklands War attract attention. To describe this book as unfortunate, therefore, does not capture fully the mismatch between the book and the naval history of the last century and a half. Padfield can write well and his battle accounts are good, but there is much more to cover.