Sealab: America’s Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor
Ben Hellwarth. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012. 400 pp. Illus. Notes. Bibliog. Appendices. $28.
Reviewed by Captain Don Walsh, U.S. Navy (Retired)
The U.S. Navy’s Sealab Program operations from 1964 to 1970 pioneered experimental deep-diving science and technologies. The program’s results were eventually utilized well beyond the Navy’s interests. This work helped push back the limits of divers’ ability to safely work on the seafloor for long periods of time. Sealab’s “fingerprints” can be found on all present-day deep-diving operations.
Author Ben Hellwarth put a great deal of scholarship into this book, as evidenced by his extensive notes. The book combines the work of a diligent investigative reporter with that of a feature writer who loves a good sea story.
The Navy’s Genesis Program in the late 1950s was one of the first to test experimental breathing-gas mixtures to extend diver bottom times. The program director was Navy Commander George Bond, a doctor and submarine medical officer. He would spend more than a decade on this work and became known as the “father of saturation diving.”
Tests showed that with a change of the gas components in the breathing mixture, animals could live and function at greater depths for prolonged periods. By 1964 human volunteers had made a dive in an onshore test facility to work at 200 feet for 12 days. Practical saturation diving had been born.
After six years of Genesis, the next step was to move into the ocean. This began with Sealab I, a small habitat anchored to the ocean floor. Inside, it provided lodging for its dive team, who would remain under full depth pressure for a prolonged time. The divers would live in the dry and then could easily suit up to go outside for work tasks. In this way, lengthy decompression time for returning to the surface was done only once at the end of the divers’ bottom time.
The Sealab I mission took place off Bermuda in 1964. The four-man team was at a water depth of 192 feet. Unfortunately the experiment lasted only 11 days, due to an approaching hurricane. Despite its short duration, this mission proved that functioning divers could be put at depth for long periods. It was the beginning of man in the sea.
In 1965 a newly built habitat, Sealab II, was installed on the seafloor off La Jolla, California, at 205 feet. This time there were three nine-man teams of divers, and each team spent 15 days in the habitat. The exception was astronaut/hydronaut Commander Scott Carpenter, who spent 30 days in the seafloor house.
The last mission in the series was Sealab III in 1969. For this the upgraded Sealab II habitat was located near the previous La Jolla site. However, the water depth for this mission was 600 feet. Regrettably, before the mission could be started, there was a fatal accident. This led to delays and the ultimate cancellation of the entire program in 1970.
The Navy was then officially out of the man-in-the-sea business. But was it really? In fact, the Sealab III project was also used as a cover for a highly classified black-operations intelligence program against the Soviet Union. The long-duration saturation-diving techniques developed by Sealab were used to deploy dive teams from submerged submarines.
The ability to work for relatively long periods on the seafloor made it possible to do object recovery and tap seafloor communications cables. This program was highly successful and was terminated only years later, when Navy Chief Warrant Officer John A. Walker informed the Soviets about it. Arrested in 1985, he is serving a life sentence in a federal prison.
While the Sealab Program is his main story line, Hellwarth surrounds it with an account of contemporary developments in the United States and abroad. The work of well-known pioneers such as Ed Link, Jacques Cousteau, and Henri Delauze is discussed. The developing offshore oil and gas industry in the 1970s adopted and perfected this work, with some dives approaching 1,000 feet. Carefully prepared experiments on land actually got divers down to more than 2,000 feet in the 1980s.
Ben Hellwarth has produced a fascinating history of man in the sea. It is a book well worth reading, whether you are an aficionado of undersea operations or a casual reader who likes a great sea story.
National Naval Aviation Museum: The Historic Collection
M. Hill Goodspeed and Michael Duncan. Pensacola, Florida: Naval Aviation Museum Foundation, 2011. 164 pp. Illus. $20.
Reviewed by Andrew C. A. Jampoler
The Historic Collection, a handsome book of color photography highlighting the central artifacts in the collection of the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida, is a perfect gem. It is a superb catalogue of the museum’s arresting exhibits that should be part of every aviation buff’s personal library. Try as I might, in the great tradition of book reviewers everywhere, I can find nothing to fault it. The selection of pieces to illustrate was inspired; the quality of the photography is excellent; the organization (roughly chronological, in five chapters covering the century that spans the birth of naval aviation through to the modern era) is coherent, and the captions are invariably crisp and suitably informative. Well, maybe a dozen or so leather and Nomex flight jackets are a few too many to show, but they’re colorful and superbly personal. (More than two dozen magnifying-glass icons spread about the book cleverly tell readers that the museum’s website has more information about each illustration so marked.)
The book is especially good at emphasizing the people of naval aviation in war and peace. Beginning with Ensign William Billingsley, who in June 1913 became the first naval aviation fatality when he fell out of his aircraft to his death, The Historic Collection includes by name many who sacrificed or otherwise contributed to victory and progress on, above, or near saltwater.
The photos show, among other curious things, a World War I–era mandolin and astronaut Neil Armstrong’s NASA bite boards. Forced to pick favorites, I’d choose “Pacific Island Home,” picturing a museum diorama that evokes so well a World War II South Pacific air station that it hints at jungle rot; or the eerie “Sunken Treasures,” an F4F Wildcat fighter as discovered on the floor of Lake Michigan; or . . . any of dozens of others. Pick your own.
Paired with its predecessor volume, The Aircraft Collection, this book makes a persuasive case that the Naval Aviation Museum is the best of the many Navy museums. All in all, Goodspeed and Duncan have much to be proud of, as does the National Naval Aviation Museum. Publication of The Historic Collection should start (continue?) a stampede of visitors heading for western Florida and the museum. They should be eager to commemorate naval aviation in the best way possible: by learning about the courageous men and women, the brilliant technology, and the powerful economy that profoundly changed war at sea and American—not to say global—history.
Deterrence through Strength: British Naval Power and Foreign Policy under Pax Britannica
Rebecca Berens Matzke. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. 320 pp. Maps. Notes. Bibliog. $45.
Reviewed by Howard J. Fuller
Readers of Naval History might be tempted by the reassuring title of this book into thinking that peace and power are synonymous, if not interchangeable, concepts. If the British were able to avoid wars through much of the 19th century (they weren’t) and maintain the respect of other great powers—through dominance—then surely today, naval giants such as the United States can learn from their experience, their good sense. Have a cup of tea, curl up with Deterrence through Strength and the national flag of your choice, and everything will be right as rain.
This all sounds rather old-fashioned, and indeed it is. There’s nothing exactly new in this work. Much of it is built directly on the work of eminent British naval historian Andrew Lambert and Professor John Beeler of the University of Alabama. Rebecca Berens Matzke acknowledges their “particular help on the nineteenth-century Royal Navy,” and it is, in fact, the issue of British naval power that is the cornerstone of their (and her) argument.
For this to succeed, readers must be willing to suspend their disbelief that the Royal Navy was anything but invincible, and all that hard-line prime ministers like Lord Palmerston had to do was brandish it in the face of anyone, including Americans, who naughtily dared challenge British strategic and economic interests. Peace was, therefore, maintained by the threat of war, rather like a Punch cartoon of the period, in which the British lion was best left asleep if you knew what was good for you.
The problem here, of course, is that this worldview is one-sided and remains largely unsupported by historical fact. At the very least it remains an interpretation of past events. According to another view, the schizophrenia of the Royal Navy during this period was that it championed itself as a defensive force, but truthfully all its efforts were to keep it oceangoing, aggressive, and threatening—offensive. This, if nothing else, remains the basis for deterrence.
It also exacerbated as many crises as it settled. As such, the Victorians might have read their Thucydides more closely, for the Athenians made just as many enemies through their application of naval power and intimidation as they did friends, and in the end one needs some allies to survive one’s own imperialism.
Realpolitik was also up for debate in the 19th century. As historian Muriel E. Chamberlain observed, Palmerston had his critics in England; Richard Cobden’s “almost unanswerable logic” and John Bright’s “radical” belief in free trade and internationalism as a means of preventing conflicts made the Manchester school as important to the Pax as sending a gunboat to out-bully a local bully in Europe, Asia, America, Africa, etc. Unfortunately, Matzke makes no use of Chamberlain and avoids engaging Cobden and Bright at all.
Still, there is much to commend here. The breadth and depth of research involved is impressive; any comparative history (in this case, Anglo-American) is valuable. And just because the Pax Britannica is relatively quiet next to the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars or World War I doesn’t necessarily imply that an in-depth study like this one is unimportant. On the contrary, the nature of an often-uneasy peace is as important as the manifestation of open war.
As such, Deterrence through Strength could have been a useful platform for well-balanced historical analysis of a human phenomenon that is highly complex as well as brutally straightforward. Instead, what we have are broad brushstrokes, especially when attempting to draw conclusions at the end of the book that are increasingly speculative and conjectural. “Other historians” are often mentioned, but they are kept out of play.
Presumably this would have entailed a larger work, and a serious discussion that would probably leave readers feeling vaguely uncomfortable in the knowledge that international relations were/are very rarely a matter of simply ruling the waves. By direct contrast, for example, Jay Sexton’s study Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837–1873 (Oxford University Press, 2005) concludes that “the United States’ need for foreign investment in particular made American statesmen think twice before twisting the British lion’s tail.” Britannia was much more commanding as a partner, when push came to shove. It was a lesson that Columbia took to heart and that, arguably, stands for much of its own global influence today.
Black Sheep: The Life of Pappy Boyington
John F. Wukovits. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2011. 249 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. Bibliog. $34.95.
Reviewed by John B. Lundstrom
One can perhaps know too much about the life of a particular historical figure. That is true in large measure for Colonel Gregory Boyington, the celebrated Marine World War II fighter ace. He himself produced lengthy memoirs that were brutally honest regarding his alcoholism and his disastrous course through life. His military exploits also appear in numerous published recollections of pilots and others who served with him. Aviation historian Bruce Gamble has not only written a groundbreaking biography of Boyington, Black Sheep One (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 2000), but also a detailed history of VMF-214, the Marine fighter squadron closely associated with his fame: The Black Sheep (1998).
In this present book, John Wukovits, a respected Pacific war historian, turns his hand to chronicling the incredible life and legend of “Pappy” Boyington. Wukovits’ compact, well-paced narrative relates the many twists and turns, the highs and lows experienced by that unique individual. Greg Boyington inspired either devotion or contempt. His life was a train wreck, a constant alternation between accomplishment and profoundly irresponsible conduct. A courageous, bold, exceptionally talented pilot and, while in VMF-214, a superb leader, Boyington was nonetheless brash and confrontational, with an omnipresent chip on his shoulder.
He dared fate to punch back, and it usually did. Holding a degree in aeronautical engineering, Boyington earned his wings in 1937 with the Marine Corps. His drunkenness and riotous behavior proved remarkable within the aviation brotherhood, where a certain degree of wild exuberance was almost expected. Seeking a fresh start, he volunteered in 1941 to fight with the American Volunteer Group (“Flying Tigers”). Over China and Burma between December 1941 and March 1942, he was credited with 3.5 Japanese aircraft, but he always claimed six kills. As Wukovits relates, Boyington’s notorious conduct ensured the AVG never regretted his hasty departure that April for home.
Boyington was fortunate to rejoin the Marines. Reaching the South Pacific in 1943 after the Guadalcanal campaign, he bounced around without seeing real action until September, when he took over VMF-214. Its pilots, typical eager, green aviators (definitely not the misfits of later legend), warmed to their older, unconventional leader, calling him “Pappy.” In turn Boyington, through his aggressive and inspired leadership, molded his young pilots into a superb squadron flying the gull-winged Vought F4U-1 Corsair.
His tactics in fact were based largely on those developed by the naval and Marine aviators who had already bested the vaunted Japanese Zero fighter in 1942 and early 1943. Wukovits does those pioneers a great disservice by stating that “Boyington demystified the Zero.” From September 1943 to January 1944 in fierce combat over the northern Solomons and Rabaul, VMF-214 destroyed 97 Japanese planes, including 20 or more by Boyington (his final score is hotly disputed). This made him, officially at least, the top Marine ace, with 28 kills.
Boyington was shot down in January 1944 off New Britain and captured. While in Japanese hands, he did much to sustain and encourage his fellow prisoners. He was awarded the Medal of Honor while listed as missing in action. Boyington returned home in September 1945 to great acclaim; he retired from active duty in 1947. His 1958 autobiography Baa Baa Black Sheep (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons) and the 1976 television series of the same name helped keep his name before the public, as did his many personal appearances. Boyington died in 1988 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Wukovits handles Boyington’s lifelong struggle with alcoholism with fairness and understanding, not excusing the failures but also not dwelling on them. Boyington never surrendered his cynical view of life: “Just name a hero and I’ll prove he’s a bum,” as Wukovits quotes him. All of his many shortcomings could not erase his magnificent performance at the head of VMF-214, and it is for that he is properly remembered. Wukovits’ biography offers a fine introduction to Gregory Boyington’s life and points the way to the more specialized sources for those who wish to know more about the leader of the Black Sheep.