Misadventures of a Civil War Submarine: Iron, Guns, and Pearls
James P. Delgado. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. 288 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. Bibliog. Index. $34.95.
Reviewed by Andrew Jampoler
This is the engrossing history of the very short life at sea of a forgotten milestone, the Sub Marine Explorer. A good place to begin reading it is with draftsman John McKay’s eight pages of illuminating “interpretive reconstruction drawings” in the book’s first appendix. These, along with several figures in the amply illustrated Misadventures of a Civil War Submarine, quickly reveal what an extraordinary vessel this was, “one of the world’s earliest successful deep diving submarines.”
She was abandoned in 1869 off San Telmo Island in the Bay of Panama after her last dive on the oyster beds of the Archipiélago de Las Perlas. Today, warm salt water is slowly reducing the remains of the Sub Marine Explorer to elemental iron. Absent some intervention, decades hence there will be nothing recognizable left of her. The product of his accidental discovery of the rusting, perforated hulk in February 2001, followed by years of archival research and several on-site archaeological investigations, James Delgado’s new book will help ensure that this fascinating bit of maritime history does not disappear.
Previously believed to be the remains of an Imperial Japanese Navy mini-submarine lost during the 1940s in a mission against the Panama Canal, the Sub Marine Explorer is not, strictly speaking, a “Civil War submarine” either. Engineer Julius Kroehl’s efforts during the last months of the war to interest the Union Navy in his shipbuilding project were fruitless. The vessel first put to sea in mid-1867 with a civilian crew, under the aegis of the start-up Pacific Pearl Company. She was, Delgado tells us, “a rare example of the earliest generation of working submarines from the pioneering developmental period of the mid-nineteenth century.”
The author counts the vessel among only five such survivors of this era, and one of only two period submarines with a “lockout dive chamber.” This was a compartment pressurized with compressed air (from a tender), which permitted access from inside the submarine through open hatches to oyster beds below. It was through those hatches that Kroehl and other investors in the Pacific Pearl Company expected “untold wealth” would be lifted into their submarine, in the form of pearls and mother-of-pearl. They were wrong.
The Sub Marine Explorer was a marvel of contemporary technology: able to dive and surface through filling and blowing a remarkably modern system of ballast tanks; mobile thanks to a hand-cranked propeller in the stern; illuminated within on the surface by deadlights and below by candles; able to refresh her air supply from a dousing spray of salt water; and open to the sea floor through half a dozen hinged hatches. But however technically sophisticated they were, Kroehl and his backers, Delgado tells us, knew practically nothing about the biology of oyster beds of the island cluster. Worse, they regarded the archipelago’s impoverished, black natives with too much contempt to seek education from them.
The Pacific Pearl Company’s business plan contemplated bringing up nearly a half-million dollars’ worth of pearls and shells annually, a volume no one else could match. But by the late 1860s, local divers had already exhausted the islands’ shallow-water fishery, and pearl oysters didn’t live at the 100-foot depth—beyond the reach of breath-holding humans—that the submarine worked during her months afloat in 1867–69.
This failure to raise shells, pearls, and revenue was matched by problems of an entirely different kind. A crew of seven could fit on board in the cramped center compartment, the vessel’s working space. During an hours-long daily dive, day after day these men, the author speculates reasonably, unknowingly subjected themselves to the bends. This hitherto unknown, painful, occasionally fatal condition was common among bridge builders who worked in pressurized caissons on riverbeds. The submarine was killing her crew.
Delgado includes a useful stage-setting history of diving bells and early submarines. He also gives readers a glimpse of the colorful details of life and politics on the isthmus, as well as in the United States in the years immediately after the great California Gold Rush. The book offers almost enough biographical information about Julius Kroehl, a Prussian-born immigrant to America, to bring him to life. The Sub Marine Explorer was his inspiration. But Kroehl, who appears to have caught malaria while serving with the Union Navy on the Mississippi, died just about the time his submarine first went on the water in the Bay of Panama. Kroehl’s death turned his submarine into an orphan, leaving no one who might have understood her problems or was interested in exploring solutions.
The book is built around two narratives: one about a 19th-century submarine, the other about the 21st-century effort to understand her. Every now and then the author repeats himself in this two-part story—something more careful editing would have caught and corrected. This minor flaw aside, Misadventures of a Civil War Submarine is a very good read.
The War of 1812 and the Rise of the U.S. Navy
Mark Collins Jenkins and David A. Taylor. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2012. 279 pp. Illus. Bibliog. Index. $30.
Reviewed by Frederick C. Leiner
This 9x12-inch, lavishly illustrated coffee-table book boasts a preface by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, a foreword by historian Douglas Brinkley, and an afterword by retired Chief of Naval Operations Gary Roughead. Designed to appeal to a wide audience, it is printed on heavy, glossy paper, like an art book. Hundreds of magnificent color reproductions display battle scenes, portraits, and artifacts.
The book covers the entire War of 1812, emphasizing its naval aspects on both the high seas and the Great Lakes. Operational aspects are discussed at length, causes of the war less so. Interspersed are many two-page sidebars, all well conceived, on topics such as naval medicine, navigation, ordnance, and prize money. The authors rely mostly on secondary sources and known document collections to provide brief, highly energized accounts of land and naval battles. While focusing largely on ship captains—they especially admire John Rodgers—strangely, they provide little sense of the life of the men “before the mast.”
Unfortunately, The War of 1812 and the Rise of the U.S. Navy does not contain tactical maps of the battles it so vividly describes; a drawing of the Constitution’s maneuvers against the Cyane and Levant, or of Thomas Macdonough’s use of a spring cable to turn his ship’s fresh broadside on the British on Lake Champlain, would have brought needed clarity. Perhaps the best parts of the book are the engrossing first-person accounts that are sprinkled throughout. Some of these are not well known, but they are affecting. Through these narratives, the reader experiences such things as the flogging of Joshua Penny and a Philadelphia woman’s view of the British sacking Havre de Grace, Maryland.
Jenkins and Taylor are the authors of more than a half-dozen books between them, but none in naval history. This effort contains nagging errors. A “sloop” is not a “sloop-of-war.” The Navy did not have “some thirty ships by July 1798.” It is false that Charles Gordon, captain of the Chesapeake, “escaped all censure” as a result of the July 1807 incident with HMS Leopard; he was court-martialed, found guilty, and sentenced to a private reprimand. “Fire vessels” were not for “raining fire on the enemy,” but rather designed to sail into a concentration of enemy ships (usually at anchor), where they would be set afire to explode and cause damage. The British blockade of the American coast began in March 1813, not at the start of the war. These (and other) mistakes are not terribly significant individually, but cumulatively they weaken the sense of the book’s reliability.
Where The War of 1812 and the Rise of the U.S. Navy breaks down is with the authors’ prose. Although Jenkins’ and Taylor’s high-octane style suits their story, too much of their writing comes across as cartoonish or over-the-top. Clichés abound: American gun crews’ aim is “unerring,” shots are “slamming,” cannon are “blazing,” and British hulls are “ripped to shreds.” The authors describe the Admiralty’s removal of the British commander-in-chief as “the Lords, their feathers in a ruffle, gave Warren the boot.” That is odd, not funny. Nor is it helpful for the reader to learn that Barney “had yet to grab his slice of history,” or that Woolsey wanted to build a naval force that “wouldn’t be laughed off the lake,” or that the Constitution’s “battle-splintered masts had a stirring tale to tell.”
The War of 1812 and the Rise of the U.S. Navy is a great book to display on a wardroom table. Readers will feast on the pictures, and perhaps enjoy a stirring vignette of a battle. But buy another book for a balanced, well-written history of the causes, people, and operations of the War of 1812.
Into the Breach at Pusan: The 1st Provisional Marine Brigade in the Korean War
Kenneth W. Estes. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. 216 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. Bibliog. $29.95.
Reviewed by Colonel Dick Camp, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)
In the defense of the Pusan Perimeter during the Korean War, Lieutenant General “Eddy” Craig commanded the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade. He and I spent many pleasant hours in his home talking about his experiences, and I also maintained a lively correspondence with Major Jack Buck, his aide. Based on my conversations with these men, I wrote an article for Leatherneck magazine titled “Warrior Six and The First Provisional Marine Brigade, June–September 1950” (August 2000). Thus I am intimately familiar with the subject of Lieutenant Colonel Ken Estes’ book.
The book opens with a summary of the situation in South Korea after the June 1950 North Korean invasion. Estes describes the Marine Corps’ efforts to organize, staff, equip, and transport the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade to reinforce the hard-pressed allied perimeter near the port city of Pusan, on the peninsula’s southeastern coast. He then outlines the brigade’s introduction to combat, discussing the tactical lessons that officers and men learned from fighting the North Koreans.
The third chapter follows the brigade though the famous Naktong battles, which “forged the reputation of the formation as a ‘fire brigade’ and gave birth to Marine Corps lore that credited the brigade with saving the U.S. Army from a disastrous defeat.” Brigadier General Craig had coined the term at a staff meeting when he made the comparison: “the Pusan Perimeter is like a weakened dike, and we will be used to plug holes in it as they open. We’re a brigade, a fire brigade!”
Finally, the book closes by addressing top Marine Corps leaders’ efforts to enhance the brigade’s legacy, in hopes of strengthening the service’s position in the ongoing roles-and-missions fight in the Washington political arena. Estes’ book challenges one of the Corps’ most cherished beliefs, one that generations of Leathernecks have been taught to accept. He asserts that the Marine brigade did not singlehandedly save the Pusan Perimeter, but that it was just one of several “fire brigades” that stemmed the tide of the North Korean aggression.
Estes points out that by the time the brigade got into action, the North Koreans had been worn down and were weakened by a long supply line. He convincingly supports this thesis through the use of official records, after-action reports, and war diaries, one of which was Craig’s “Incidents of Service 1917–1951,” a treasure trove of information concerning the brigade. In this memoir and in my conversations with General Craig, he never directly criticized the Army—but he did not hide his frustrations with the tactical situation with which the brigade was faced.
Estes also shoots holes in several long-held axioms that the brigade:
• comprised combat-hardened veterans of World War II. Instead, Estes asserts that men below the rank of staff sergeant enlisted after 1945 and were, in essence, green troops. He notes that while the battalion commanders had been in World War II, they had not participated in leading troops in combat.
• was the first of the reinforcements to go into combat. This was not true, Estes maintains. While it was the first unit to leave the United States, the brigade arrived in Korea after several Army reinforcing units had already seen combat.
• formed the first Marine air-ground task force. In contrast, Estes argues that the aviation component of the brigade operated ashore in Japan under the command of the deputy brigade commander; however, the fighter squadrons operated under the direction of Carrier Division 15, and thus were not under the direct control of the brigade commander. General Craig thought otherwise, writing in his memoirs that the brigade was a “trained air-ground team.”
Reflecting on how this misperception or outright fabrication came about, Estes notes that the “official” history of Marine operations in the Korean War was started while General Lemuel C. Shepherd Jr. was commandant. The effort was intended to help secure the Marine Corps’ postwar survival in the Department of Defense, and, it was hoped, this history would show the service’s essential contributions to the public. Shepherd and his peers, says Estes, “still smarted from the difficulties of the defense reform initiatives of the late 1940s, as well as the fiscal impoverishment of the Marine Corps by the end of the decade.” By having this history written, Shepherd’s idea was to set down the definitive Korean War record in order to “deliver maximum benefits to the Marine Corps as an institution in the U.S. military establishment.”
The Pusan Perimeter (1954) the first of the official history’s five volumes, thus embellished the role of the fire brigade and was deliberately self-serving, according to Estes. Yet, even though he attacks in no uncertain terms the “rhetorical excesses and exaggerations [that] have distorted the history of the Marine brigade at Pusan,” the author is also careful to point out that “the brigade’s accomplishments in Korea are in no way diminished by an accurate account of its operations.” Estes’ Into the Breach at Pusan is a well-written and researched book that persuasively challenges the lore surrounding the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade. I expect it to spark spirited discussion, and Ken Estes may well be advised to wear a flak jacket and helmet when the fire brigade’s conventional defenders come out of the bushes with “guns” blazing.
The Perfect Wreck: ‘Old Ironsides’ and HMS Java: A Story of 1812
Steven E. Maffeo. Tucson, AZ: Fireship Press, 2011. Maps. Illus. 382 pp. $19.95.
Reviewed by Wade G. Dudley
The deliberate marriage of history and fiction is an art not easily mastered. Michael Shaara, Patrick O’Brian, and Dudley Pope proved their expertise in the technique. As a whole, their historical fiction probably enticed more people to embrace history than all the scholarly publications of the past decade. Retired Navy Captain Steven E. Maffeo attempts to follow in their footsteps with the first book-length treatment of the 29 December 1812 battle between the frigates Constitution and HMS Java. The encounter reduced the British ship to a “perfect wreck.”
Throughout Britain’s wars with France after the overthrow of Louis XVI, its Royal Navy established an amazing record of victories, from single-ship actions to fleet engagements. After Trafalgar in 1805, the people expected victory against the French and their allies regardless of the odds. Usually the Royal Navy’s captains obliged them, thus feeding a myth of naval invincibility. Then, in the closing months of 1812, the loss of three British frigates (the much-celebrated “cruizers” of the era) to frigates of the U.S. Navy crushed that myth forever. Maffeo tells the story of the last of the frigate engagements of 1812, pitting American Commodore William Bainbridge and his veteran crew against veteran British Captain Henry Lambert and his less-experienced men.
Maffeo tells his story through the words of the officers (and a few of the men) who served on board the two frigates, beginning in August 1812 during the final stages of refits on the veteran vessels. This starting point allows him to provide background on the acres of trees, miles of rope, and tons of metal fittings and cannon used in these intricate tools of war. Similarly, the author paints a picture of the crew and officers of each warship, from the hard-luck Commodore Bainbridge to the youngest ship’s boys, the powder monkeys who cheerily served the great guns.
As the officers exchange words on deck and across the wardroom table, the strategy and tactics of the period, as well as the complexity of ship handling, unfold. The actual battle is superbly written, in terms easily understandable to the layman, in all its bloody and very sad details.
Maffeo’s research is impeccable. Experts will recognize the journals and papers that inform the interpretations shaping his narrative, and most will even agree with that narrative. However, this is a work of fiction. Despite the superb research, the conversations (sometimes contrived and a tad awkward) and interactions that the author uses for exposition, scene setting, and plot advancement are all inventions. This is not in itself a problem—provided the book is clearly presented as a novel. In this case, however, there is no way for the average reader to separate fact from fiction. Without the proper citation inherent in a work of serious nonfiction, even the post-battle letters included in the book’s appendices could be inventions (but they are not). The danger is that fiction will become fact if this volume is classified (or marketed or read) as a work of history.
Nevertheless, I highly recommend The Perfect Wreck—as a work of historical fiction. Maffeo has a strong mastery of the naval technicalities of the Age of Sail. As long as the reader consults his excellent glossary, the author does a fine job of writing for layman and expert alike. Maffeo may lack the fluency of Pope and be less steeped in the cultures of that long-ago era than was O’Brian, but his characters are every bit as enduring as are Lord Ramage, Jack Aubrey, and their supporting casts. After all, Bainbridge, Lambert, their crews, and their ships are still with us 200 years after their close embrace.