Book Reviews

The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944–1945

James D. Hornfischer. 640 pp. New York: Random House, 2016. Illus. Notes. Biblio. Index. $35.

Reviewed by Craig L. Symonds

The term “D-Day” refers to the date of any major military operation. Since World War II, however, it most often has been used to refer specifically to the Allied landings on the beaches in Normandy on 6 June 1944. Yet there were two D-Days that month: A mere nine days after American, British, and Canadian troops charged ashore in Normandy, another D-Day took place half a world away in the Central Pacific, on the island of Saipan. And just as D-Day in Normandy marked the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler’s empire, D-Day in Saipan marked the beginning of the end for imperial Japan.

James D. Hornfischer’s new book, The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944–1945, is about that other D-Day. Despite the title, his narrative encompasses more than the landings and actions of the U.S. fleet, for Hornfischer also provides detailed coverage of the fighting on shore, which inaugurated a new level of violence in the Pacific war. In his view, “The ritual suicides of the Japanese garrisons, and their predatory brainwashing and murder of the innocent [civilians], has been insufficiently considered as a turning point that shaped the war’s final year.”

The notion that the invasion of the Marianas was the critical moment in the Pacific war makes sense on a number of levels. Not only did it mark the penetration of Japan’s inner ring of defenses, it also triggered the first full-scale fleet engagement since the Solomon Islands campaign: the Battle of the Philippine Sea, or the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” Moreover, the U.S. acquisition of airfields on Saipan allowed the new B-29 Superfortress bombers to reach Japanese homeland cities, inaugurating what Hornfischer calls “the punishment phase of the Pacific war.”

Hornfischer builds much of his narrative around half-a-dozen major characters: Richmond Kelly Turner, Marc Mitscher, Draper Kauffman, pilot Paul Tibbets, and particularly Raymond A. Spruance, who emerges as a particularly admirable figure. Hornfischer also follows the action through the eyes of several well-chosen minor characters, including Hellcat pilot Alex Vraciu, Marine Private Robert Graf, and 18-year-old Japanese nurse Shizuko Miura.

As in all of his books, Hornfischer is both authoritative and eminently readable and uses prose rich in metaphor and detail. Parachutes on the sea drift “like great jellyfish”; a dropped belly tank is “a burning steel teardrop”; and rather than merely crashing into the sea, a plane “cartwheeled into pieces on the hardpan of the glistening ocean.”

Concerning the central controversies of the campaign, Hornfischer sides with Spruance on the decision to keep the carriers of Task Force 58 tethered to Saipan to cover the landings, rather than send them off to attack the approaching Japanese. He is critical of U.S. Marine Lieutenant General Holland Smith for his relief of Army Major General Ralph Smith, suggesting that “Marine leadership underestimated the bitter opposition the 27th [Army Division] confronted.” He also comes down foursquare in favor of the decision to employ the atomic bomb. It was necessary, he declares, to convince the man whose opinion mattered most, Emperor Hirohito, that the annihilation of his country and his people was at stake, and to overcome the “dead-enders” in the Japanese cabinet who wanted to fight down to the last civilian. Though some have questioned the military necessity of dropping the two atomic bombs, Hornfischer notes, “there was no questioning their practical psychological and political effect.”

Hornfischer has a well-earned reputation as a chronicler of the Pacific war thanks to his previous books on the USS Houston (CA-30) (Ship of Ghosts, Bantam, 2006), the naval battles off Guadalcanal (Neptune’s Inferno, Bantam, 2010), and the Battle off Samar (The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, Bantam, 2004)—the last of which has become a minor classic. With The Fleet at Flood Tide, he burnishes that reputation.

Jutland: The Unfinished Battle

Nicholas Jellicoe. Barnsley, UK: Seaforth Publishing/Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2016. 402 pp. Intro. Maps. Illus. Photos. Notes. Index. $35.95.

Reviewed by Rear Admiral Joseph F. Callo U.S. Navy (Retired)

The Battle of Jutland occurred at a time when the sea power theories of retired Rear Admiral Alfred T. Mahan and Sir Julian Corbett intersected with the industrialization of naval warfare. Nothing marked that junction more dramatically than the naval actions of 31 May and 1 June 1916, off the northwest coast of Denmark. The combat there involved steam propulsion, iron hulls, armor plate, torpedoes, gunfire control, explosive shells, advanced mines, and—above all—rapid-fire, long-barrel, turret-mounted, large-caliber, long-range naval guns.

Jutland also was a naval arena for a smoldering German aspiration: namely, the end of Great Britain’s dominance at sea. Britain saw Jutland as an opportunity to preserve or enhance that dominance. For Germany, with 99 ships in the battle, it was the overdue opportunity to end the thrall of Trafalgar. For England, with 151 ships involved, it was a chance to extend a century-long dominance at sea. After the smell of cordite had dissipated in the naval operating areas off Jutland, Britain’s strategic objective had been achieved; Germany’s had not.

In his preface, Nicholas Jellicoe, grandson of one of the battle’s principals, then-Admiral John Jellicoe, writes:

The battle was complex. . . and the story of its tactics, technology and personalities told through both British and German eyes. . . . Jutland was the first real test for the tactics and naval and military technologies which had been developed in the years of peace and not yet proven under the stress of war. It was a test faced by two very different navies, one only a generation old, the other steeped in, and bound by, the traditions of centuries.

Given the family connection, it’s not surprising that Jellicoe particularly focuses on the leaders of the British and German forces involved. The commander of the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet, Admiral Jellicoe, and the leader of the British Battle Cruiser Fleet, Vice Admiral David Beatty, are given a chapter provocatively labeled “A Contradiction, Not a Team.” By contrast, commander of the German High Seas Fleet Admiral Reinhard Scheer and leader of the German scouting forces Vice Admiral Franz Hipper are identified as “Men from the Same Mould.”

The author takes us beyond the din of combat, which often distracts from war’s larger lessons, and focuses on the main players at Jutland, who are at least as important to understanding the battle as the sequence events. He augments his analyses with firsthand accounts, many from noncommissioned seamen, of the horrors they experienced during combat.Jellicoe uses charts and diagrams to illustrate the details of the 12-hour battle, during which 14 British and 11 German ships were sunk.

One of the battle’s lessons was that a lack of efficient communication among a fleets’ units would be costly. It can be argued that the main reason the British, despite superior numbers, failed to achieve a decisive tactical victory at Jutland was the poor communication between Jellicoe and Beatty during the actions. Those failures caused extended postbattle controversy in Great Britain. The author covers this debate in considerable detail. (Similar communication problems were reprised dramatically during the 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf.)

Jutland emphasizes the profound importance of the personalities involved in the battle. In fact, the tensions between Jellicoe and Beatty may have been the reason the German fleet escaped Jellicoe’s deadly trap.

Such lessons about flawed communications and the influence of personality on battle outcomes resound in today’s world of global tensions and accelerating military technology—both of which are closely connected to the idea of “information dominance” as a military imperative.

Warship 2016

John Jordan, ed. London, UK: Conway, 2016. 208 pp. Illus. $60.

Reviewed by Norman Polmar

For almost four decades, Conway has produced an outstanding annual publication dedicated to warships and related subjects of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. The current volume, edited by naval author, historian, and draughtsman John Jordan, maintains the very high standards of the publishing program.

The subjects covered in this year’s edition include the naval war in the Adriatic in 1917–18, French colonial sloops of the Bougainville class, Japanese destroyers of the Asashio class, and contemporary littoral combat ships. The last is the only article addressing contemporary warships that will have broad appeal to U.S. and foreign naval officers.

The chapter “Modern Littoral Surface Combatants” by Conrad Waters, the editor of the annual Seaforth World Naval Review, provides an excellent discussion of the origins, promise, and issues relating to the U.S. Navy’s highly controversial littoral combat ships. Most helpful, the author also addresses the Norwegian Skjold, Swedish Visby, German Braunschweig, and Turkish Heybeliada classes, which allows readers to compare the different approaches to this type of warship. Like the book’s other articles, it contains data tables and excellent illustrations—photos and, in this essay, drawings by John Jordan.

Peter Marland addresses a post–World War II subject in “Post-War AIO and Command Systems in the Royal Navy.” The British action information organization is the equivalent of the U.S. Navy’s combat information center. This highly detailed and comprehensive chapter does not bring the subject up to date, but trails off in the 1990s.

One Soviet-Russian essay appears in this edition: “The Soviet Fugas Class Minesweepers,” by Vladimir Yakubov and Richard Worth. Also known as the “Tral” class, these 44 ships were built in the 1930s and served many roles in World War II; a few survived into the 1950s (some being transferred to North Korea).

These were multimission ships fitted to carry mines and depth charges; two performed trials with torpedo launchers to enhance their role as merchant raiders. During World War II their primary armament of one 100-mm gun was enhanced with light antiaircraft weapons. The article provides a detailed account of their development, characteristics, modifications, and service. Again, excellent photos and line drawings illustrate this account.

The 11 contributions in Warship 2016 maintain the high standards the first volume established when it was published in 1977.