Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018. 592 pp. Illus. Maps. Index. $28.
Reviewed by Thomas B. Allen
An epic battle can inspire an epic book. Often, though, the book is little more than a battle report: The reader gets a litany of what is known about the fight from official records and perhaps some interpretations by the author. Indianapolis is an epic book dedicated not only to the story of the cruiser’s sinking and the rescue of her belatedly discovered survivors but also the Navy’s search for blame. They spent a decade tracking down 107 survivors and eyewitnesses. Then, aided by survivors seeking justice for their skipper, the authors plunged into an analysis of the court-martial of her commanding officer, Captain Charles McVay III. The Navy’s star witness: the commander of the Japanese submarine whose torpedoes sank the Indianapolis (CA-35).
The authors eloquently tell the story of the Indianapolis, from the laying of her keel in 1930 and her christening in 1932 to the discovery of her remains under 18,000 feet of water in 2017. Indianapolis also preserves the memories of crewmen who survived the worst sea disaster in U.S. Navy history. The authors’ account is aided by interviews and previously unpublished facts about the ordeal of the ship’s commanding officer, McVay.
In 1945, the heavy cruiser was chosen by atomic scientists to secretly carry components of what would be the first atomic bomb from the United States to Tinian Island in the northern Marianas, about 1,400 miles from Japan. Crewmen and officers guessed that the huge crate guarded by Marines contained a supply of General Douglas MacArthur’s scented toilet paper or paperwork for the invasion of Japan.
After delivering the atomic cargo, the Indianapolis sailed to Guam and was ordered to proceed to Leyte via “Route Peddie,” an 1,100-mile straight course across the wide Philippine Sea from Guam to Leyte. The route was so long that it was under two Navy commands. Their border was at the CHOP line—an acronym for change of operational command.
Around midnight on 30 July 1945, Mochitsura Hashimoto, captain of the Japanese submarine I-58, fired two torpedoes at the Indianapolis. “The first fish slammed into Indy’s starboard bow, killing dozens of men in an instant,” the detailed account of the tragedy begins. Then a second torpedo hit amidships and the ship’s bow lifted from the water. The authors continued a horrifying narrative describing the damage to men and their ship—and the long minutes until McVay said, “Pass the word to abandon ship,” an order that was “passed man to man” because all communication were out.
Brave, desperate radiomen tried to transmit distress calls, unsure if their signals were being heard. Nor did they realize that during the death throes of the ship, survivors had been drifting miles from where she went down. Some men were 10 to 20 miles from the sinking site when the first shark attacked survivors.
A day and a half after the sinking, men “suspended in the troughs between waves” suffered “thirst, pain, heat, blood, sharks, and the coppery rotting stench of dead men.” One group of 80 survivors had dropped to 17 by Wednesday morning, 1 August. In another group, men volunteered to stab to death those whose delirium inspired them to attack another man.
The survivors had been in the sea for nearly four days when the pilot of a Navy PV-1 Ventura on routine patrol spotted a group of about 30 survivors; then another, this one about 150 men. And so began the rescue saga that would save about 300 men. Another saga soon began: Who was responsible for the loss of the Indianapolis—and 63 officers and 782 enlisted men? The Navy’s answer was to court-martial Captain McVay. Survivors and others spent years exonerating McVay in another epic story.
Steve Ginter with Joe Weathers Jr. Simi Valley, CA: Steve Ginter, 2018. 284 pp. Photos. Drawings. Illustrations. $52.95.
Reviewed by J. M. Caiella
This book cannot be reviewed in a vacuum. It is an integral part of a long running, seriously (!) extensive multivolume series of aircraft monographs. The “Naval Fighter” series consists of 106 volumes, of which this, Vought SB2U Vindicator, is the latest. Once you understand the series, this work’s evaluation lies in its relationship to its predecessors.
The author, Steve Ginter, has self-published the softbound “Naval Fighter” series (he also publishes the “Air Force Legends” series) since 1980. He was honored for this work with the Admiral Arthur W. Radford Award for Excellence in Naval Aviation History and Literature. While the series has evolved over nearly 40 years—the paper is slicker, drawings are sharper and more accurate, image reproduction significantly better—the premise has not changed. His clientele are hard-core aviation junkies and modelers. He believes his readers want to see airplanes and, by God, they are going to see airplanes.
Do not expect a traditional book. There is no title or copyright page, table of contents, and the like. This is an organized stream-of-consciousness presentation of large, crisp photographs of every conceivable angle and view of the given aircraft and its details. All that front matter is crammed onto the inside of the front cover along with author biographies and usually a couple of photographs. The text, while not minimal, is Spartan, but concentrated and focused on illuminating the surrounding images. The series takes a general chronological look at each aircraft from its inception to its demise. For low-production units, there may be an individual bureau number by bureau number recitation of the type’s history. The text is supplemented by line drawings and illustrations, mostly from the manufacturer and military maintenance manuals. A few pages at the end are dedicated to available models of the plane. The uninitiated should be forgiven for believing they could build a full-size replica from the contents of the book.
That is the series in a nutshell. Vought SB2U Vindicator is all that, and as the latest, must be the epitome of its type. The reader has 617 photographs to ponder, 111 in color. This reviewer has researched aircraft for more than 50 years, and at least half the photos are new to me.
Vought’s SB2U scout bomber, first flown in 1936, was the Navy’s second production carrier monoplane, following closely on the Douglas TBD torpedo bomber. The airplane was on the cusp of technology, with a composite construction of all-metal semi-monocoque fore fuselage and the aft portion of fabric-covered steel tubing. It also was on the cusp of the transition from the colorful pre–World War II “yellow wings” to the somber wartime blues and grays. It was built in three versions, the very similar -1 and -2 for the Navy, and the long-range -3 for the Marines. Great Britain and France also flew the type. All are represented in this book.
The plane’s only U.S. use in combat—17 aircraft with the Marines’ Scout Bombing Squadron 241 based at Midway Atoll—saw three days of fighting from 4 to 6 June 1942 during the famous battle. Only three were serviceable at the end. The plane was pulled from service in 1943.
The narrative covers the Vindicator’s history with a fair amount of detail enhanced by first-person accounts from Vought test pilots, Navy and Marine Corps pilots, and a French squadron commander, collected by coauthor Joe Weathers from 1966 to 1974. Regrettably, it perpetuates the myth that Captain Richard E. Fleming dove his stricken Vindicator into the turret of the Japanese cruiser Mikuma.
Bottom line: Is this $53 book worth the money? From the production value, the wealth of significant visual information is there. It is supplemented by primary research into most all of the individual aircraft. It features interesting takeaways, such as the McClelland Barclay experimental camouflage designs and nine pages on the Marines’ floatplane variant. There is a lot here. If you cannot get enough of aircraft, it is worth it
Steven Ujifusa. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018. 351 pp. Sources. Notes. Index. $29.99.
Reviewed by Andrew C. A. Jampoler
Remarkably, very large and fast sailing vessels remained commercially viable in certain markets practically until the start of World War II—a full century after the introduction of steam propulsion on the high seas. The huge, four- and five-masted barks of Hamburg, Germany’s Flying-P Line (eventually owned by hat-maker Frederick Laeisz’s descendants) were profitable almost until then, hauling bird manure (more delicately “guano,” organic fertilizer) from off the west coast of South America and grain from Australia to Europe. The keys to the success of these huge and handsome vessels were the great bulk of the commodities carried, the fact that refrigeration was not required, and their cargo’s price insensitivity to time in transit to and of arrival in port.
As pretty as they were at sea under full sail, the P-Liners of the 1880s and later never gained the universal admiration that an earlier generation of celebrated cargo vessels had enjoyed, the famed clippers and extreme clippers. They sailed swiftly between three continents under such towering canvas that the type’s most famous exemplar was justly named Flying Cloud. (Her beauty and her record-breaking 89-day passage around Cape Horn aside, the Flying Cloud came to a miserable end in her 25th year of service. As Ujifusa concludes in what amounts to the ship’s biography, reduced to hauling lumber and no longer a money-maker in 1875, the fabled clipper, then hard aground off St. Johns, Newfoundland, was torched so her fittings could be salvaged.)
Barons of the Sea, historian Ujifusa’s second book, is a history of these breathtakingly beautiful ships; a biography of several of their inspired designers (chief among them the Canadian-born Bostonian Donald McKay) and of their ambitious owners, doughty captains, and often-abused and mutinous crews; and a survey of the times that placed such a great premium on fast ships plying months-long sea lanes not only across oceans but between them, to connect continents half a world apart. It is an excellent book, enhanced by the many side stories Ujifusa spreads about like decorative mulch. Among these are descriptions of expatriate life ashore in Macao and Canton and in the Whampoa anchorage; the business of trade in opium and tea; the particular virtues of various shipbuilding hardwoods (a great U.S. commercial advantage once Great Britain had exhausted its domestic forests); the merits of assorted hull designs; Wagner’s dark opera about a ship captain’s deal with the devil, “The Flying Dutchman”; Christmas as a national American holiday; the profound consequences of the wreck of the steamship Central America . . . and on and on—all good.
Beginning after the mid-19th century, those special times, times that placed a huge economic premium on being first into a distant port with a high-value cargo (be it tea from China, consumer goods to California, or gold from there), were the forcing function behind the appearance of the clippers and their swift refinement into an epoch’s most sophisticated technology—until market changes, steam ships, and the railroad soon shouldered them aside.
Other authors have managed the stage-setting part of his story as well as he has (Eric Ray Dolin’s When America First Met China [Liverlight, 2013] and William J. Bernstein’s sweeping history of world trade, A Splendid Exchange [Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008]), but Ujifusa’s book is a great read on his core subject, blending a historian’s commitment to research with a novelist’s ability to set scenes, describe players, and imagine dialog.