Engines of Rebellion: Confederate Ironclads and Steam Engineering in the American Civil War
Saxon T. Bisbee. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2018. 264 pp. Drawings. Illus. $59.95.
Reviewed by J. M. Caiella
To say that the Confederate ironclad warships are enigmatic is an understatement. They were few in number, with only 21 commissioned (22, if the armored ram Stonewall, which is outside the scope of this work, is included). None, with the exception of the foreign-built Stonewall, made it to sea. They were concentrated in a relatively small area: the waterways and coastal areas of the South. Most were built within sight of the local population, yet little concrete information is known about them. Among the hundreds—if not thousands—of books written about the American Civil War, barely ten are devoted to the South’s iron warships.
Thus, any scholarly addition to the discussion is greatly appreciated and welcomed. So it is with Engines of Rebellion. The book appears to be an expansion of the author’s 2012 master’s thesis, “How a Vessel of This Magnitude Was Moved: A Comparative Analysis of Confederate Ironclad Steam Engines, Boilers, and Propulsion Systems.”
The book focuses on the ships’ motive power, an enigmatic subdivision of an enigma. Beyond the engines, boilers, condensers, and other mechanical propulsion devices, however, the book looks at the Confederate ironclad program as a whole. It illustrates how the wartime pressures of limited heavy industry, finances, skilled labor, raw materials, and transportation played into the creation of the final commissioned warships. Further, it provides significant information to counter the notion that the Confederacy produced inherently defective ironclads. The book’s recitation of “possible” constructors and “no knowledge” available on exact configuration of engines, boilers, and the like, is available for a significant number of the subjects goes far in underscoring the dearth of information about these ships.
The book has an interesting and very workable construct, one that perhaps will be paralleled by future authors. He breaks 27 ships (he includes several that were not completed) into “classes.” This term is used very loosely, but it does aggregate ships into groupings of more or less similar characteristics. It goes a long way in helping understand the vessels, their fit into Confederate strategy, and their value. More important, it vividly illustrates the progression and evolution of the Confederate ironclad over the course of the war. The nearly completed Milledgeville and incomplete Wilmington, both destroyed by the Confederates before they could be tested in combat, are held by the author to be the epitome of the genre. Although Engines of Rebellion is a significant addition to the literature, it is not without issues. Chief among them is the number of redundancies introduced by the author’s reluctance to distance this work from the pedantic thesis model of introduction-discourse-summary.
A significant failing is the use of illustrations. The selection is sparse, but completely adequate to the job—if they could be seen. This basically is a book about engineering aimed at non-engineers. The text should and could be rendered more comprehensible by better linkage with the art. The author attempts to rectify this with the captions, but the images are too small to allow any meaningful transfer of information. For instance, Figure 9.1 of the Mississippi is just two inches long and one and a half high. It has 25 linear inches of text to explain items too small to be seen. Figure 6.1 of the Virginia II is terribly reprinted with little visible detail, yet the caption, larger that the image, goes to great lengths to explain the invisible.
Despite its limitations, this book provides many points for further research, especially investigation of remnants of these long-lost vessels. It is worthy of reading almost more for what is not known than what is.
Mr. Caiella is the former lead editor of scholarly publications at the Naval History and Heritage Command and a contributing editor to Naval History.
Prisoner of the Samurai
James Gee and Rosalie H. Smith. Allyson Smith, ed. Havertown, PA: Casemate, 2018. 178 pp. $32.95.
Reviewed by David Sears
In mid-January 1942, having escaped Japan’s post–Pearl Harbor onslaught, the U.S. Navy cruiser Houston (CA-30) joined U.S., British, Dutch and Australian (ABDA) warships defending the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia.) After sustaining battle damage in early February, the Houston survived the 27 February Battle of the Java Sea only to sink two days later during the Battle of Sunda Strait. Shipwrecked Houston survivors—just a third of her 1,168-man crew—washed ashore on the island of Java and became Japanese prisoners of war. Scores eventually were shipped to Burma (Myanmar) to join a 60,000-man slave labor force constructing a 258-mile railway link between Rangoon and Bangkok.
Surviving the “death railway,” James Gee continued in captivity in Thailand and Singapore before ending the war slaving in coal mines just 40 miles from Nagasaki. Postwar, Gee and fellow POW buddies recovered what he called “our equanimity” in the psychiatric ward of Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay Naval Hospital. As part of therapy, ward charge nurse Rosalie Hamric Smith helped Gee and others write down their experiences. Smith subsequently wove those accounts into a manuscript that gathered dust until Allyson Smith, Rosalie’s daughter, discovered it. Edited by Allyson, Prisoner of the Samurai has been published on the 75th anniversary of the Houston’s sinking.
Rosalie’s writing and Allyson’s editing coalesce into a solid narrative, a worthwhile companion piece to other accounts of U.S. POWs in Japanese captivity, most notably James D. Hornfischer’s Ship of Ghosts (Bantam, 2006). What Ship of Ghosts delivers, however, and Prisoner of the Samurai lacks, is context: how its Houston protagonists fit into the bigger picture of the Pacific war. In 1946, when Rosalie teased out the horrors of her patients’ captivity, such lack of perspective was understandable. In its 2017 form, however, Prisoner of the Samurai needs explanatory background, either at the beginning of each chapter or as parenthetical asides as events unfold. As Prisoner of the Samurai reads, episode merely follows episode, with Gee and his buddies as the sole arbiters of what is happening and why. There are gruesome, painstaking details, but there also are awkward passages and dialog that does not ring true.
Prisoner of the Samurai might have worked better as oral history with Gee and his closest buddies Marv, Tex, Bob, Gordon, and John elaborating, corroborating, and even contradicting each other’s recollections. Their therapy sessions with Rosalie likely were cathartic—perhaps initially as painful as captivity itself. I would have welcomed her thoughts and impressions. That said, Rosalie’s efforts to shape these accounts are commendable, as are her daughter’s efforts in preserving and bringing this memoir to the printed page. Collectively, they add a vital piece to the POW mosaic.
Having written recently about Americans in Japanese captivity (“A POW’s Secret Diary of Captivity,” Naval History, June 2018), I am always struck, as I am again reading Prisoner of the Samurai, by the incredible forbearance demonstrated by men who were so hideously maltreated for so long. They forgive, but we must not forget.
During the first months of the Pacific war, as Japan captured Wake, Guam, Singapore, the Philippines, and the East Indies, 132,000 Allied airmen, sailors, and soldiers (35,000 of them Americans) became POWs. Overall, more than one in four eventually died in captivity. U.S. service members fared worse: 13,000 died—more than 37 percent. While many rationales for Japanese cruelty have been offered, they remain explanations, not excuses.
Virtually no nation in modern history has a spotless record when it comes to the treatment of captive combatants, but Japan’s record was particularly lamentable. It brought the empire no advantage and, if anything, contributed to its unconditional downfall. For that reason alone, Prisoner of the Samurai serves as a vivid, cautionary reminder.
Mr. Sears is the author of four books, including Pacific Air: How Fearless Flyboys, Peerless Aircraft, and Fast Flattops Conquered the Skies in the War with Japan (DaCapo, 2011) and Such Men as These: The Story of Navy Pilots Who Flew the Deadly Skies Over Korea (DaCapo, 2010). He is the 2017 Naval History Author of the Year.
Disciplining the Empire: Politics, Governance and the Rise of the British Navy
Sarah Kinkel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press., 2018. 305pp. Notes. Index. $45.
Reviewed by Andrew Lambert
In this important dissection of the British sea power empire of the 18th century, Sarah Kinkel emphasizes the contested role of the Royal Navy in British and Colonial politics. The creation of a Constitutional Monarchy after 1688 saw the Royal Navy fall under control of Parliament, a legislature in which the men of trade and commerce, as well as those of land and agriculture, exercised a degree of power. The new state had a national debt, which was supported by the City of London, commercial profits, and landed wealth, while the Bank of England regulated the system. The new funding streams were used to defeat the hegemonic ambitions of Louis XIV and Bourbon France and to secure a greater share of world trade. In both roles naval power proved critical.
Under the long-serving establishment Whig government of Robert Walpole the Navy was small and largely configured to European roles. Walpole worked with France to maintain order in Europe and paid little attention to challenges in the New World, from aggressive Spanish coast guards to tax-averse American colonists. Walpole’s reluctance to use the Navy split British politics. The City of London, anxious for more trade, wanted to fight Spain, the question was with what type of forces?
“Patriot” Whigs called for a low-cost defense portfolio where “patriotic” publicly minded men of virtue, militiamen, and privateers would reinforce small regular forces in wartime. Authoritarian Whigs, anxious to impose order on a dissolute society and ineffective military forces, wanted to professionalize and expand the Navy, to fight for command of the sea, secure more trade, and control the expanding empire.
In 1739, Walpole, forced into a war he did not want, lost power. The new administration included Patriot and Authoritarian elements. Between 1744 and 1782, Authoritarian Whigs, the Duke of Bedford, Lord Sandwich, and Admiral Sir George Anson (an officer with extensive American experience) ran the Admiralty, creating an aggressive, disciplined, battle-winning force of professional officers, with larger, more globally effective ships for the Anglo-French Wars between 1747 and 1782.
Having defeated France and Spain in the Seven Year’s War, 1756–1763, British ministers turned to the navy to enforce the new taxes that they imposed to recover the costs of winning the war and protecting the American colonies. Where an older generation of naval officers had enforced imperial rule with an eye on local sensibilities and the limits of their station, the new war-winning professionals and the execution of Admiral John Byng for not doing his best reminded their successors that they must obey their orders—to the letter. This issue sparked massive debates on both sides of the Atlantic, with Patriot agendas, shaped in England in the 1740s, fueling American opposition.
It might have been useful for the author to address the distinctive nature of sea power empires. Most empires are terrestrial, acquired by the conquest of adjacent territory. In sea power empires, navies are critical to imperial control, and their cost requires the imperial power to tax its colonies—for cash or other resources. The empire enabled Britain to exercise sea power, which made it a great power. In 1763, British ministers tried to reduce the debt burden from the latest conflict. Americans, unwilling to pay, used the rhetoric of the Patriots to challenge Authoritarian policies. The British state learned the lesson: in the future, colonies of settlement would get local self-government, without costly garrisons.
This transformative text puts politics and ideology back into naval history, and the breakdown in relations between Britain and the 13 colonies. It is equally important for students of sea power. Once we accept that the size, shape, and structure of the mid-18th-century Royal Navy expressed the changing and contested ideologies and agendas of political factions, not a singular monolithic nation, it is easy enough to transfer that approach to other navies—and other centuries.
Professor Lambert is Laughton Professor of Naval History in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London. His books include the award-winning The Challenge: Britain versus America in the Naval War of 1812 (Faber & Faber, 2012). His latest book is Seapower States (Yale University Press, 2018).