Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War, Volume 1: July 1937–May 1942
Richard B. Frank. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2020. 717 pp. Illus. Index. $40.
Reviewed by Craig L. Symonds
For many Americans, World War II began on the “Day of Infamy”:
7 December 1941. In fact, of course, by then the war had been going on in Europe for more than two years, and in Asia it had begun two years before that with the Japanese invasion of China in the summer of 1937. That the war in China is an integral and too often overlooked part of the global conflict is the central argument of this deeply researched and powerfully written new book. Richard Frank’s previous works on Guadalcanal and Operation Downfall established him as an authoritative voice on the Pacific war, or what he calls here the Asia-Pacific war. In this first of a projected three volumes, he covers that war from 1937 to 1942, including the war in China, the ways that war affected growing Japanese–U.S. relations, the Pearl Harbor attack, and the fighting for Singapore, Burma, and the Philippines.
These were not separate incidents; in Frank’s narrative, it is all one story. He draws a clear line between the Marco Polo Bridge and Pearl Harbor. In the process, he illuminates the political and cultural aspects of the various participants as well as military-naval events. He explains, for example, the relationship between the Japanese government and its army, a dynamic that is often inexplicable to Western readers; he deconstructs the rivalry between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists; and he explores the enigmatic role of the Soviet Union.
As Frank makes clear, the death toll in the Sino-Japanese War was appalling. Americans professed shock at the losses endured on tiny islands such as Tarawa, where a thousand U.S. Marines died, but largely were ignorant of the combat losses in China, which reached into the millions, and civilian losses that were even greater. Frank dissects the elements that allowed smaller Japanese armies to master much larger Chinese armies with regularity, inflicting in some cases 50 to 60 times more losses on the Chinese than they suffered themselves.
In addition to relatively well-known events such as the Rape of Nanking and the Japanese attack on the USS Panay (PR-5), Frank discusses lesser-known but historically significant events, including the Battle for Shanghai in the fall of 1937, which seriously degraded Chiang’s army, and the bombing of Chongqing, a massive fire-bombing campaign that destroyed a city of more than half a million people. Frank assesses the Nationalist decision to break the dikes on the Yangtze River, which flooded much of three provinces and killed nearly 900,000 people, and the Great Migration of some 45 million people seeking to escape the war. It is hard to argue with his conclusion that the China war, considered a sideshow by many, was a human disaster of the first order.
The war in China intersected the European war when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Frustrated by a perceived stalemate in China, and with withdrawal culturally unthinkable, Japan’s elites seized on an expansion of the war as a solution. Frank argues that Japan’s admirals and generals knew that a war with the United States was unwinnable but saw retreat from their position in China as intolerable. It was, he concludes, “a lack of moral courage” that led them to embrace war with the West.
Initially, the Japanese were as successful in their war against the British, Dutch, Australians, and Americans as they had been against the Chinese. Frank devotes detailed and thoughtful attention to the Japanese capture of Singapore and the extended fighting in the Philippines, as well as the campaign in Burma, the importance of which, he writes, “is difficult to overstate.” None of the Western generals in these campaigns come off well: Arthur Percival (Singapore), Joseph Stilwell (Burma), and Douglas MacArthur (the Philippines) all committed signal blunders. Frank does not hesitate to place blame for the fall of the Philippines squarely on MacArthur for errors of both omission and commission.
In short, there is much to admire and to consider in this important book, which offers a valuable corrective to histories of the Pacific war that begin with Pearl Harbor, and it will whet the reader’s appetite for the next two volumes.
Dr. Symonds taught history at the U.S. Naval Academy for 30 years. He is the author of 17 books, including his most recent, World War II at Sea: A Global History (Oxford University Press, 2018).
1545: Who Sank the Mary Rose?
Peter Marsden. Barnsley, England: Seaforth Publishing, 2019. 256 pp. Appxs. Endnotes. Biblio. $49.95.
Reviewed by Andrew C. A. Jampoler
Late afternoon on Sunday, 10 August 1628, soon after she got under way on her maiden voyage in Stockholm’s harbor, Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus’s beautiful new reserve squadron flagship, the Vasa, heeled over, filled with water through her open gunports, and swiftly sank in about 15 fathoms. Some 30 members of her crew and visitors on board drowned, while horrified crowds around the port watched. The catastrophe was quickly and correctly attributed to the fact that the Vasa’s upper works were too lofty and too heavy for her hull.
Something very similar had happened to King Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose, in the Solent on a Sunday some 80 years earlier. While in sight of the astonished king and courtiers, and of the lead elements of an invading French fleet hoping to seize the Isle of Wight, the Mary Rose suddenly heeled over, filled, and sank in some 35 feet of water, drowning perhaps 500 of her crew and leaving only about 40 men alive. The ship, a heavily gunned four-masted carrack, had just emerged from rebuilding and rearming after more than 30 years of service afloat in Henry’s fleet. She had first came off the ways in 1512, just two years after the teenage Henry—who ordered her construction—had become king. The 1545 reconstruction had seen the Mary Rose gain perhaps 200 tons and triple her original number of ship-killing big guns.
A salvage effort the next year failed almost immediately, although some of the Mary Rose’s guns were successfully raised.
In both sinkings, the determination of the respective royals to arm their ships with many heavy guns and their ignorance of good design had much to do with the catastrophes that visited their men-of-war. So did designs that included gunports little more than a foot above the waterline.
Like the Vasa, and for the same reason—the high drama of her destruction—the Mary Rose has since attracted a lot of attention from historians and other authors. A quick glance at the first ten pages of WorldCat Online produces the names of 13 who have written books about the ship, Peter Marsden among them. In this, his third book on the subject (the others are Mary Rose, Your Noblest Shippe: Anatomy of a Tudor Warship and Sealed by Time: The Loss and Recovery of the Mary Rose), Marsden tells several stories, all of them helped along by a beautiful volume, rich with black-and-white plans and period color illustrations. Those of Tudor ships from the famous 1545–46 Anthony Roll on vellum, and of artifacts recovered from the ship, are especially handsome. I have not read a more generously illustrated book.
Marsden tells his story progressively:
• The building of the Mary Rose and Henry’s almost simultaneous acquisition of other combatant ships
• A construction program set in the context of nearly continuous hostilities with France and Scotland
• A description and analysis of the Battle of the Solent, the abbreviated Anglo-French confrontation in the summer of 1545 near the Isle of Wight (the main bodies never engaged) that saw the Mary Rose suddenly sink and the French give up their plan to seize the island to trade it for English-occupied Boulogne
• A look at the politics of leadership selection in the British fleet, driven (like much else in Tudor England) entirely by the whims of His Majesty
• A description of the hard life at sea evidenced by provisions for messing and berthing on board and the battered bodies of sailors, as seen in their skeletal remains.
The artifacts found with the wreck, and especially the many bits of human skeletal remains (whimsically but inaccurately inventoried as “Fairly Complete Skeleton No.”), tell Marsden and his readers much about life at sea in that century, a life that saw most sailors handicapped by chronic poor health and debilitating physical conditions, as evidenced by near universal forms of skeletal trauma.
Marsden includes information about the technology and politics of the successful salvage, and about the no-less-successful effort to reconstruct all that was found and to present it to the public accurately and creatively in a museum dedicated to ship’s memory.
If you’ve not read about the ill-fated Mary Rose, begin your education with this book.
Mr. Jampoler spent nearly 25 years as a naval aviator including a year on the ground in Vietnam, command of a squadron and a naval air station, and service on several high-level staffs. He is the author of seven Naval Institute Press books.
Cayman’s 1794 Wreck of the Ten Sail: Peace, War, and Peril in the Caribbean
Margaret E. Leshikar-Denton. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2020. 316 pp. Figs. Maps. Appxs. Notes. Biblio. $29.95.
Reviewed by James P. Delgado
Cayman’s 1794 Wreck of the Ten Sail is an account of the loss and rediscovery of ten British ships, one of them a captured French warship, L’Inconstant, renamed HMS Constant. Part of a convoy of 59 ships bound from Jamaica to Great Britain, the ten ships fell victim in the dark to the eastern reefs off Grand Cayman on
8 February 1794. The book is the culmination of decades of research into the lost ships based not only on archival sources and local memory, but also a series of archaeological investigations done under the direction of author Margaret Leshikar-Denton. It is an exceptional example of what decades of study on an archaeological site can yield when its story is pursued by a dedicated and skilled scholar with a passion not only for the subject, but also for sharing results with fellow scholars and the public.
The origins of the project date back to the birth of professional and academic nautical and maritime archaeology in the Cayman Islands in 1979. It has continued ever since, with focused work on the Wreck of the Ten Sail beginning in 1990. As part of that ongoing effort, Leshikar-Denton exhausted every avenue of inquiry. That includes archival research in five nations, a rich array of printed sources, and oral histories personally conducted by the author.
The story behind the Wreck of the Ten Sail is prominent in local legend and lore, as this event was not only one of the greatest maritime disasters in the Caribbean, but also a major event in the history of the Caymans. Mindful that lore and legend are important aspects of the larger cultural significance and the human story of shipwrecks, Leshikar-Denton interviewed a number of elders who shared generations of tales passed down since 1794. They form an important part of this book.
The larger story and contexts of the ships, and especially the L’Inconstant/Constant, which is the focus of the book, range from the characteristics and history of ships and guns, and the wrecking event, to the larger contexts of the Caribbean, the Caymans, the Napoleonic Wars, and the summary of decades of archaeological work. It is maritime and nautical archaeology at its best—the scholarship focused on merging all aspects of the record, both remembered, written down, and physically present under the sea, sand, and coral. Artifacts recovered archaeologically have far more value than simple relics, and this book is another well-stated and documented exposition of that.
The six appendices enhance the scholarly value of the book and provide rich detail for those who seek more detail without interfering with the narrative flow. Cayman’s 1794 Wreck of the Ten Sail therefore does great service to other researchers while also sharing the synthesis of exceptional work by an exceptional scholar. I recommend this book to any reader who is fascinated by naval history, ships, shipwrecks, and the archaeology of lost ships.