If By Sea: The Forging of the American Navy—From the Revolution to the War of 1812
George C. Daughan. New York: Basic Books, 2008. 536 pages. Notes. Bib. $30.
Reviewed by David Curtis Skaggs
In his If By Sea, George Daughan undertakes three critical and difficult tasks: first, he seeks to integrate naval history with that of the ground forces, 1775-1815; second, he incorporates a study of domestic and international politics and diplomacy to understand the interrelationship of these to military and naval policies and events; third, he posits that the story of the maligned Continental Navy has a direct impact on the U.S. Navy that emerged after 1794. These are immense, complex, and somewhat contradictory objectives that are difficult to encompass in one volume.
Central to his study of the War for Independence is that congressional leaders misunderstood the Navy's most important role. They misdirected the limited Revolutionary naval resources toward a Lilliputian version of the Royal Navy to fight a guerre de course on the high seas rather than engaging in "unorthodox, low-cost, guerrilla-style tactics" with long boats and gunboats fighting in coastal waters and cooperating with General George Washington's Continental Army. "Commerce raiding," Daughan concludes, "would have been far better left to the hundreds of privateers sailing from every seaport on the Atlantic coast. It was this fleet that created problems for the British, not the patriots' few Continental warships." In a historical revisionist mode, he advocates a joint force structure with army and naval elements under Washington's command.
Half this book is spent in this speculation combined with a detailed description of the fleet actions of the Royal Navy and the French Navy, which eventually resulted in the Battle of the Chesapeake Capes and the isolation of Charles Lord Cornwallis' army at Yorktown.
What were the consequences of this on subsequent policy? Washington and John Adams conclude that the United States should have a well-built blue-water squadron with professionally manned regular naval forces to protect the commercial fleet from "depredations of nations at war" and thereby "secure respect to our neutral flag" through the ability to "vindicate" national honor "from insult or aggression."
With considerable irony given his criticism of the naval conduct of the Revolutionary War, Daughan chastises Thomas Jefferson and James Madison for advocating diplomatic "peaceful coercion" with coastal fortifications and gunboats combined with privateers as the centerpiece of naval defense policy. Washington and Adams had considered a blue-water fleet necessary to national defense; Jefferson and Madison considered it expensive, provocative, and strategically ineffective.
But like Adams during the Quasi-War with France, Jefferson was willing to use the few frigates at his disposal in the conflict with the Barbary States. Daughan provides effective but conventional descriptions of naval policies and combat during these conflicts and notes their preparation of young officers for the important struggle with Britain that would follow.
In his discussion on the War of 1812 Daughan acclaims the single-ship victories by U.S. Navy ships but fails to recognize that it was the privateers that inflicted more damage on Britain than did the regular forces. He notes that the real impact of the Navy was on the North American lakes where it could achieve equality and, in some cases, superiority over the Royal Navy. Isaac Chauncey on Lake Ontario, Oliver Hazard Perry on Lake Erie, and Thomas Macdonough on Lake Champlain conducted the first squadron-to-squadron actions in U.S. Navy history with both important tactical and strategic consequences. Perry and Macdonough's effective cooperation with Army forces are not fully examined, nor are Chauncey's failures in this regard explored.
Daughan's concentration on foreign and domestic politics limits his inquiry into the institutional development of the U.S. Navy so well chronicled elsewhere by Christopher McKee. Moreover, despite an impressive bibliography of primary and secondary sources, Daughan omits a number of critical ones. Annoying errors like misspelling Commodore John Rodger's name crop up occasionally.
Frankly, most readers of the post-Revolutionary era will prefer Ian Toll's Six Frigates to If By Sea.
OKB Tupolev: A History of the Design Bureau and Its Aircraft
Yefim Gordon and Vladimir Rigmant. North Branch, MN: Specialty Press, 2007. 360 pp. Illus. $59.95.
Reviewed by Raymond Robinson
This splendid book is unlikely ever to be surpassed, regarding technical activities at what was for decades one of the premier aircraft design bureaus in the world. As noted in the book's first pages, almost 300 projects—mostly military airplanes and, from the mid-1950s, unmanned aerial vehicles—were conceived in the Tupolev Experimental Design Bureau (Tupolev OKB). Of these, nearly 90 reached the prototype construction stage, and more than 40 of those went into series production. To a large extent, they determined the image of Soviet/Russian aviation in the 20th century. The text provides extensive details of the dimensions, layout, and performance of Tupolev airplanes proposed or built over nearly nine decades. Some 18,000 prototypes and production aircraft stemming from the OKB took to the air. The book also details aircraft designations, dimensions, performance, decision dates, first flight, production totals, and modifications of the original designs. The graphics accompanying the text also are outstanding.
The lack of an index is a drawback but is offset in part by the way the book is divided topically and chronologically.
A number of the design bureau's projects and programs are of particular interest. From the mid-1930s there was serious interest in sea-going aviation and the development of aircraft carriers. On several occasions studies and even the creation of prototype aircraft for service on board carriers was undertaken, but because of changes in the international environment and changes in military doctrine—perhaps Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's overestimation of the effects of nuclear weapons—and for other reasons, the creation of suitable aircraft carriers was put aside or delayed. Thanks to citations of dates of go-ahead and then of cancellation or refocusing of specific projects such at the "509" folding-wing variant of the twin-engine Tu-14 and the "91" single-engine torpedo-bomber/ground-attack plane, changes in the carrier programs can sometimes be dated quite precisely. Among other items of naval interest are the bureau's efforts to develop nuclear-powered aircraft, including a variant to serve in antisubmarine warfare.
Beyond technical matters, however, the volume suffers from notable shortcomings and omissions. First, early on and then scattered elsewhere in the book, are suggestions that the Soviets were defensive while the United States pushed the arms race. The authors merely hint at the Soviet continuation of wartime rates of weapon production in the early postwar years as part of Josef Stalin's drive to prepare for a great war with the capitalist world in the mid-1950s to early 1960s. Neither is there reference to the long-term Soviet aim of a worldwide socialist revolution that was to be achieved by the dawn of the 21st century.
Second, there is insufficient reference to Soviet policies—and policy revisions—as determinants of the Tupolev OKB's efforts. Though Khrushchev's "disdainful" attitude toward manned aircraft is briefly noted, some of the causes and consequences of this attitude perhaps could have been spelled out more clearly. For instance, in the late 1950s through the early 1960s Soviet leadership became strongly oriented to nuclear missile weapons as a means of quickly, and relatively cheaply, winning a future war against the capitalist states. Accordingly, requirements for old-style weapons—long-range bombers, naval ships, and naval aviation, for example—could be minimized. Probably as a consequence of this view, in early 1960 roughly 80 percent of the Soviet Navy's airplanes were retired or transferred to other services, primarily the antiair defense force.
On a more speculative level, we might wonder if the Tupolev OKB assisted in the Soviet development of offensive biological and chemical warfare capabilities. The entire topic was a matter of great secrecy under the Soviet government, and that tradition is being followed by the present Russian government. Gordon and Rigmant make no mention of the subject, which may or may not be significant.
Some information, however, did leak from other sources, most notably from two Soviet biological warfare specialists who defected to the West in 1989 and 1992. Reportedly, Soviet preparations to produce large quantities of toxic agents of various types had increased substantially after 1972 and grew throughout the Mikhail Gorbachev era. If so, then the Tupolev OKB may well have shared in development and testing of means of dissemination of such weapons from manned and unmanned aircraft. Unless the world changes in unexpected ways, however, some of the work carried on at the Tupolev OKB probably will be forever secret.
On balance, OKB Tupolev is well worth reading in detail by anyone interested in Soviet/Russian aviation and the history of the Cold War.
Operation Albion: The German Conquest of the Baltic Islands
Michael B. Barrett, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. 298 pp. Notes. Append. Bib. Maps. Index. $29.95
Reviewed by Andrew G. Wilson
By the fall of 1917, the German military situation on the Western Front was desperate. In an effort to reinforce its forces in the West, a plan was needed to knock Russia out of the war once and for all, allowing German units engaged on the Eastern Front to move west to stave off the next Allied offensive. Thus was born Operation Albion, the German plan to invade and occupy the Russian islands of the Baltic (Dago, Osel, and Moon). With Operation Albion, Michael Barrett provides both the World War I enthusiast and the seasoned naval professional a detailed look at one of the past century's early forays into opposed amphibious landings.
Drawing from Russian and German army and navy sources as well as personal memoirs, Barrett provides the reader with a complete blueprint of intentions, operations, and the eventual strategic and political impact of Albion as seen by planners and antagonists on both sides. In the end, however, as pointed out by Captain Erich Otto Volkmann, the German victory came not at the cost of thousands of German lives but rather was successful because of "planning, boldness, and surprise . . . and luck." In an interesting historical parallel to the Allies' World War II Normandy invasion, one example of this luck was the Russian assumption that the Germans would not attack when they did because of the bad weather. It appears that by 1944 the Germans may have forgotten the lesson they had imparted on Russians, as they, too, would become victims of the other "greatest general"—the weather.
Several themes are well covered by Barrett in Operation Albion. Chief among these is the internal debate within the German services and government leading to the decision to strike the islands. Another is a detailed examination of the significant land defenses and units placed on the islands by Russia to thwart such an attack, which under normal circumstances might very well have thrown the Germans back into the Gulf of Riga. This was, however, a Russian army and state plagued by revolutionary sentiment and activity, wracked by dissent and turmoil, and comprising soldiers with questionable levels of loyalty to the state. However, as Barrett makes clear, the Russian Navy—despite episodes of mutiny, murder, and limited capabilities against a much stronger German fleet—made a respectable showing in action. Nonetheless, the German forces, despite the presence of significant shore batteries and no prior experience with opposed landings or joint operations, were able to launch the most successful amphibious operation of the Great War. It indeed led to Russia's withdrawal from the conflict.
The only fault this reviewer found with the work—annoying because of its recurring nature—was the continued use of "High Sea Fleet" rather than the more accepted High Seas Fleet. This criticism aside, Operation Albion remains a very organized and interesting tale of two countries with two very different levels of operational capability, and two very different military goals, in the waning months of the Great War.
For present-day naval professionals, Operation Albion should serve as a reminder that despite the technological wonders available to the modern military, first-rate leadership, organization and planning, minesweeping capability, and naval fire support remain pivotal aspects of a successful amphibious operation.
While Operation Albion is slow going at times, it is only because of the exhaustive nature of Barrett's impressively detailed text. And although this work is not geared for the literary weekend warrior, for those with a serious or professional interest in combined arms operations or the lesser-known operations of the Great War, there is much to be gleaned.
Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45
Max Hastings. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. 615 pp. Illus. Notes. Index. $35.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hanley, U.S. Air Force (Retired)
Max Hastings has written a book that students of military history will find engrossing. In fact, Retribution is the latest of his works that stand as implicit rebukes to a pair of contemporary trends, robbing the study of our past of its capacity to teach and delight.
First, there is the ponderous monograph, in which all the worst features of the Ph.D. dissertation are on display. In this, the pursuit of novelty is taken to ridiculous levels with an enormous logistical tail of endnotes and rhetorical flourishes.
Historical works produced by commercial presses frequently err in the opposite direction choosing sentimentality or salacious detail over fact.
By contrast, Max Hastings recognizes that good writing is a species of truth-seeking—an elusive goal that is most effectively won by the disinterested historian who keeps in mind that his readers are not obliged to move from one sentence to the next.
Hastings wasn't moved to write Retribution based on new archival material; rather, he interprets with customary verve facts widely known. Hastings dwells on the little diagnostic truths that adumbrate larger and significant ones, synthesizing personal recollections from the various combatants—British, Indian, American, Japanese, Chinese, Russians—with official records and the previously published work of esteemed historians.
At 550 pages, Retribution is ample enough to explore several themes, one of which contests the widely held view among Americans that the Pacific theater was for the United States unusually murderous. Hastings points out that our losses were mercifully light when compared with the blood price extracted from the Japanese and the peoples they conquered, not to mention the casualty sums that the war yielded for the Germans and the Russians. The lesson is that, however acute was the suffering imposed on us in the Pacific war, our experiences were by no means particularly sanguinary, and we would do well to contemplate the enduring legacy of that war on the Pacific region. Ominously, Hastings observes that the Japanese people have so far successfully resisted the moral obligation to recognize fully the perfidy of their nation's conduct and the culture that justified it between 1931 and 1945.
Another praiseworthy argument here is Hastings' justification for the use of the atomic bombs, which ultimately saved many thousands of lives on all sides. Also illuminating is his evenhanded commentary on General Douglas MacArthur, whose status as a great hero was as much a counterfeit as it was a reflection of genuine accomplishment.
It is a testament to Hastings' achievement that a brief review cannot begin to do justice to this compelling book. Readers of this magazine will find that Retribution never fails to make a rewarding claim on their time.