Members of the Institute, both regular and associate, may save money by ordering books through its Book department, which will supply any obtainable book. A discount of 10 per cent is allowed on books published by J-he Institute, and on books of other publishers (government and foreign publications excepted). Address Secretary- treasurer, U. S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, Maryland.
Navies IN EXILE. By A. D. Divine. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, Inc. 1944. 264 pages. $2.75.
Reviewed by Professor Allan Westcott, U. S. Naval Academy
A British patrol including “one vessel Planned by the Royal Netherlands Navy and one by the Polish Navy.” ... A flotilla of the United Nations working from a northern base “where the notices are posted in five languages and the depot ships are polyglot.” • • • It is this story of wholehearted and effective co-operation between the British Fleet and the navies of a half dozen exiled governments that the well-known correspondent and naval writer A. D. Divine covers in the present volume. The book deals with the work of the Polish, Dutch, Fighting French, Greek, and Yugoslav navies in exile, with briefer notes on the “Section Beige” in the British Navy and the two motor minesweepers manned by Danes. Almost necessarily, in this war-time volume, the tone is not that of sober history but rather one of Warm, appreciative laudation for these ships and men who joined with England against the common foe.
Inevitably, also, there is some sameness in these records of commerce warfare—subhunting in the Atlantic, offense and defense 111 the Mediterranean, desperate melees of Srnall craft in the narrow seas. It is interesting to note that two Belgian-manned corvettes, Buttercup and Godetia, were on the American coast in the anti-submarine campaign of 1942. Covered also are the operations of Dutch ships with “Abdaflot” in the Java Sea. Altogether, Mr. Divine has furnished an authentic though necessarily incomplete account of the minor navies, including the work of many ships whose names have appeared often in the dispatches —such for example as the Polish destroyer Kujawiak, tops for aircraft destruction in 1942; the Norwegian corvettes Rose and Eglantine, conspicuous in escort duty; the big French submarine Surcouf; and the Dutch ships De Ruyter, Java, Piet Hein, and Isaac Squeers.
STAR ALTITUDE CURVES, LATITUDE 70° TO 90° NORTH AND NEW LINE OF POSITION TABLES. By Captain P. V. H. Weems, U. S. Navy (Retired). Annapolis: Weems System of Navigation. Third edition, 1944. $10.00.
Reviewed by Commander Paul Miller, U. S. Navy
In 1928 the Weems System of Navigation started a program, the ultimate aim of which was to publish Star Altitude Curves to cover the whole earth. Curves have been issued covering latitudes as far south as 50°. This volume completes the program for all northern latitudes from the equator to the pole. From 70° to 80° north the curves are in usual form on the Mercator projection. From 80° north to the pole the curves are plotted on the polar stereographic projection. This requires some minor changes in the method of using the curves, these changes being carefully explained in the text with illustrative examples.
In addition to the Star Altitude Curves, this book contains Weems New Line of Position Tables, an explanation of the use of the pole as the assumed position, and new low altitude correction tables. Thus the book furnishes complete methods of navigation in polar regions at any time. The low altitude correction tables are worthy of special mention since bodies near the horizon will often be the only ones available for use near the pole.
GEORGE BANCROFT: BRAHMIN REBEL. By Russell B. Nye. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1944. 340 pages. $3.50.
Reviewed by Lieutenant John C. Reed, U. S. Naval Reserve
Fame has treated George Bancroft unjustly. Although historians and graduates of the Naval Academy will never be ignorant of him, most people today have little knowledge of him or his accomplishments. Mr. Nye’s book, especially timely as the centenary of the Naval Academy approaches, should help to bring him to light again.
Born in 1800, educated at Exeter, Harvard, and Gottingen, Bancroft devoted the whole of his long life (he died in 1891) to the furthering of the cause of education and culture. He was a passionate patriot; his writings and his diplomatic activity are stamped with a fervent display of his devotion to his country; his actions as a political figure show the same guiding principle. The History of the United States begun in 1832 and finished in 1874 brought him fame and wealth. He was Minister to Great Britain and Germany, going to Berlin in 1876 and staying through the stormy years of the Franco-Prussian War and the birth of the German Empire. Fie became a great personal friend of Bismarck and the Junkers, and when he returned in 1874 he had established relations between the United States and the new Reich that seemed unshakable.
Mr. Nye tells the story of the founding of the Naval Academy briefly but clearly. Polk selected Bancroft as Secretary of the Navy in 1845. Unhampered by tradition, with a mind always open to expert advice, Bancroft instituted a series of sweeping reforms. He abolished the casual flogging of seamen by officers, he did away with the rule of promotion by seniority alone, and he established a firm and workable plan for the education and training of naval officers. Two schools had been started in Philadelphia and Norfolk in 1840, but the midshipmen attending them had little chance to study. In the face of Congressional indifference and even opposition Bancroft ordered the midshipmen to report to Annapolis where the skeleton of a school had been got ready under the superintendency of Commander Franklin Buchanan.
On October 10, 1845, the Naval Academy opened at eleven in the morning as Buchanan read Bancroft’s letter to several boys meeting in a classroom in an old shed, and as fast as the vessels reached port Bancroft detached their midshipmen and sent them to Annapolis. ... In less than nine months as Secretary, George Bancroft had completely changed the course of the American Navy.
The end of his life was rich and full. Summers in Newport where he grew roses (his gardener developed the “American Beauty”), winters in Washington where his dinners were gatherings of the best minds available, days full of activity, although the old plan of sixteen hours of work a day had long been of necessity abandoned—all present a picture of the fitting end to a career rich, fruitful, noble. Mr. Nye tells the story well.
BASES OVERSEAS. By George Weller. New
York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
1944. 424 pages. $3.50.
Reviewed by Commander Philip R. Osborn, U. S. Navy
Bases Overseas is a book that deals with the facts of our present world situation in the light of many years of study of international politics. The author, one of the foremost members of a group of Chicago Daily
News foreign correspondents, presents a strong case for a permanent system of American bases as a guarantee for our security. He forcefully reports and interprets the facts of today in terms of a positive Policy for the future.
The author is forthright and treats the causes of the two World Wars and the aims °f the great powers in a realistic manner without hypocrisy. Moral issues are not dealt with. Speaking of the last war the author states: “America failed herself, and failing herself, failed her allies—as for her independence, she had to go to war for it again, at far greater cost, within a generation.”
The secret treaties and the mandate system of the last war which now operate to °ur immense disadvantage in the Pacific are severely criticised, as well as our bungling diplomacy at the time. To the author, our present victories in the Pacific are merely the remedy for a prior and costly political defeat. He points out how, even long before the last war, when the work of our missionaries and traders in the Carolines entitled the United States to a far better claim to those islands than any other power, we did not make the slightest move to develop this mfluence into political control. After the Spanish-American War of 1898 we passed up the opportunity to acquire these islands and are now paying a heavy price for this lack of foresight.
The idea is brought out that, although d is possible through simple excess of production or superiority of weapons to defeat an enemy in a military sense, this is a shortsighted aim; our true aim should be, not mere military victory, but its strategic consolidation by the retention and use of a system of world-wide bases.
Against a background of past mistakes and inconsistencies, the author sets forth the impelling need for a new outlook. His point °f view is well summarized in the following Paragraph:
A system of permanent American Bases overseas ls planned for a single purpose: to lift the level of the political power in peacetime of the United States to a point where, with regard to its European and Imperial allies, it approximately equals the American wartime responsibilities on their behalf, and thereby approaches parity in world-wide political leverage with the Soviet Union and Great Britain.
Altogether the book is a timely, effective, and challenging presentation of the case for the establishment of a permanent system of United States bases throughout the world.
INVASION JOURNAL. By Richard L.
Tobin. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.,
Inc. 1944. 223 pages. $2.00.
Reviewed by Louis H. Bolander
Never before in the history of warfare have newspapermen been given such ample opportunities of finding out for themselves what is happening on the various fighting fronts. On the Allied fronts, at least, they have shared the hazards of the front-line troops. If they lived they might write home about it, provided of course, that they could get their copy passed by the military and naval censors. Mr. Tobin was one of these correspondents sent to England by the New York Herald Tribune in April, 1944. Here he witnessed some of the preparations for D-day early in June and was on board the British battleship Ramillies when she was bombarding German gun emplacements on the French coast.
His book, written in diary form, is, on the whole, interesting and informative. It is marked in certain instances by superb writing. His vivid account of his passage from New York to an unnamed British port on a crowded troopship is by all odds the best part of his book. The reader can almost smell the sweat of the soldiers jammed in the hold and feel the sting of the wind in the North Atlantic when the troops were called to the decks for lifeboat drill. His description of life in war-time London is also excellent, as is his description of the damage wrought by a flying bomb on an English hospital. Perhaps his best story is one told to a group of newspaper correspondents, Tobin among them, by an American para- troop colonel whose men took St. Mere Eglise, the first French town captured in the invasion. The colonel’s parachute had caught in a tree. “So,” said the colonel, “I had the devil’s own time getting out of the parachute and the tree. We knew we
were in enemy territory, and that we were the first folks there.” Nothing could better illustrate the calm, prosaic, and almost casual manner of our American citizen soldiers in war.
THE NETHERLANDS INDIES AND JAPAN: BATTLE ON PAPER, 19401941. By Hubertus J. van Mook. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc. 1944. 138 pages. $2.00.
Reviewed by Lieutenant William W.
Jeffries, U. S. Naval Reserve
This concise book is an account of the diplomatic contest between the two Japanese economic missions to the Netherlands Indies in 1940-41, and the Indies Government. Although the author is the Minister for the Colonies, Netherlands Government, the tone of the book is quite restrained. The facts and the essential documents speak for themselves, and the author adds only the details necessary for background, explanation, and continuity.
In the 1930’s the Netherlands Indies introduced measures to prevent Japan’s establishing a dominating position there. Japan protested that these were discriminatory and sent missions to the Indies to attempt to open the way for Japanese penetration into the vital economic life there and to contract for a virtual monopoly of Indies products which were essential for a Japan at war. From the outset the Dutch saw that the early friendly, and later arrogant offers of closer economic ties were only attempts to make the Indies an integral part of the Japanese “co-prosperity sphere” and a source of strategic raw materials for the Japanese war machine.
The practically defenseless Dutch realized that they could not afford even to compromise with the Japanese and that their only hope of blocking them and of continuing to supply the democracies was to be receptive to Japanese suggestions, play for time, reply cautiously with pleas of the impossibility of meeting their demands, and avoid antagonizing the aggressive Japanese. The Dutch achieved their aims completely and won the economic “battle on paper.” Only by armed force were the Japanese able to overcome those determined and astute people.
DEATH WAS OUR ESCORT. The Story of Lt. (j.g.) Edward T. Hamilton, U.S.N.R. by Lieutenant Commander Ernest G. Vetter, U.S.N.R. New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1944. 323 pages. $3.00.
Reviewed by Lieutenant A. Stuart Pitt, U. S. Naval Reserve
Lieutenant Commander Vetter’s narrative of Lieutenant (j.g.) Hamilton’s tour of duty with a squadron of PT boats off the northeast coast of New Guinea appears on the market at this time under two possible handicaps: the breezy, journalistic personal narrative of war experiences has already become as conventional a type in this war as the comic, lighter-side-of-the-war novel was in the last. Nevertheless, the reader who shies away from Death Was Our Escort for these reasons will be going the book an injustice, for it has special values of its own.
For one thing, the reader gets a particularly clear concept of the pressure and confusion—the making up for lost time and the doing the best you can with what you have —that necessarily marked our early operations in the South Pacific. (The events in the narrative are largely undated, but roughly occur during the months that followed the naval engagements off Guadalcanal.) For another, an excellent notion of the structure, operation, and use of the PT boat is developed throughout the narrative. Finally, there are detailed and impressive pictures of New Guinea itself and warfare in the tropical jungle, a hideous nightmare of heat, vegetation, rain, stench, disease, swamp—and Jap snipers.
Death Was Our Escort has a curious effect on the reader: it startles him into the realization that the supposedly absurd excesses of drugstore thrillers and juvenile hero-epics become stark and unvarnished realities in a modern world at war. Hairbreadth escapes, triumphs over seemingly insuperable odds, and incredible feats of bravery and endurance are not episodes in romance to the servicemen of this war but elements of their very existence. Lieutenant Commander Vetter’s book captures this truth with unusual force and compulsion, and for this reason it ls genuine, sobering, and significant.
Thumbnail Reviews
The Tempering of Russia. By Ilya Ehrenburg. Translated from the Russian. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1944. 356 pages. $3.00.
In extracts from his diaries and articles the noted Russian writer and correspondent pictures Russia’s bitter struggle of 1941-42. It is journal- lstic, often brilliant writing, compact of atrocities, glorification of Russia, and blazing hatred of the Nazis.
They, Mac! “ You’re in the Navy Now! A Story of Boot Training in the U. S. Navy. By Arthur Curtis, Apprentice Seaman. New York: American News Company. 1944. 64 pages. 25 cents.
In ofi-hours, an ex-Harvard student wrote these informal, informative, and amusing sketches of fife at the U. S. Naval Training Station, Farragut, Idaho. The author is now an instructor at the C. S. Naval Academy.
Steamboats Come True. By James Thomas Flex- ner. New York: The Viking Press. 1944. 406 pages. $3.50.
Who invented the steamboat? After all, the problem was simply that of successfully applying the already invented steam engine to water propulsion. Many were at work on the idea both in this country and abroad. As early as 1790 John Bitch built a steamboat on the Delaware which jnade repeated trips at 6 to 8 miles an hour. But it was Fulton at last who combined the ideas of others into a boat that would not only run but Would pay. The steamboat era had dawned! Into the record of all this experimentation the author °f the present volume has put much scholarly research and ability in presentation. Yet it must be confessed that the struggles, setbacks, quarrels, and litigation of these for the most part unskilled experimenters makes at times a weary tale.
Important Professional Books and Magazine Articles
Anderson, Edwin P. Audel’s Marine Engineers' Handbook. New York: T. Audel. 1944. Army-Navy Guide; Answers to Your Questions about the Armed Forces. New York: Crown Publishers. 1944.
Ayling, Keith. Bombardment Aviation. Harrisburg, Pa.: Military Service Pub. Co. 1944. What happens both in preliminary preparation and action when our bombers plaster Berlin,
Cologne, Hamburg, Essen, or the Ploesti oil fields.
Bailey, Gilbert P. Boot; the Training of a Marine.
New York: Macmillan, 1944.
Baker, Elijah. Introduction to Steel Shipbuilding.
New York: McGraw-Hill. 1943.
Coupland, R. The Indian Problem; Report on the Constitutional Problem in India. New York: Oxford. 1944.
Hagen, Paul. Germany after Hitler. New York: P'arrar & Rinehart. 1944.
A hard-headed and workable program, according to the author, for a democratic post-war Germany.
Kris, Ernst. German Radio Propaganda. New York: Oxford. 1944.
Meiksins, Gregory. The Baltic Riddle; Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Keypoints of European peace. New York: L. B. Fischer. 1944. Paterson, W. B., editor. Cornell Red Book of Marine Engineering. New York: Cornell Maritime Press.
Radius, Walter A. United Slates Shipping in Transpacific Trade, 1922-1938. Stanford University Press. 1944.
Rockey, Harry, USN. The Navy's Best Stories. Second edition. Los Angeles: Wetzel Pub. Co. 1944.
Sforza, Carlo. Contemporary Italy; Key to the Italy of Today and Tomorrow. New York: Dutton. 1944.
Smith, George G. Gas Turbines and Jet Propulsion for Aircraft. Second edition. London: Flight Pub. Co. 1943.
Waitt, Alden H. USA. Gas Warfare. New York: Duell, Sloane & Pearce. 1942.
The chemical weapon, its use and protection against it.
Wertenbaker, C. C. Invasion! New York: Apple- ton-Century. 1944.
The first connected account of the invasion of France.
MAGAZINE ARTICLES Leadership in Combat. By Col. M. E. Barker.
Chemical Warfare Bulletin, June-July, 1944. Chain of Command and Responsibility. By Major John M. Ericson. Command and General Staff School Military Review, October, 1944.
Combat Importance of Night Vision Training. By Major L. O. Rostenberg. Command and General Staff School Military Review, October, 1944.
Amphibious Miracle of Our Time. By Lt. Gen. A. A. Vandegrift. Marine Corps Gazette, October 1944.
They Held Kronstadt. (The Russian naval base in the war). Nautical Magazine, September, 1944.