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ADMIRALS OF AMERICAN EMPIRE.
By Richard S. West, Jr. Indianapolis, Ind.
Bobbs-Merrill, 1948. 354 pages. $4.00.
Reviewed by Captain John B.
Heffernan, U. S. Navy
This is an excellent combined biography of George Dewey, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Winfield Scott Schley, and William Thomas Sampson, whose careers in the United States Navy were climaxed by the Spanish-American War and the beginnings of American empire. The author is a professor at the Naval Academy, and already has to his credit two very good volumes of naval history: Gideon Welles: Lincoln's Navy Department, and The Second Admiral: David Dixon Porter.
This is not merely four biographies in one volume. Professor West has chosen to follow the careers of his four subjects in such a manner as to compare and contrast the characteristics and experiences of these four officers. He begins with the family background and early upbringing of each of the four: Dewey, the son of a doctor in Montpelier, Vermont; Mahan, the son of a professor of mathematics at West Point; Schley, born in a Southern manor house in Frederick County, Maryland; Sampson, the son of a working man in upstate New York. He gives an account of the characteristics of each as demonstrated during their formative years at the Naval Academy where they graduated in successive years, 1858 to 1861 inclusive. During the Civil War Dewey served for a time as Executive Officer of the old side-wheeler Mississippi, participating in the capture of New Orleans and the attack on Port Hudson. Mahan’s only experience under fire was in the attack on Port Royal, in which he was the Executive Officer of a steamship with a coal-bunker capacity of sixty-seven tons, and in which he received early and unforgettable lessons in the logistics of the early steam Navy. Schley performed blockading duty and was under fire at Port Hudson and Mobile. Sampson was Executive Officer of a monitor, the Patapsco, when that vessel was sunk by a mine during an attack on Charleston, South Carolina. All four young officers had experience under fire and behaved well in the Civil War. In the years of stagnation after the Civil War, and in their middle age the careers of the four deviated: Mahan began his writing and established himself as the philosopher and historian of Sea Power; Schley had interesting experiences in Korea in 1871, and achieved fame in the Greely relief expedition of 1884; Sampson developed new ordnance and was Superintendent of the Naval Academy.
The book is well written, and holds the interest of the reader throughout. It has a good index. The author has succeeded in his effort to give us a vivid portrayal of this period of our history.
It is only natural that the book gives considerable space to the Sampson-Schley controversy. In reading of this controversy one is reminded of the strenuous efforts which have been made by some of our present-day journalists to produce a similar controversy concerning certain events of the recent war. In the opinion of this reviewer, the author has made a sincere attempt to handle this subject objectively, but there is room for some differences of opinion regarding his conclusions. There is a very sympathetic presentation of Schley’s actions throughout the Spanish-American War—more sympathetic in my opinion than Schley’s own book, Forty-Five Years Under the Flag, New York, 1904—and the author has stressed the fact that Schley was a sociable and pleasing individual who liked people. He says, “Of the four chief naval figures in the war for American empire Schley was by far the most sensitive and responsive to the feelings of other people.” The author has, however, not stated that contemporary naval opinion overwhelmingly regarded the controversy as a reflection upon Schley. Specifically, intelligent naval officers were almost unanimous in the belief that Schley had been dilatory while off Cienfuegos and that he should have managed to fuel his ships at Guantanamo or nearby, instead of departing for Key West and leaving Santiago unguarded. The author lays considerable stress on the unfortunate wording of the message by which the victory at Santiago was announced to the Navy Department, but he fails to mention that the message was drafted by Sampson’s Chief of Staff, Captain F. E. Chadwick.
Although the author has been very sympathetic in his treatment of Schley, he has inclined to the opposite in his presentation of Mahan. In particular, he has repeated the allegation that Mahan was a poor seaman. This is a conclusion or a point of view which has been propagated by some individuals but it is one which is not borne out by the record. Captain Puleston shows that, in the final days of his command of the cruiser Chicago, Mahan took the ship to an anchorage in the North River and subsequently took the ship to a pier in the Brooklyn Navy Yard without using a pilot. (Mahan, W. D. Puleston, New Haven, 1939.) During the recent war, some destroyer squadron commanders were annoyed and exasperated by having some of their commanding officers call for pilots when these ships were to be placed at piers in the Brooklyn Yard where the tides and currents do create some problems. In view of the fact that Mahan declined to use the Navy Yard pilots, and placed his ship alongside unaided, there is no justification for asserting that he was incompetent as a seaman. On the other hand, it is quite probable that there were many captains contemporary with Mahan who were better seamen.
THE DEFENSE OF WAKE. By Lt. Col.
R. D. Heinl, Jr., U. S. Marine Corps. U. S.
Government Printing Office, Washington.
1947. 75 pages, 7 colored maps, 23 photographs. $1.25.
Reviewed by Major John V.
Kelsey, U. S. Marine Corps
In the foreword General A. A. Vandegrift, U. S. Marine Corps, states, “during December 1941, the stubborn defense of Wake by less than 450 Marines galvanized not only the American public but their comrades in arms.” The author had taken this headline story and presented it in the form of an operational monograph designed to provide the casual reader as well as the student with a complete narrative well illustrated with photographs and colored maps.
Development of Wake was initiated early in 1941, in response to the Hepburn recommendations. Lieutenant Colonel Heinl describes Wake in the autumn of 1941 as, “the image of America: an island in the path of inevitable war; an island vibrant with unceasing construction in an effort to recapture time lost; an island militarily naked.” This prying outpost on the flank of the Marianas and north of the Marshalls was firmly emplanted in the strategic context of the Japanese and must fall along with Guam, Makin, and Tarawa.
In August of 1941 the advance detail of defending Marines arrive, followed by ground reinforcements in November, and Marine Fighting Squadron 211 on December 4, just four days prior to the initial air attack by the Japanese based at Roi to the south.
With Wake under attack, plans to reinforce the garrison quickly crystallize. On December 16, Task Force 14 joins with reinforcing Marines aboard the U.S.S. Tangier southwest of Oahu; relief is underway. A week later and some two and a half hours prior to the surrender of Wake, Task Force 14, then but 425 miles off Wake, is recalled. The author describes reactions aboard the Astoria, Saratoga, and Tangier as varying from “astonishment to shame and anger,” and points out that had this Task Force with its air power proceeded, the history of Wake might have been very different.
Wake fell, but not before the defenders had exacted from the Japanese a consequential loss of naval vessels and aircraft. The fall of Wake is concluded to be reasonable; a military defeat of value as a military lesson.
LOST ILLUSION. By Freda Utley. Philadelphia: Fireside Press, Inc. 1948. 288 pages. §3.00.
Reviewed by Captain Paul F.
Dugan, U. S. Navy
Six years’ residence in Soviet Russia, plus several years of service to the Communist Party in England and Japan, were ample experience to give Freda Utley the personal and intimate knowledge of Communist methods of government, and their effect on the average citizen, which she exhibits in Lost Illusion.
The author’s first contact with the Russian Communist Party was with the members of the Soviet Trade Delegation in London. Her background, however, was Socialist; her father, who was a lifetime Socialist, had a profound influence on her. Communism appealed to the young English student while she was at London University on a scholarship awarded by a trade union in 1920; she viewed the struggle between Labor and the British Government, culminating in the General Strike of 1926, as a class struggle. Even the personal influence of Bertrand Russell and his opposition to Communism, as expressed in his Theory and Practice of Bolshevism, did not deter her from adopting the Communist philosophy. Another influence favorable to Communism was the apparent prosperity she saw in Moscow on a short visit in 1927.
In 1928 she became the wife of a Russian Jew, Arcadi Berdichevsky, not a Communist Party member but an employee of the Soviet trade organization, “Arcos,” in London. Japan's Feet of Clay was written by Miss Utley as a result of a year’s residence in Japan with her husband. In 1930 she became a resident of Moscow, where she was to remain for six years’ rugged experience.
She saw the liquidation of the Kulaks and the forced collectivization of the farms, the famine of 1930 to 1933, the shift of the Comintern to the “Trojan Horse” technique in 1935 to win the support of foreign liberals and Popular Front parties, the beginning of the purge of 1936 to 1939, and parts of three Five Year Plans, which she indicates were largely failures.
The author, having won her master’s degree in economic studies at London University, and having worked for years as an economic specialist for the Soviet Government, appears well qualified to assess the success or failure of the Soviet economic system. She finds the major source of revenue, amounting to 70% in 1939, to be a tax on consumer’s goods, and of this tax two thirds was on bread and other foods. She states, “Since there is always a shortage of goods of mass consumption, long lines of customers along the street leading to the shop doors have remained a permanent feature of Soviet life.”
This realistic story of pre-war day-to-day living in Moscow includes the author’s description of the terribly crowded living conditions, the food lines, the constant fear of arrest and secret imprisonment, the inflated prices of necessities, and the final descent of the secret police on her own home to take her Russian husband away to an imprisonment from which he never returned.
Compared with John Fischer’s Why They Behave Like Russians, which endeavors to predict the future course of Russia and advises how the United States may best get along with the Soviets, Miss Utley’s book does not offer advice, it merely tells conditions as seen by a trained observer on the inside. Upon reading her tragic experience, and the opinions formed through that experience, the only effective method of dealing with the Communist regime may appear obvious to many readers.