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THE MIDGET RAIDERS. The Wartime Story of Human Torpedoes and Midget Submarines. By C. E. T. Warren and James Benson, with a Foreword by Admiral Sir George Creasy, New York: William Sloane Associates, 1954. 318 pages. Illustrated. $4.50.
Reviewed by Commander Burke Wilkinson, U. S. Naval Reserve (Inactive)
{Commander Wilkinson served as Liaison Officer to the Admiralty during World War II. Ilis first novel, Proceed at Will, was based on a one-man submarine exploit. Last Clear Chance is his most recent adventure story.)
It is a fine thing to have all the British small submarine and human torpedo operations of World War II—or almost all—between two covers. There has been so much folklore and half-truth about this lonely form of warfare that Warren, a “Charioteer” himself, and Benson, who commanded an X-Craft toward the end of the War, have done us a great service of clarification.
The Chariots were the British version of the Italian two-man Human Torpedo (Maiale) which caused so much trouble in the Mediterranean in the early years of the war. It was not until January of 1942 that the British Joint Chiefs, prodded by Mr. Churchill himself, seriously undertook to match these exploits. In a memorandum of that month to General Ismay, the Prime Minister put the case very succinctly indeed: “Please report what is being done to emulate the exploits of the Italians in Alexandria Harbour. ... Is there any reason why we should be incapable of the same kind of scientific aggressive action that the Italians have shown? One would have thought we should have been in the lead.”
Goaded by such high-placed sarcasm, the Admiralty went into full action. The X- Craft, a four-man submersible, was already in the blue-print stage. Now production was speeded.
By a stroke of good luck, the British had salvaged an Italian Human Torpedo at Gibraltar. With this as prototype they soon had a stable full of Chariots and a trained team of frogmen to ride them.
Warren and Benson, in straightforward, understated fashion, tell the story of the training period, first at Portsmouth and then in a lonely sea loch in the north of Scotland. The endless detail and the ever-present hazards of small-craft undersea work are made explicit in a way that no over-writing could ever do.
1 hen they re-tell, in the same succinct style, the great exploits of the small craft operators—the wounding of the Tirpitz by two X-Craft, the two small-submarine raids on Bergen to blow up the drydock there, the attack on the Takao at Singapore in the waning weeks of the war. Nor are the Charioteers neglected, although their weapon was essentially a stop-gap until the X-Craft were commissioned. Only a last-minute mishap prevented a spirited Chariot attack on the Tirpitz. At Palermo and La Spezia the Charioteers earned their spurs and drew blood with them.
Perhaps the one flaw in The Midget Raiders is the patronizing attitude of the co-authors toward the equipment and performance of the Italians. Successful as the British operations were, they never did match Luigi de La Penne at Alexandria and Valerio Borghese in the roadstead of Gibraltar. Nor was the total tonnage sunk and damaged comparable to the 200,000 tons of allied shipping which Italian operators accounted for in the Mediterranean.
But this is a minor flaw in a book that is a major contribution. And it is a flaw which stems from the enthusiasm of the two authors for the craft they manned and the men with whom they served. Without such team spirit small craft operations, calling for the greatest reserves of courage and endurance, would never have been possible in the first place.
THE STRUGGLE FOR POLAND. By H.
Peter Stern. Washington, D. C. Public
Affairs Press, 1953. 79 pages. $2.00.
Reviewed by William J. Tonesk
(Mr. Tonesk has had an extensive background in the field of Slavonic studies. During World War II he was on active duty in Russia and Poland while serving as a lieutenant in the U. S. Naval Reserve.)
In the seventy-nine pages of The Struggle for Poland, H. Peter Stern tries to pull together the tangled strands of Poland’s history between 1941 and 1947. Because this period covers the Teheran, Yalta, Moscow, and the Potsdam conferences, he is dealing with a subject about which, to say the least, there are violent differences of opinion both in the United States and abroad. One has only to glance at the three page bibliography to see titles that range from The New Poland to I Saw Poland Betrayed, and The Rape of Poland.
The book is a compilation of facts from sixty sources, followed by a nine-page chronology of events, and appendices which include the “Agreement Between the U.S.S.R. and Poland,” portions of the Yalta and Potsdam reports on Poland, and a State Department comment about the Polish elections of January, 1947. All through the chronology one can see evidences of Soviet duplicity—it appears in Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam, in the arrest of the fourteen members of the Polish Underground Government in 1945 after the Soviet Colonel Pimyenov gave his “word of honor as a Red Army officer” in guaranteeing the safe return of the group, and it can be seen in Stalin’s word at Yalta concerning the holding of “free and unfettered” elections in Poland. The elections, as shown by Mr. Stern, were neither free nor unfettered. All through the pages of this small volume one can find evidence of the Soviet desire to carry out its plan to absorb Poland as a satellite.
In the chapter entitled “Compromise on a Compromise,” the author deals with the formation of the Provisional Government of National Unity in Moscow as a result of the Yalta agreement. The facts presented on the basis of references used are correct. Nevertheless, it may be desirable to supplement this information with a fact which to my knowledge has heretofore not been brought out. In the course of the endless discussions in Moscow in June, 1945, between the Lublin Poles and those from inside Poland and from England, no agreement could be arrived at in the selection of the Premier of the Provisional Government. Mr. Mikolajczyk at first insisted on taking this post, but when the conferences were on the verge of collapse he agreed to the post of vice-premier. When it came to naming the Minister of Interior, Mikolajczyk was adamant; the post had to go to a Peasant Party member named Dr. Wladyslaw Kiernik. In the Polish government the Minister of Interior always controlled the national police and the internal security forces.
On June 26, 1945, I congratulated Dr. Kiernik in Moscow on being given the most important post in the new Polish Provisional Government. The next day when he arrived in Warsaw, to his consternation he read in the Communist-controlled press that overnight the eighteen ministries had become twenty-two, and his Ministry of the Interior had become an emasculated Ministry of Public Administration, while the police functions were assumed by the newly created Ministry of Public Security under a Communist zealot who proceeded to turn it into an extension of the Soviet MVD. Thus the Polish Communist puppets in the new Provisional Government ably began to emulate their masters in the Kremlin from the very moment they set foot on Polish soil.
In closing, it should be noted that the spelling of the Polish names throughout the book was surprisingly accurate but for two exceptions. Even though this little volume pulls together between its covers the various sources dealing with Poland, the opinions expressed by the author show that he has not completely mastered his subject, because what he regards as a struggle for Poland was actually the pushing of the reluctant Polish maiden into the grasping arms of the Russian bear by the unwary West.
PAN-SLAVISM, Its History and Ideology;
by Hans Kohn; University of Notre Dame
Press, 1953; 356 pages. $6.25.
Reviewed by Vice Amdiral Leslie C. Stevens, U. S. Navy (Retired)
(President of the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, Admiral Stevens was U. S. Naval Attache in Moscow, 1947-1949.)
Hans Kohn, Professor of History at the City College of New York, was himself born in Prague. He was a prisoner in Siberia of World War I for five years. He is well known for his historical writings, with particular emphasis on the origins and development of nationalism.
Today, when all of the Slavic lands with the single exception of Jugoslavia are united under Russian domination, it is of practical as well as academic interest to examine the historic concept of Pan-Slavism, what it has meant to the different Slavic nations at different times, and what may be its validity, its strength or weakness. Professor Kohn has done this well.
The rise of nationalism in the various Slavic peoples and the attitudes of those peoples to each other are complicated subjects. A hundred years ago, “the Slav world, apart from the Great Russians, offered the spectacle of subjection and multiple division. Their national consciousness was weak and still in the process of formation, except in the case of the Poles. The same held true of their national languages.” The idea of Pan-Slavism first grew up in the early part of the last century, in an atmosphere which was profoundly influenced by German scholarship, notably that of Johann Herder, who considered language to be a major factor in determining national loyalties. Following Herder’s belief in the Slavs as the coming leaders of Europe, Slavic scholars added “to the undisputed affinity of language from which was deduced a doubtful common descent, . . . the rather nebulous affinity of a Slavic Volksgeist.”
Pan-Slavism as an idea of a power complex did not originate with the Russians, who were strong, but with the weaker Slavic nations who would like to have had the protection of brotherly Russian strength. It has never been an agent of Russian imperialism, except insofar as it was briefly adopted since World War II as a tool by the Russian- dominated Soviet government, and even in this case, the defection of Yugoslavia disrupted the idea. Since then, “Moscow’s policy toward Poland and Czechoslovakia differed as little from that toward Hungary or Rumania as its attitude toward the Ukraine differed from that toward its Mohammedan subject nationalities.”
In summary, the forces of division have been stronger than those of cohesion, for “since the national awakening of the Slavs in the first part of the nineteenth century, Slavs have fought and hated other Slavs at least as bitterly and consistently as they have fought and hated non-Slavs.”
With little or no trace of nationalistic bias, Professor Kohn gives us the history of an idea in all its complex detail. His book is divided into three main chapters: PanSlavism and the West, 1815-1860; PanSlavism and Russian Messianism, 18601905; and Pan-Slavism and the World Wars, 1905-1950. As a result of the First World War and the breakup of the Austrian Empire (which the author seems at times to regret), the Western Slavs attained their maximum independence, but Russia emerged from the Second World War triumphant, for a time at least, over the whole Slavic world.
This book is not easy to read. It presupposes a scholarly background in the history of central and eastern Europe. Latin, German, French, and Slovak quotations are sometimes given without translation in the eighty-five pages of notes at the end of the text. Extensive quotations are, however, translated, which eloquently portray the sometimes noble dreams of nationalism, or provide illuminating and even startling examples of such phenomena as the deep- seated belief of some Slavs and their sympathizers, and notably certain Russians, that it was a Slavic or Russian mission to save the world. One meets with writers and thinkers who are household words to their our nationalities,—Mickiewicz, Palackjl, the Slavophiles, Tyutchev, Solovyov,—but only within the context of their views which are pertinent to the main argument. Although' Professor Kohn’s book is a valuable contribution to thought and understanding, it is not for the non-specialized reader.
SPARE-TIME ARTICLE WRITING FOR MONEY. By Commander William J. Lederer, U. S. N., New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 268 pages. $2.95.
Reviewed by Chief Quartermaster William J. Miller, U. S. Navy
(Chief Miller, twice an honorable mention winner in the U. S. Naval Institute’s Enlisted Prize Essay Contest, has been a stajf writer on All Hands magazine and is currently editor of The Gator, published weekly by the Atlantic Fleet Amphibious Force.)
How-to-do-it books, we learn from those in the book trade, are enjoying a popularity as never before. This aptly-titled book is one of that type. Commander Lederer, of course, needs no introduction in these pages. And with his numerous articles in top magazines, there aren’t three better known writers of non-fiction in the Navy. The recognized quality of his work carries through in this book.
It seems particularly appropriate that this book should be reviewed in the Proceedings. Scholastic quarterlies aside, there are few other magazines with as high a percentage of writers among its readers. Unfortunately, however, many contributors to the Proceedings are “one shotters”—persons who under a strong self-compulsion set forth their thoughts on, say, a certain aspect of naval life, an important naval activity, a new kink in seamanship or navigation, or a controversial geopolitical, historical, or diplomatic topic. Having once made his point in print, though, the one shotter sets aside his pen and makes no more attempts at article (or article-essay) writing for several years, if at all. This book may prompt many one shotters to begin work on another piece Those thinking about making their first attempt at article writing for publication will find the book serving both as a further impetus and as a guide.
Certainly there are few professions with so fertile a field for article possibilities as the military. As the author points out on page 237: “Military personnel probably have better opportunities to be successful part-time writers than any other class. During war you are exposed to the most exciting of all activities. . . . During peace you can get into jobs which appear thrilling to civilians.”
For the greater part, this book is aimed at the general public, or at least at those John and Mary Does aspiring to be article writers. In books of this type, however, it is difficult for the author to be wholly objective. As a result, the author’s naval officership repeatedly breaks through the text. This could be distracting for some readers, but it would give a not-unpleasant feeling of reader identification to many now reading this review.
Just what does this book cover? It ranges wide: choosing the subject and the magazine, querying editors, researching the article. After an extended treatment of the actual writing process, it discusses the legal aspects of authorship, the value of literary agents, and the possibilities of writing as a profession.
One chapter deals with “Special Sections for Special Cases.” Members of the armed forces form one of these cases. The most commonly asked questions of would-be service writers are answered here and excerpts from Navy Regs are thrown in for support.
The book’s chief drawback, so it seems to this reviewer, is that nearly a third of the book is devoted to a discussion of the author’s best known magazine article. Treating the production of this article as a case history, he takes us through the four-month process from the first contact with the “SatEvePost” editor to shortly before accepting the sizeable check. As a pattern it is excellent, but unfortunately it’s a pattern for an off-trail, serialized type of article.
In all, it’s a fully authoritative book on this particular subject—a subject with a great many “gonna writers.” And checking at the local base library, I find there are six names on the book’s waiting list.
THE GREAT IRON SHIP, by James Dugan, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1953, 267 pages with 16 pages of illustrations, $3.50.
Reviewed by Howard I. Chapelle
(•Author of The History of the American Sailing Navy and many other scholarly studies in maritime history and naval architecture, Mr. Chapelle is also well known as a yacht designer.)
Due, perhaps, to the perspective created by time, the great sailing ships of the past have received more attention in print than have the great steamers of a more recent age. This is unfortunate, for one of the most remarkable ships ever built was the steamer Great Eastern, constructed on the Thames opposite Greenwich in 1857-8. The Great Iron Ship is an account, in popular style, of the building and career of this noted vessel. Mr. Dugan has succeeded in assembling statistics, technical information, and anecdotes relating to the Great Eastern in a highly readable form.
Fortunately, the author has emphasized certain matters that are not generally known by the public interested in maritime affairs. For one thing, he has pointed out that the Great Eastern was 693 feet long and 120 feet beam; dimensions to be viewed respectfully even today, for they are exceeded by relatively few modern ships. For another, he notes the small power given this huge ship, 11,000 h.p.; a very low figure by modern standards, yet the ship was so well designed that she was able to steam at 15 knots in smooth water and cruised at better than 12 knots. She was peculiar in that she had both side-paddlewheels and a screw propeller; under paddlewheels she could steam 8 knots while under propeller alone she could do 9 knots. She once crossed the Atlantic in 8 days 6 hours; altogether her steaming qualities were amazingly good. The huge ship also had sail power, 58,500 square feet of canvas could be spread on her six masts. With five stacks, and without the high superstructure of the modern liner, the Great Eastern was a most imposing ship—happily this is shown in some of the contemporary photographs selected by the author.
Mr. Dugan’s story of this ship traces the reasons why such a vessel was built and the difficulties of her construction and launching, followed by a thorough description of the operating difficulties that made the career of the Great Eastern notorious in her time. There are also descriptions of the passenger accommodations and of life aboard ship. Indeed, this book would be a useful shipboard reader for the modern ship-passenger, for it would make the reader less likely to complain about the service and accommodations he has.
Another feature of the book is the excellent account of the men involved in the ship’s career; her promotor and designer of the structure, Isambard Kingdom Brunei; her hull-designer, Scott Russell; the Director of the owning company, Daniel Gooch; and her captains, engineers, and managers.
A commercial failure as a passenger and freight ship, the Great Eastern was a success from the engineering point of view and also as a cable ship. The book contains a remarkable story of the cable-laying and also an amusing record of the ship while on the American coast as a “sightseeing spectacle.” The author has made a successful effort to explain the failure of the ship commercially by pointing out many instances of poor management and worse planning by the owners’ representatives—the American adventure being a rather hilarious example. Here were owners with the ship of the age in hand, but without foresight or business acumen to put her to her proper work. It might be said that her great size and capabilities so overpowered the minds of her owners that all they could grasp was the spectacle she created.
The author has been remarkably successful in conveying to the reader the “feel of the times” in his descriptions of life aboard the ship and in the whole book, in fact, this can be felt.
Perhaps too little credit is given to Scott Russell, or at least his part in the design is not made very clear. It was his hull-form that made the steaming qualities of the Great Eastern remarkable. It seems unfortunate that the plans of the ship could not be reproduced for they would have helped some readers to understand the arrangement inboard and many ingenious features of design incorporated could be shown. Though the photographs do much in aiding the reader to visualize the size of the Great Eastern, comparative line drawings of the Great Eastern and of a modern liner in profile and midsection would have been most effective.
The Great Iron Ship is not a technical description of the Great Eastern; rather it is a compact and satisfyingly complete historical record of the great steamer that should please any layman interested in ships.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NAUTICAL
KNOWLEDGE. By W. A. McEwen and
A. H. Lewis. Cambridge, Maryland:
Cornell Maritime Press, 1953. 640 pages.
$12.50.
Reviewed by Captain Donald Mc- Clench, U. S. Naval Reserve
{Captain McClench taught navigation at the Naval Academy and now, as a civilian, is engaged on the staff preparing navigation publications in the U. S. Navy Hydrographic Office.)
The evaluation of an encyclopedia presents unusual difficulties to a reviewer. This is true partly because one misses the usually assayable literary qualities, and partly because its true value is ascertained only by habitual use over a long period. One just does not spend a quiet evening absorbed in an encyclopedia; one uses it as a tool. If it can be depended upon year after year, it is good; if it frequently lets one down, it is disappointing. This one-volume encyclopedia can not only provide most of the answers, but can in addition, richly reward the inquisitive.
The authors have a common bond of interest in the sea and the language of men who have sailed it. Captain William A. McEwen has been a seafarer for nearly fifty years in sail and steam, wood and steel. He co-authored the popular Merchant Marine Officers’ Handbook by the same publishers. Alice H. Lewis, with a nautical background and a keen interest in the sea, denoted part of her leisure to the compilation of a card file containing thousands of nautical terms and phrases, some rare and half-forgotten. Her file, augmented through the wide experience of her co-author grew into the present 600-page, 15,000-item encyclopedia.
This book is not without its faults, but these are buried beneath a wealth of accurate and illuminating lexicography. Theinadvert- ent omission of the rank of lieutenant in the list of commissioned officers, or the failure to include the chain-of-command concept in the definition of a line officer, are insignificant when one comes upon such titillating entries as water monkey and jibber the kibber. The material is well arranged, extensively cross- indexed, conveniently thumb-tabbed, and the judicious use of bold-faced type permits the inclusion of many variations of meaning. Thus, approximately one hundred different usages are listed for the single word “deck”; including the engaging phrase to “lipper off the deck.”
Encyclopedias, like other books, do have their individuality. The savor of this one lies not so much in cold semantics as in the richness of its contents which “awakes old words that long have slept.” It is not limited to the parts of a modern ship; they are here in abundance, but here also are the galleys and the galleons; the fish and the sea birds; the stars and their mythology; the clouds, the winds, the currents, and many of the other things that seamen have always talked about from donkey’s breakfast to admiral’s walk. Here are most of the modern words but here also are the words and phrases of Genoa and Liverpool and New Bedford. This book belongs on a ship with Bowditch and Cugle and Riesenberg. But it is at home also with Conrad and Melville and Dana.
It is a book for writers, model builders, and sailors, be they of the armchair or of the sea.
BREAKTHROUGH ON THE COLOR
FRONT. By Lee Nichols. New York:
Random House, 1954. 235 pages. $3.50.
Reviewed by Cameron Gregory
{Mr. Gregory is assistant City Editor of the Norfolk {Va.) Virginian-Pilot. He is a Lieutenant Commander in the U. S. Naval Reserve and saw active service in World War II and again in 1951-52.)
There is evidence that the integration of the Negro into the United States armed forces was accomplished with less advance publicity than some wartime military operations. In Breakthrough on the Color Front, Mr. Nichols tells the story of how integration occurred, and explains why there was no fanfare accompanying “Operation Hush-
Hush,” as he suggests it might have been called.
Political leaders saw the wisdom of this quiet and, from the military viewpoint, expedient move. One of the most powerful Southern Senators, when asked by Mr. Nichols why he did not publicly fight integration, said: “I could have got up and shouted, and the home folks would have said:
‘Hooray, there’s Senator -- *------ up
there raising hell,’ but it might have only made things more difficult for the military and it wouldn’t have changed anything.”
Mr. Nichols has done considerable research into the battleground performance of the Negro, from the American Revolution through the Korean campaign, and has attempted to evaluate the record under the contrasting lights of segregation and modern integration. He found conflicting opinions as to how well the Negro fought in segregated units; tales of panic and desertion under stress were countered with accounts of individual heroism.
But the facts indicated that, segregated, the Negro generally was far from a brilliant performer, perhaps due in no inconsequential measure to his awareness that he was set apart and to the resulting uncertainty in his own mind as to his ability. Integrated, he vindicated himself for past performances.
It was in the Navy, Mr. Nichols learned, that the course was set toward integration when, on February 27, 1946, the following order went out to all ships and stations:
“Effective immediately, all restrictions governing the types of assignments for which Negro naval personnel are eligible are hereby lifted. Henceforth, they shall be eligible for all types of assignments in all ratings and all ships of the Naval service.”
Mr. Nichols, in his enthusiasm for what he regards as “one of the most significant racial developments in United States history,” has dug deep into the files and record books and traveled to many military bases to gather evidence that integration is an achievement, not mere theory.
He has documented, and admirably so, the slow breakdown of the prejudices against the Negro and the reasons for this racial military revolution. Breakthrough on the Color Front, may serve as a textbook on integration.
DIPLOMACY IN A WHIRLPOOL—HUNGARY BETWEEN NAZI GERMANY
AND SOVIET RUSSIA. By Stephen D.
Kertesz, University of Notre Dame Press,
Notre Dame, Ind., 1953. 288 pages. 84.75.
Reviewed by Professor A. E. Sokol
{Dr. Sokol is Professor of Asiatic and. Slavic Studies and a Research Associate of the Hoover Institute of War Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, California.)
Since time immemorial the plains of Hungary have served as a gateway for the invasion of Western Europe by peoples from the East. Because of this strategic and dangerous location, Hungary always tended to be part of a larger political unit, either as the leader of the numerous nationalities living within the Middle Danubian basin, or as one of the component states of an empire, such as that of the Turks, the Austrian Haps- burgs, or, more recently, of the Nazis and the Soviets.
Depicting the plight of a little country which becomes the victim of conquest by its more powerful neighbors, the playball of international politics, and the object of totalitarian experimentation, this book is a valuable though pathetic document. Pathetic not only because it deals with the sad fate of one of Europe’s most valiant little nations, but also because it reveals the succession of Western mistakes which are to a great degree responsible for that fate. At the same time it is a most instructive case history of Soviet policies toward its weaker neighbors.
Dr. Kertesz, the author, is at present professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, but previously served in the Hungarian Foreign Ministry and was the Secretary-General of the Hungarian peace delegation that went to Paris in 1946, and later Hungarian Minister to Italy. Court- martialled when the Nazis took over the control of his country, he quit its service when it became evident, in 1947, that Hungary would become a Communist satellite.
Presenting the complex material honestly and objectively, his book is well written and can be read with profit even by nonprofessionals. For those specially interested in Soviet politics or in Eastern Europe it is an absolute must.