Book Reviews

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(Editor’s Note: Since December 7, 1941, Americans have been deluged with millions of printed words on the Pearl Harbor attack. Recognizing the need for an im­partial summary of the literature of Pearl Harbor, the Naval Institute asked Dr. Louis Morton, Chief of the Pacific Section of the United States Army’s Office of Military History to prepare this survey. Dr. Morton’s other writings include The Fall of the Philippines, a volume in the U. S. ARMY IN WORLD WAR II Series, and “The Japanese Decision for War” in the December, 1954, Proceedings.)

A study of the policies, decisions, and ac­tions which preceded American par­ticipation in World War II is as im­portant and timely today, with fresh threats of war sounding in the Far East, as it was thirteen years ago when Japanese bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor. Though responsi­bility for that disaster was assigned at the time to the field commanders by administra­tive action and later confirmed by Congres­sional investigation, that judgment was sharply challenged then and has continued to arouse heated controversy, fueled by charges and countercharges of the most seri­ous nature. The latest of these^[1] is made by

Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, USN (Ret.), Commander of the U. S. Pacific Fleet at the time of the attack and the man who, with Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, USA, the Army commander in Hawaii, was held by many to be chiefly re­sponsible for the disaster.

The interest that attaches to Admiral Kimmel’s Story derives largely from the fact that his is the only account to date by a major participant directly involved in the question of responsibility. More than that, it is likely to remain so. General Short is dead, and both General George C. Marshall and Admiral Harold R. Stark—the last of whom, as Chief of Naval Operations, shared re­sponsibility on the Navy side with Kimmel— have indicated their unwillingness to engage in the controversy. For their views, one must search the voluminous files assembled as a result of the various investigations con­ducted during and after the war.

Admiral Kimmel’s case rests upon the allegation that he was deliberately denied in­formation available in Washington. Had he had this information, he says, he would have known the Japanese intended to strike Pearl Harbor and could have adopted measures to meet the attack and minimize the losses. These measures, which he outlines, are of considerable interest, though one wonders to what extent they are guided by hindsight.

To support his case, Admiral Kimmel draws on the evidence presented during the investigations of the Pearl Harbor attack. This evidence, he claims, was not only ob­scured at the time but was evaluated to pro­duce a desired result. Inconsistencies in the testimony were ignored, and important ques­tions raised during the hearings left unan­swered. He charges bias on the part of inves­tigating officers and a deliberate effort to white-wash the administration and block an impartial search for the truth. “The Con­gressional investigation,” Kimmel declares, “was governed by the majority party, the Democrats. The huge volumes of testimony in that inquiry served to confuse the public mind as to the significance of the facts and to smother testimony damaging to the ad­ministration.”

Responsibility for Pearl Harbor, Kimmel charges, rests squarely upon the shoulders of his superiors in Washington and ultimately on the Commander-in-Chief, President Roosevelt. “Until this day,” he writes, “I have kept silence on the subject of Pearl Harbor. . . . Now, however, I deem it my duty to speak out. What took place in Washington must be so clearly placed on the public record that no group of persons in administrative power will ever dare again to invite another Pearl Harbor and place the blame on the officers in the fleet and in the field.”

The charges that Admiral Kimmel makes are not new and were being circulated even before the end of the war. The Japanese attack on December 7 had unified the country and ended temporarily the debate between the “isolationists” and the “inter­ventionists” which had marked the prewar years. All classes and parties closed ranks for the duration of the struggle. But even during the war, there had been a recognition of the political implications involved in the question of responsibility for Pearl Harbor, and the administration had taken steps to preserve the record. Six investigations had been conducted even while the conflict raged, all but one of them by the Army and Navy.

As a result, a large volume of testimony and documents that might otherwise have been lost was assembled.^[2] But the requirements of wartime security and a unified national effort made public debate impossible.

The war over, partisan differences re­appeared, and critics of President Roosevelt began to challenge openly the views so widely held during the war years. The cooling of passions and disillusion with the postwar world raised further questions about Ameri­can participation in the war. Historians and publicists, as they have done after every war, sought to reassess the causes of the war and to place Roosevelt’s policy in the larger perspective of American history. Thus, in the years following the end of the conflict, a new interpretation of the events that had preceded the war and of the conduct of the war itself emerged.

One of the earliest statements of this view, now termed revisionism, was that made by John T. Flynn in 1944, when Roosevelt was campaigning for a fourth term. In a pam­phlet entitled The Truth About Pearl Harbor, Flynn accused the President of deliberately maneuvering the United States into war to insure his reelection and divert attention from the failure of his domestic program. The following year Flynn published another pamphlet, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, revealing the fact that the Japanese diplo­matic code had been broken prior to the Pearl Harbor attack.^[3]

As a result of the evident dissatisfaction with earlier investigations and the rumors of mismanagement and misconduct, the Con­gress in October, 1945, undertook a full in­vestigation of the responsibility for the dis­aster that had taken the nation into war. A Joint Committee with wide discretion and full access to the records was appointed. The questions that this Committee had to deal with were far more complex than the state of Hawaii’s defense on December 7, 1941. They involved the whole problem of Presi­dent Roosevelt’s foreign policy during the years preceding the attack, the military strategy developed to support that policy, and the conduct of public officials, civilian and military, throughout the period. Thus, the investigation of the Joint Committee ranged far and wide and produced early in 1946 so large a collection of documents and testimony that its findings fill forty thick volumes and remain the single most impor­tant published source of information on American policy prior to the war.

Two reports were submitted by the Joint Committee, a majority report signed by the Democratic members and two Republicans, and a minority report signed by the remain­ing Republicans, Senators Ferguson and Brewster. With respect to responsibility, the majority found no evidence that the Presi­dent or his advisers had “tricked, provoked, incited, cajoled, or coerced Japan” into attack. Specifically, they held that the Hawaiian commanders, though not guilty of derelictions of duty, had failed to take appropriate action after being alerted to the danger of attack and, with the War Plans and Intelligence Divisions of the War and Navy Departments, had committed errors of judgment. The President, the majority as­serted, “had made every possible effort, without sacrificing our national honor and endangering our security, to avert war with Japan.” The tragedy of Pearl Harbor re­sulted from the failure of the Army and Navy “to institute measures designed to detect an approaching hostile force, to effect a state of readiness . . . , and to employ every facility at their command in repelling the Japanese.” The minority report disagreed sharply and placed responsibility for the Pearl Harbor disaster on the President, Secretaries Stim- son and Knox, General Marshall, Admiral Stark, and Maj. Gen. Leonard T. Gerow (Chief of War Plans), as well as Admiral Kimmel and General Short.^[4]

The critics of President Roosevelt were not satisfied with the results of the investiga­tion, the most exhaustive in American his­tory. Using the evidence assembled by the Committee as well as the voluminous Ger­man and Japanese records then being col­lected by the War Crimes Commissions, the revisionists undertook to write their own version of events. The first such full-length documented study appeared in 1947 and was the work of George Morgenstern, an edi­torial writer for the Chicago Tribune,^[5] Charging Roosevelt with secretly plotting to maneuver the United States into war, Morgenstern sought to show that the Ameri­can people had been misled and tricked by the late President. Information in Washing­ton gave ample indication of Japanese inten­tions, Morgenstern declared, and the Pearl Harbor disaster need never have happened. The fact that it did was Roosevelt’s fault, said Morgenstern, and on him, not the field commanders, rested the responsibility for that disaster.

Morgenstern’s charges did not go un­answered. The 10,000,000 words assembled by the Joint Committee provided as much information for Roosevelt’s supporters as for his critics. Thus, the same year that saw the publication of Morgenstern’s book also saw a strong defense of the late President by Walter Millis of the New York Herald Tribune. In his book, This Is Pearl!,^[6][7] Millis reviewed the steps leading to the Japanese attack and, like the Joint Committee, placed a large share of the blame on the commanders in Hawaii.

The ablest presentation of the revisionist position was made by Charles A. Beard. An eminent scholar, past president of the Ameri­can Historical Association, and a prolific writer whose works were widely known and respected, Beard could not be as easily brushed aside as Morgenstern and Flynn. None knew better than he the rules of evi­dence; few could exceed his skill in marshal­ing the facts and presenting them in clear, forceful language. With the publication in 1948 of his President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War⁷ revisionsim reached the status of a mature historical interpretation of events that no serious student of prewar policy could ignore.

Beard’s thesis was the by-now-familiar charge that President Roosevelt and his ad­visers had led the country into war while professing a policy of peace and assuring the American people “again and again and again” that their sons would never fight overseas. With a wealth of detail and full documentation Beard built up a powerful case against the President’s foreign policy. The United States, he asserted, had been in no danger of attack from Germany and even less from Japan. But Roosevelt, convinced that the United States must sooner or later, enter the war, had sought first to provoke Germany into attack, and failing in that, had maneuvered Japan into striking the first blow at Pearl Harbor.

Hitler, Beard held, had had no designs against the United States and had wished, as a matter of fact, to remain at peace with this nation. American interests, he argued from hindsight, might have been better served had Nazi Germany been used to check Soviet Russia. Roosevelt, moreover, by aligning himself with Chiang, had linked American fortunes in the Far East to a decadent China. By doing so, Beard charged, Roosevelt had forced Japan into a position from which she could escape only by war.

On the reading of the evidence, Beard con­tended that it was absurd to lay the blame for the disaster at Pearl Harbor on the field commanders. Roosevelt had known the Japanese were going to strike there; in fact, he had maneuvered them into doing so. His failure to inform Kimmel and Short of what had been learned from the Japanese inter­cepts, moreover, was deliberate. Roosevelt,

⁷                     Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale Uni­versity Press, 1948.

therefore, was responsible for the American participation in the war and for the Pearl Harbor attack.

But Roosevelt had his champions, and the voices raised in his defense were many. Per­haps the most eloquent was that of Samuel Eliot Morison,^[8] Harvard professor, historian of naval operations, and President of the American Historial Association in 1950. “If all the books on the war before 1942 but Beard’s should perish from the earth,” wrote Morison, “the curious reader in the far future would have to infer that a dim figure named Hitler was engaged in a limited sort of war to redress the lost balance of Ver­sailles; that Japan was a virtuous nation pur­suing its legitimate interests in Asia; and that neither threatened or even wished to inter­fere with any legitimate American interest.” Not only was this picture false, Morison asserted, but Beard’s book was so full of mistakes, half-truths, innuendos, and mis­conceptions that it would take another volume equally long to correct them.

Yet even the staunch champions of Roose­velt could not deny some of the charges made by Beard. It was undoubtedly true that Hit­ler had had no plans for attacking the United States or that he would have preferred in 1941 to avoid war with America. And no student of the Far East could successfully dispute the assertion that Japan was a far better customer than China and that a strong Japan served to maintain the balance of power in that area. The conclusions Beard drew from these facts, however, could be dis­puted and were.

Beard’s charges gained weight also from Roosevelt’s inconsistencies, his apparent un­willingness to disagree with the conflicting views of many of his advisers, and his lack of candor. The President’s supporters ad­mitted these charges but justified them on the ground of necessity. The American people, they asserted, did not understand the danger they faced. Isolationist sentiment was so strong and the people so short sighted, argued one writer, that Roosevelt had “to deceive them into an awareness of their own long run interests.” The President, wrote Thomas A. Bailey, “was like the physician who must tell the patient lies for the pa­tient’s own good.”^[9]

By 1948, the flow of books and articles on responsibility for the war, stimulated by the growing intensity of the cold war, was steadily increasing. If Roosevelt had per­sonally plunged the nation into the last war, as many thought, was not this fact appli­cable to the present crisis? Had war been necessary in 1941? And might not a different course have avoided war and brought about a better solution of our problems?

In defense of Roosevelt’s policy were the memoirs published in 1948 of two of the chief architects of that policy—Cordell Hull and Henry Stimson.^[10] Both amplified their role in events and gave strong support to the argument that the President had made every effort to avoid war while preparing for a sur­prise attack. Robert E. Sherwood performed the same task for Harry Hopkins in one of the best volumes published during these years and in so doing cast further light on the President’s actions.^[11] Admirals William D. Leahy and Ernest J. King followed with their own memoirs, both useful for an under­standing of the strategy of the war as well as the military preparations that preceded it.^[12] Finally, the President’s own public papers and addresses, with notes and introduction by his friend Judge Rosenman, provided a strong defense for the correctness of the Presi­dent’s policy both before and during the war.^[13]

On the military side, Maj. Gen. Sherman Miles, who in 1941 had been Chief of the Intelligence Division of the War Department General Staff, argued the question of re­sponsibility in an article in The Atlantic Monthly.^[14] Perhaps not unnaturally, he held General Short and Admiral Kimmel account­able for failure to take proper precaution and insisted that they had had adequate warning. Responsibility for the disaster, he held, was theirs alone.

That same year, Morison published the third volume of his history of naval opera­tions, the first in the series dealing with the war against Japan.^[15] In it he reviewed U. S.- Japanese relations prior to the war and the attack itself in an account that remains the best description to date of what happened at Pearl Harbor on December 7. Morison considered also the question of responsibility on the naval side and concluded with Ad­miral King that Stark and Kimmel were the responsible officers and that both, in King’s words, lacked “the superior judgment neces­sary for exercising command commensurate with their rank and assigned duties.”

Comparable to Morison’s study was the analysis of the Army’s responsibility in the Pearl Harbor attack made by Mark S. Watson, a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In a volume written for the Army series on the history of World War II, Watson traced with careful precision and full documentation General Marshall’s activities from 1939 to the outbreak of war.^[16] The disaster, in his view, was the result of a “fateful series of mischances,” rivaling those Victor Hugo re­cited “in the memorable apostrophe of Les Miserables to explain Waterloo.” Among these “mischances,” Watson listed: the fail­ure of Intelligence to read Japan’s intentions right, the failure in Hawaii to grasp “the im­perative character” of the November 27

¹⁴                  Maj. Gen. Sherman Miles, “Pearl Harbor in Retro­spect,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1948.

¹⁶ Samuel Eliot Morison, The Rising Sun in the Pacific, Vol. Ill, HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES NAVAL OPERATIONS IN WORLD WAR II. Bos­ton: Little, Brown and Company, 1948.

¹⁶ Mark S. Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations, UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II. Washington: Chief of Military History, 1950.

war warning, the failure of the Washington planners to realize that General Short had misunderstood the warning, the failure of others to appreciate as Marshall did the sig­nificance of the “1 o’clock message” on De­cember 7, and the failure of Army com­munications at the critical moment. “Had all of these circumstances, many of them wholly adventitious, taken the opposite course,” Watson concluded, “a magnificent defense could have been interposed, suffi­cient to inflict on the raiders a proper penalty.”

Though John T. Flynn argued the case for the revisionists once again in 1948,^[17][18] it was not until 1950 that another full-length study presenting the revisionist point of view was published. The author, William Henry Chamberlin, an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, had a long record as an expert in foreign affairs having served for twelve years as Soviet correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor}* Chamberlin drew on the sources already used by Beard and others to prove that Roosevelt had maneuvered America into war. At every point Chamberlin contrasted the President’s statements with his actions. “Like the Roman god Janus,” he wrote, “Roosevelt in the prewar period had two faces.” This point was emphasized also by Frederick C. San­born, an expert in international law, in his Design for War, published in 1951.^[19] Like Beard and Chamberlin before him, Sanborn subjected every move by the Roosevelt Administration to close scrutiny, emphasiz­ing the gulf between words and deeds.

The next major contribution to the cause of revisionism was made by Charles C. Tansill, professor of diplomatic history at Georgetown University and author of one of the leading revisionist works on World War I. In a study entitled Back Door to War,^[20] published in 1952, Transill examined in­tensively Roosevelt’s foreign policy in the decade preceding the war and provided addi­tional ammunition for the critics of Roose­velt. With other students of the period, in­cluding William L. Neumann,^[21] Tansill emphasized the mistakes of an American Far Eastern policy based on the support of China. The result, he pointed out, was the elimina­tion of Japanese influence on the mainland and the rise of Communist China and Soviet Russia in the Far East. Both Tansill and Neumann, after a study of Roosevelt’s rela­tions with Japan, concluded that the Presi­dent courted war. But a veteran diplomat like George Kennan,^[22][23] who was equally criti­cal of Roosevelt’s Far Eastern policy, main­tained in his American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 that the President had done his best to avoid war with Japan.

The chief polemicist of the revisionist movement after World War II, as he was in the years following World War I, is the historian and sociologist, Harry Elmer Barnes. Though he has made no original contribution himself, Barnes has actively supported the views of Beard, Tansill, Morgenstern, Sanborn, and Chamberlin, while criticizing sharply the supporters of Roosevelt’s foreign policy. In The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout,²² Barnes charged historians, publishers, and public officials with a deliberate effort to prevent the publication of revisionist writing and to discredit and distort its works in order to perpetuate the Roosevelt myth and to sup­port an interventionist foreign policy. Barnes saw in this “blackout” a situation similar to that depicted in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and drew frightening compari­sons between the Nineteen Eighty-Four society and our own.

Among the historians whom Barnes at­tacked most severely was Basil Rauch who,

²¹                  William L. Neumann, “How American Policy Toward Japan Contributed to War in the Pacific,” in Harry Elmer Barnes, editor, Perpetual War for Per­petual Peace. Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1953.

²²                  George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900­1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.

²³                  Harry Elmer Barnes, The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout. 9th edition, revised and enlarged, no date. See also his “Revisionism and the Historical Blackout” in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, op. oil.

in his Roosevelt: From Munich to Pearl Har­bor,^u had undertaken to answer Charles Beard in detail. As a full-scale rebuttal of re­visionism, Rauch’s eloquent defense of the late President came under heavy fire from the revisionists.

Some of his severest criticism Barnes re­served for the so-called “court historians,” i.e., those who are employed by the govern­ment or have been accorded privileged access to the records. Included in this group was Herbert Feis, an economist and former con­sultant for the State Department, who con­centrated his researches in the Japanese records in an effort to evaluate the effect of American action on Japanese policy.^[24][25] The result was, for Feis, an exoneration of Roosevelt. The revisionist view that Roose­velt gave the Japanese no choice but to accept an inferior status in the Far East or else go to war, Feis concluded, was an ab­surdity. The same conclusion had already been reached by another State Department expert, Joseph W. Ballantine, a year before.^[26]

The most exhaustive and scholarly survey , of foreign policy between the years 1937 and 1941 is the work of William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, published in 1952-53.^[27] The former, a professor of history at Harvard and now Chairman of its Committee on Regional Studies, worked during the war and for some time after in Washington. Gleason, also a former teacher of history, is still em­ployed in the government. With full access to State Department files, these two pro­duced an impressive two-volume history of prewar diplomacy and policy marked by ob­jectivity and the most careful examination of all available evidence.

The work of Langer and Gleason gave strong support to the adherents of Roose­velt’s foreign policy. The President, Langer and Gleason found, not only did not seek to draw the nation into war but sought instead by all means at his disposal to avoid full- scale commitment to a war on the European Continent. Both he and Hull recognized the threat presented by Germany and Japan and did what they could to prepare the nation for war while aiding the victims of Axis aggres­sion. It w^ras the isolationists, Langer and Gleason claimed, who hindered the efforts to strengthen the nation’s defenses and build up the armed forces.

The failure of the President and his advisers to anticipate the attack against Pearl Harbor may have been “a classical example of hu­man frailty,” said Langer and Gleason, but it offered no proof of a devious plot. No­where, they said, did they find any evidence in support of the charge that Roosevelt, or any other official in the administration “courted a Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor base in order to enable them to lead the country into the European war by the Pacific back door.”

If Langer and Gleason could find no basis in the evidence to support such a thesis, there were others who did. Within a year after the publication of their second volume, Rear Admiral Robert A. Theobald, USN (Ret.), commander of the destroyers of the Pacific Fleet at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, presented his case for the revisionist view.^[28] Buttressed with naval arguments and bearing the endorsement of Admirals Kim- mel and William F. Halsey, Theobald’s book revived the charge that Roosevelt was re­sponsible for the Pearl Harbor disaster, that he deliberately kept the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor as an open invitation to the Japanese. And to be absolutely certain that the attack achieved the surprise so necessary to his plans, Roosevelt, Theobald asserted, kept from Admiral Kimmel and General Short vital information that would have given ample warning of Japanese intentions. In this plot Marshall and Stark were re­luctant if not willing partners; Kimmel and Short, the scapegoats.

Despite Admiral Theobald’s contention that his was the “final” secret of Pearl Har­bor, Captain Tracy B. Kittredge, USNR

²⁸                  Rear Admiral Robert A. Theobald, USN (Ret.), The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor. New York: Devin- Adair Company, 1954. The title, it is interesting to note, is identical with that used by John T. Flynn in 1945.

(Ret.), undertook to answer his charges with a sober and factual account of the develop­ment of military policy and strategy in the year before the war.^[29] A naval historian in both world wars and a former member of the Historical Section of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Captain Kittredge found, after a con­sideration of all the evidence, that no new facts had come to light since 1946 which would invalidate the conclusion of the Joint Congressional Committee.

Thus the controversy continues, as the publication of Admiral Kimmel’s Story at­tests. The questions raised in attempting to assign responsibility for the tragic disaster at Pearl Harbor are not easily answered. Great events do not have simple explanations and their causes do not lie in the whims of any one man.

BRASSEY’S ANNUAL: THE ARMED FORCES YEAR-BOOK, 1954. Edited by Rear Admiral H. G. Thursfield, New York: The Macmillan Company, 480 pp., 23 photographs and 5 diagrams. $9.50.

Reviewed by Commander Ellery H.

Clark, Jr., U. S. Naval Reserve

[Commander Clark is an Associate Professor and in structor in Naval History, Department of English, His­tory, and Government, U. S. Naval Academy.)

For sixty-five years Brassey’s has presented outstanding articles on naval affairs and progress. As a consequence, the world is in lasting debt to Lord Brassey and his suc­cessors for consistent contributions to mari­time history and philosophy. It seems pecu­liar that the United States does not create a similar publication which would enable their writers to broaden this field.

The Royal Navy continues to concentrate on modernization of anti-submarine and anti­mine forces and completion of their carrier construction program. A generous amount of space in Brassey’s is devoted to the armed forces of the United States and Russia. Commander Courtney’s “The Naval Strength of Russia” concludes with the opinion that the Soviet Navy “in the ortho­dox manner of naval thinking . . . can still be described more as an extension of land and air power over the sea than as a ‘sea- power’ proper.” Russia’s 3,000 naval planes are land-based, since they have no carriers, and problems of geography and climate, as usual, continue to beset them. They are believed to possess about 350 submarines, the majority of which are small, pre-war coastals. The recent impact of combined East German and Russian technology soon is expected to lead to a large fleet, very strong in long-range, high-speed submersibles. In surface vessels, Russia has perhaps ten of the new, powerful Sverdlov heavy cruisers while her latest destroyers reportedly are not as rugged-hulled as those of Britain and the United States, more resembling those of the Italians.

Jules Menken’s “Soviet Policy and War” is another thoughtful essay. He believes at least for the next two years Russia will not consider launching a major war because of consumer goods and agricultural shortages, weakness in bomber strength, and the addi­tional time required to consolidate the hold of their present regime. Looking ahead, he forecasts Communist determination for world domination to last at least twenty years and he recommends for Western survival “Main­tenance of the means for air-atomic reply and for defence on the necessary quantitative scale.”

Associate Editor Brigadier Barclay’s “Les­sons of the Korean Campaign” presents some very interesting, perhaps even contro­versial views. He says American “luxurious standards in the field are a source of envy among their allies, and must often be a source of satisfaction among their enemies.” Discussing the British problem of furnishing clothing and equipment to their forces ashore, he points out that they cannot “af­ford to do as our American friends do on occasions—provide everything than can possibly be required and then, when the time comes, discard what is found to be unneces­sary.” He also mentions the abilities of the Chinese Communists in night fighting tech­niques and holds the conviction that an army can operate efficiently indefinitely without air support.

There are many other fine articles, includ­ing J. M. Spaight’s “Total War,” Comman­der Funge Smith’s “Engineering Factors Affecting Naval Operations,” and Editor Thursfield’s “Types of Warships.” No uni­formed or civilian student of naval, military, and air history can afford to miss this edi­tion of Brassey.

WINDJAMMERS SIGNIFICANT, by J.

Ferrell Colton. J. F. Colton & Co. Flag­staff, Arizona. 280 pp., 188 photos and

19 pages of plans. $10.00.

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.)

Though there has been much written and published on the sailing ship in general, there is remarkably little available on the largest and last of the type—the huge iron and steel sailing carriers of the last quarter of the 19th century.

Windjammers Significant does much to close this gap in maritime knowledge; its objective is to describe the design, construc­tion, rigging, fitting, and operation of some of the last commercial squareriggers. The au­thor is well fitted to undertake this task for he has had extensive experience with two fine examples of the class. Not only is there a clear and detailed description of the ships, there are also fine, detailed photographs in addition to portraits of some of the ships re­ferred to in the text. These are further en­hanced by rather complete plans of one ship, the German-built Hans, later known as the Mary Dollar, the Tango and finally as the six-masted schooner Cidade do Porto. Addi­tional plans of a sister ship, the Kurt, are used as references. This combination of detailed photos and plans, combined with text, will make this book most useful to ship modellers interested in the big sailing carriers.

The student of maritime affairs will find much to interest him in this book. For one

thing, there is a strong opinion expressed as to the possible usefulness of the sailing ship in some trades in the present time. For an­other, there is a clear account of the actual difficulties encountered in recent operation of large sailing square-riggers. It must be said that the latter seems to contradict Mr. Colton’s opinions on the probable usefulness of sailing ships today—at any rate it is apparent that large commercial sailing craft cannot be used now or in the future unless there is a training program for crews and officers. Nor can there be, unless—as Mr. Colton so wisely remarks—the accumulated knowledge of sailing ship design is somehow retained. Certainly this book will enable some important parts of sailing ship design, con­struction, and operation, so far as large bulk carriers are concerned, to be recorded and so preserved, against the time when, as the author hopes—“someday, an ingenious naval architect and a far-sighted shipbuilder will get together with a smart business man to produce some form of ocean-going wind- propelled vessel capable of lading large cargoes swiftly and economically.”

The chapters on design and construction are particularly useful, and there is much in these chapters and in others that not only deals with their particular subject but, also sheds light on the basic economics of sailing craft operation. It is regrettable that the reproduction of the plans does not equal, in clarity, that of the photographs. The chap­ter on masting and rigging suffers somewhat from lack of illustration, and it is unfortu­nate that Mr. Colton did not have the fine German reference—Bemaslung und Takelung der Scliifife by F. L. Middendorf from which illustrations might have been extracted.

Mr. Colton has added a valuable record to the slowly growing literature on the prac­tical aspects of the sailing ship, as apart from the romantic “flowing sheet” approach to the subject. And, in addition, he makes some suggestions that practical men might, at least, consider.