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Sicily-Salerno-Anzio, January 1943-June 1944. Volume IX of History or United States Naval Operations in World War II. By Samuel Eliot Morison. Little, Brown and Company, Boston 1954. 413 pages $6.00.
Reviewed by Rear Admiral Charles Wellborn, Jr., U. S. Navy
(Admiral Wellborn was in command of Desron 8 during the invasion of Sicily and is now Commander, U. S. Second Fleet.)
Shortly after the United States’ entry into World War II Samuel Eliot Morison, then Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard, author of several maritime histories and an experienced blue water yachtsman, went to President Roosevelt with a proposal that the history of the war at sea should be written contemporaneously while events remained fresh in the minds of those who participated in them. The President and Secretary of the Navy Knox aPproved, and Professor Morison was commissioned in the Naval Reserve to write such a history. This project developed into a Planned 14-volume History of U. S. Naval Operations in World War II, of which this volume forms a part.
The author served on active duty in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific and was present at many of the most important naval engagements of the war. In addition to the personal knowledge he thus acquired of many of the operations he describes, Admiral Morison has had access to practically all official records, both friendly and enemy, and has interviewed or corresponded with most of the commanders about whom he writes. His history is written with not only a complete knowledge of what happened but also a thorough understanding of why it happened as it did.
Sicily-Salerno-Anzio is the ninth volume of the history. It picks up the story of the war in North Africa and carries it through the fight for Sicily and Italy from January, 1943 to June, 1944. It covers the background of the political strategy as well as that of the military decisions. It describes in considerable detail the planning and execution of the actual operations. The author’s sketches, photographs, and maps combined with clear description make even the most complicated operations easy to understand. The author also manages to make the story live and to give the readers some of the atmosphere in which the war was fought by telling something of the personal exploits of the people who fought it. Admiral Morison knows and accurately speaks the language of the sea, and he uses this knowledge to give his history zest and saltiness without rendering it incomprehensible to the landlubber.
Since the three campaigns described in this volume were all both joint (Army and Navy) and combined (U. S. and British), it of necessity takes note of U. S. Army activities on the ground and in the air as well as those of Britain’s Navy, Army, and Air Force. The operations of all of the services of both nations are so closely interrelated that the story of one without the other would be meaningless. The three campaigns were all primarily ground operations. The Navy’s part in them was to put the Army ashore where, when and how it wanted, and then support it. Repeatedly, the story is told of an amphibious assault landing followed by a period in which naval gunfire renders vital support to the troops ashore as long as they remain within range of the Navy’s guns. It is a story of almost uniformly excellent cooperation between the Army and the Navy, with an ever-increasing appreciation on the part of the ground forces of what naval gunfire can do for them.
There were no U. S. Navy aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean and no U. S. naval air arm other than the light cruisers’ embarked seaplanes. The British naval air effort was relatively small. The U. S. Navy, therefore, had to depend principally upon the U. S. Army Air Force for its air support. Throughout the three campaigns, the U. S. Army Air Force and the Royal Air Force were preoccupied with achieving and maintaining air superiority and with “strategic bombing,” and little effort was expended on close tactical support of naval and ground operations. The U. S. Army Air Force’s cooperation with the other services was poor, at first; later it improved but never reached the level of that between the Armies and the Navies.
Admiral Morison is critical of much of the political maneuvering that led to the decisions to conduct the Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio operations. He considers that the plan for the capture of Sicily was wrong and that the same erroneous reasoning that produced the wrong plan permitted the successful evacuation of Axis forces from Sicily. He believes that Rome could have been taken at the time of the Salerno landings, with great advantage to the Allies, had a bold decision been made to risk an air borne landing at Rome simultaneously with the Salerno landings. He considers that the Anzio landing was an “incorrect strategic move.” He confesses, however, that, “Writers on military subjects are in danger of contracting the occupational disease of omniscience.” He finally concludes that all three of the campaigns covered by this volume contributed materially to the defeat of Germany. He considers the Sicily and Salerno operations definitely worth their cost. While he sees Anzio as of more doubtful value, he considers it memorable as a symbol of heroic tenacity.
Editor’s Note: Recognizing the international scope and significance of Admiral Morison’s Sicily-Salerno- Anzio, the Naval Institute’s editorial staff believed it worthwhile to ask the outstanding British and German naval historians for their views on this volume.
Captain S. R. Roskill, R.N., whose views are presented first, is the author of The War at Sea, the official history of Britain’s Royal Navy during World War II. Volume I of The War at Sea was published in the Spring of 1954; Volume II will be published in the near future; and Volume III is in preparation.
A British Naval Historian’s Comments on Morison’s Sicily-Salerno-Anzio:
The appearance of a new volume of Professor Morison’s great history is an important and welcome event in Britain, more particularly when it deals with operations in which the British Armed Services played a big part. It is understandable that the author should not always be sympathetic towards our strategic oudook and purposes where they differed from those of his own countrymen; but his comments are generally fair as well as shrewd. In his appreciation of the Royal Navy’s fighting traditions his generosity is conspicuous. It will warm British readers’ hearts to find Lord Cunningham described as “the beloved A.B.C.,” and please them to see Emerson’s words about “the British pulse” quoted; they will also be glad to read the author’s categorical assertion that we were right to resist American pressure to undertake the cross-channel invasion in 1942"or ’43. As to Mr. Churchill’s desire to attack “the soft under-belly” of Europe, it may be that Professor Morison takes rather too little account of the Prime Minister’s vivid imagery when he suggests that the difficulties inherent in the long flog up mountainous Italy were underrated. There can be little doubt that when the Prime Minister first used that expression he was comparing the European land mass to an animal like a rhinoceros with its head in Spain, its feet in Italy and Greece, and having a very well-armoured back running along the Channel and North Sea coasts. He wished to attack the beast where it was least well protected, and a strategist with lesser literary gifts would probably merely have described the
direction of his choice as “the southern flank.”
Professor Morison’s repeated castigation of the way in which U. S. and British air forces tried to fight their own war in their own way, without much regard to the immediate needs of the combined operations of which they formed a part, contain a pregnant warning. He might have remarked how often such tendencies appeared in other theatres, from Marshal Goring at Dunkirk and in the 1940 blitz on Britian to Admiral Yamamoto’s “I” operation of April-May 1943, in the Solomons. The results achieved were uniformly unsuccessful. In this connection the historian’s well deserved tribute (pages 22-23) to Air Marshal Lloyd’s African Coastal Air Command is all the more remarkable.
In his comments on the use of naval guns against shore targets I wondered whether there was not some confusion between two different purposes. We British have repeatedly tried and often failed to knock out well-sited coast defences from the sea (the attack on Dakar in September, 1940, was an excellent example); but in our services the value of heavy naval gun support on the seaward flank of a mobile army has never been disputed. In the North Sea and English channel in 1940 and from the very start of the campaign in Africa our ships were repeatedly employed in such manner; and it was our experience of its beneficial effects in both wars which led us to build ships such as the 15-inch monitors, whose work Professor Morison praises. It astonished me to read how reluctant the United States Army was to accept such lessons from the recent as well as the more distant past. At Salerno it was unquestionably the gunfire of the ships, “incessant in effect,” which saved the day.
This writer would not dispute the validity of . Professor Morison’s criticism of the 8th Army’s strategy before Catania. Its total failure to make use of our command of the sea is also likely to be a matter which will puzzle posterity. But the question of the enemy’s successful evacuation across the Straits of Messina demands very careful examination. It is surely impossible to accept that the same commander who a few months earlier, at the time of the enemy’s encirclement in Tunisia, had signalled to all his forces “Sink, burn, destroy. Let nothing pass,” should that time not have attempted all that was possible with the forces at his disposal. In truth the crossing was little more difficult than that of a river, both of whose banks were strongly held by the retreating Army. Incidentally, it passed through my mind that I do not think Professor Morison aimed any rebuke (page 209) at those who allowed the Guadalcanal garrison to escape intact by night, in spite of Allied maritime superiority!
As to the invasion of Sicily f found myself wondering why it had been found necessary to deal with the land operations so fully. In consequence of this the story of the maritime side of husky does not flow as smoothly as those of avalanche and SHINGLE. The account of Anzio seemed to me the best and most convincing part of the book, told with all of Morison’s splendid rhetoric and his gift for bringing out the dramatic and human sides of a bitter conflict.
In his account of Salerno the vital matter of the proposal to withdraw VI Corps from the right and throw it in on the left is dealt with cursorily. The reader is not informed why the command of that corps was changed during the operation, where the proposal to switch it originated nor how and by whom it was killed. The impression is given that General Mark Clark was somewhat of a pessimist, and that determination was lacking somewhere on shore. That the proposal to shift the corps was fantastically impossible, and that it was the senior British officers on the spot who first realised it might have been made clearer. At Anzio General Clark’s pessimism appeared again and may have influenced General Lucas. But it seems undeniable that a fleeting opportunity for great deeds did occur, and that a forceful commander would have seized it with both hands. It is this fact which weakens the historian’s moderate, but none the less definite condemnation of the whole undertaking.
As a general criticism of the book I feel that space might have been found to describe more fully the manner in which the forces were built up and trained. It was a prodigious effort to get the Eastern Assault Force for husky and most of its supplies out to Egypt via the Cape of Good Hope; yet it receives the barest of mentions. Equally the steady progress of the convoys to Gibraltar and thence east to the assembly ports, and the great maritime effort involved in ensuring their safety, hardly appear in the narrative at all. The lay reader 'might thus be led to believe that combined operations like husky could be mounted without that all-embracing control of the seas which the British and American navies exerted, and on which in fact all else depended.
As to the details of the work of the British Maritime forces which took part in all these operations there may be a few minor inaccuracies, but there are remarkably few important omissions. If it is true that this volume does not produce on the reader quite the same gripping absorption as do the best of Professor Morison’s accounts of Pacific fights, it is none the less a most valuable contribution to British as well as American students of the war in the European theatre.
Editor’s Note: Vice Admiral Friedrich Ruge, has been a frequent contributor to the Proceedings and is the author of Enlscheidung irn Pazijik and Der Seekrieg, 1939-1945. From March until August, 1943, Admiral Ruge was high in the German Naval Command in Italy.
A German Naval Historian’s Comments on Morison’s Sicily-Salerno-Anzio:
Very appropriately S. E. Morison starts his new volume with a quotation from Thucydides giving in a nutshell the problems of the Athenian landing on Sicily (and of any amphibian operation). By linking his well-written narrative in several contexts with the past, Morison enhances its depth and value. Moreover, he adds color to his tale by giving minor scenes and details of human interest, some tragic, others funny, all illuminating the situation. A wealth of sources was at his disposal (causing slight envy to one who has to do his writing with the publications available in Germany). The result is a most readable and yet historically sound book, highly interesting to the other side, too. “Major William Martin”—the man who never was—reminded me of those heated telephone talks with Supreme Naval HQ at Berlin to have the sudden transfer of my motor minesweepers to Greece postponed only for a few days until they had finished laying minefields off likely landing beaches. He had no success—Licata and Gela bights remained unmined. The ports of Syracuse and Augusta come back to memory; Palermo smashed by air attacks; an ancient coastal battery defending Messina straits; feeble field fortifications along the east coast, conferences with many words and negligible results; Italian and German sailors doing their best under difficult circumstances; Italian friends torn between conflicting duties and loyalties; the depressing feeling of disaster, defeat, and doom; etc., etc.
Though this is an American history, conditions of command and organisation, logistic efforts, particulars of operations (small-scale though they mostly were) on the Italian-German side perhaps might have been mentioned in slightly greater detail. Greater detail might also have been given to the preparations for eiche (operation to liberate Mussolini) which first devolved on German Naval Command when the Duce was held prisoner on the island of Ventotene west of Naples. It took some hard thinking to invent not-too-im- plausible excuses for having three ex-French torpedoboats, the only larger fast craft available, embarking a company of paratroopers and sailing up and down the coast never exceeding a certain distance from Ventotene. The attempts to send supplies to Sicily, the mines laid off the German- held coasts, and the figures of material sent to the front by sea might also have been of interest. Incidentally, the translation “perambulators” for “Marine-Fahrprahme” is novel and ingenious, but a bit off the mark. The boys on the F-lighters would probably have objected; “Navy ferry lighters” is about right.
A few slips are inevitable in any book, however, and they cannot detract from the excellence of Morison’s work. Moreover, in my own case it would be only fair to refrain from negative comment for—as captatio benevolentiae?—Morison has kindly seen fit to ennoble this writer who nevertheless will forego the pleasure of using the von conferred upon him and simply sign as
F. Ruge
A MILITARY HISTORY OF THE WESTERN WORLD: FROM THE DEFEAT OF THE SPANISH ARMADA, 1588 TO THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO, 1815. By Major-General J. F. C. Fuller. New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company. 1955. Pp. x, 561. $6.00.
Reviewed by Dr. Kent Roberts Greenfield
{Dr. Greenfield is C'lief Historian, Office of Military History, Department of t'le Army, and as such has been the General Editor of the excellent U. S. Army in World War II Series.)
This is the second volume[1] of the author’s expansion of his Decisive Battles (1940) into a three-volume work. The pattern of both works is the same: battle pieces alternate with “Chronicles” (in Decisive Battles called “Synopses”), which provide a connective tissue of general history. Into his history of the period from 1588 to 1815 traversed by the present volume General Fuller has introduced six new battle studies: the defeat of the Spanish Armada; Poltava; the Battle of the Chesapeake and the Siege of Yorktown; Valmy; Trafalgar; and Waterloo. The battle narratives retained from his earlier work are the part that has been changed the least in this one.
The present volume like its predecessor exerts two kinds of fascination. One proceeds from the author’s sense of history; the other from the penetration, knowledge and skill with which he analyzes the art of war and the great practitioners of that art on the stage of history. For General Fuller it is the art of arts and a noble one, notwithstanding its tragic accompaniments, which he fully recognizes, and into his present work he has distilled his lifelong concentration of thought on the subject, checked against his own experience of war. Here he cannot be matched among living writers. In his Trafalgar and Waterloo in this volume his mastery of military exposition is at its height. He has brought to bear on these battles not only his knowledge, imagination, and insight, but a literary strategy and tactics comparable with the generalship of the great captains whose exercise of command he analyzes and describes.
The other unique quality of this culminating work of General Fuller’s career is derived from his sense of history. He has made an ambitious and earnest effort to relate the history of warfare in the West to the history of Western civilization. This effort opens up wide perspectives and gives an air of momentousness and grandeur to his narrative that heightens its interest for the thoughtful reader. This is the kind of setting in which the history of warfare needs to be seen. But in this larger realm although the author has brooded intently on the fate of man he cannot inspire the same confidence as when he deals with the art of warfare. In both cases his mind has sought out general principles, and in neither is he doctrinaire. He has too large a mind and imagination for that. He is less dogmatic in his interpretation of history in the light of general principles than he was in his earlier shorter work. He has suppressed many generalizations that merely glittered, and the “Chronicles,” once he has left the ancient world in Volume I, tend to become merely chronicles, often thin, which are valuable to the reader chiefly to remind him of the course of events. But the large generalizations that give his work the atmosphere of world drama are still present.
With the basic one that frames this volume historians will hardly quarrel. It is that the great battles of the period were events in the conflict between the rising economic imperialism of England and the interests and passions of the rest of Europe. But. behind this looms the author’s detestation of the power of “Mammon.” In his first volume he identified this with the Reformation. In this one he directs his spleen against the ruthlessness and greed of finance capitalism. But his attacks on it as an evil are confused and tempered by his pride in being English, which comes out even more strongly in this volume than in the first.
In short, the battle pieces in General Fuller’s great work can be read with confidence by those who need to know, and also with a delight in fine historical exposition for its own sake. His readers can be far less sure that he has found for them the true bearing of these battles on the history of the Western world, because they will often feel that his positive interpretations of that history are subjective. But in that wide realm what historian’s interpretations are not?—and no reader of military history can fail to have his sights lifted and his imagination stimulated by this book.
THE GOOD SHEPHERD. By C. S.
Forester. Little, Brown and Co., Boston,
1955. 310 pages. $3.95. Michael Joseph
Publishers, London. 12/6
Reviewed by Lady Stella M. Bishop
{During World War II Lady Bishop was particularly active in organizing ships’ libraries for the Royal Navy. She is the wife of Rear Admiral W. A. Bishop, R.N., Head of the Royal Navy’s Education Department.)
There will be little cavilling at the statement that C. S. Forester’s The Good Shepherd, a sea-story of the last war, is the finest sea-story he has yet written; nor at its choice as Book of the Month. Many of us go so far as to claim it his best book of any background; and it should (and probably will) deservedly live on well beyond our own times, in its own right an account of an Allied Convoy in the Battle of the Atlantic that is vividly authentic in setting and faultlessly laid out. “The incidents described in this book never took place,” states Mr. Forester emphatically. But, in fact, each incident separately or together might well have done so that those whose war years were from the early days spent on convoy duties read this imaginary description spell-bound—transported back to the suspense, the terrible responsibilities, the well-nigh unbearable discomforts, the inner fears and dread, the comradeship, the sense of unity within each ship that were the daily lot of all those destined to command or be connected in greater or lesser degree with this shepherding across the dangerous oceans of the vulnerable merchantmen whose cargoes of men or freight were the blood, bones, and sinews of our war effort.
This is a long novel to encompass only forty-eight hours, during which we live and see through the brain, heart, and eyes of the Escort Commander, Commander George Krause, U. S. Navy, Captain of the destroyer U.S.S. Keeling. Mr. Forester’s extraordinary perception and exceptional capacity for getting outside himself and into the skin of a main character are here exemplified to a masterly degree. And to anyone of American-British parentage like the writer, the author’s uncanny ability to present with complete reality this American naval officer’s endeavors to understand and successfully interpret the mental makeup of the British naval officers he must work with (unseen, heard only through the medium of signals) are one of the most facinating facets and tours de force of the book. It is salutary and unusual for the British to see themselves from another country’s focus,
but Mr. Forester’s insight is remarkably sound and always kindly to both sides.
Commander Krause is the son of a Lutheran minister, devoutly and rigidly brought up, physically and mentally well- disciplined, thirteen of his twenty years at sea spent in destroyers. He is thus well equipped for the task ahead of him, but is nevertheless prey to many inner doubts of his ability to make the right decisions, and given to introspection both as to the effect on his career and to the outside judgment there will be on his actions and himself should a decision turn out to be the wrong one. He does not realize that his quickness of mind and eye are instinctively those of a born leader when put to the test.
The hunt for U-boats and the guessing- game of their tactics, the depth-charge attacks, the hounding by U-boats, the terrible sinkings, the difficult rescues, the horror of collision, the tyranny over all of the implacable Atlantic form a thrilling novel that one cannot put down. This is a book to buy and keep as a magnificent example of the art of combined character- portrayal and enthralling narrative, its simplicity of style the hall-mark of a finished craftsman.
Editor’s Note on The Good Shepherd.
To men who follow the sea a new novel by C. S. Forester is always of interest. One cannot be dedicated to the naval profession and fail to admire in the Horn- blower series literature instructive in leadership as well as fascinating nautical lore to the mariner. Now the dean of sailing navy authors as well as novelist of the modern Royal Navy has launched a novel which centers about a U. S. naval officer and a U. S. destroyer.
_ ^ he officers and men of our navy will admire in reading The Good Shepherd the accuracy of Mr. Forester’s presentation of a “gold plater” making an Atlantic convoy crossing shortly after the entry of the United States into the war. They will admire as well the accurate manner in which Mr. Forester employs Naval Academy class, rank, experience (and inexperience) to accurately portray the personnel of a typical vessel of this period. After querying Mr. Forester, this editor learned that some inaccuracies of armament and equipment were even made intentionally in order that their nomenclature would reflect anti-aircraft weapons and sonar equipment familiar to the many men who served in our Navy in 1943-44 rather than the relatively smaller number afloat in early 1942.
Nowhere has the responsibility and the loneliness of command been better portrayed than through the inward doubts and indecision of Commander George Krause, USN. To his officers and men these are hidden,
but the reader finds himself one with this destroyer captain. Here is a novel of the North Atlantic and the U-boat, of convoys and wolf packs, of cold and fear— a novel that arouses vivid recollections to all who served in Support Force and later in the Atlantic convoy and hunter-killer forces in the Battle of the Atlantic.
AWAY ALL BOATS. Kenneth Dodson,
Little, Brown and Company, Boston,
1954, $3.95.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Commander William B. Hayler, U. S. Navy
{A frequent contributor to the Proceedings, Lieutenant Commander Hayler is currently attached to the Staff of the Commander in Chief, U. S. Pacific Fleet.)
Away All Boats is a story about the APA U.s.s. Belinda, between the time she was commissioned in 1943 and the Okinawa operation in 1945. This book is assured of becoming a classic of World War II naval fiction.
The book starts well. In early 1943, the principal character, MacDougall, then master of a merchant ship, saw the Belinda being built in Oakland. He was told by an old workman who had just lost his grandson at Guadalcanal that she would be a good ship and a lucky ship. The old man’s love of the ship was transferred to MacDougall who, after another voyage in his own ship, found himself on active duty in the Navy, and fortuitously enough, with orders to the Belinda.
Dodson unfolds his story skillfully. The Belinda progresses through shakedown training at Pearl Harbor and then joins the fleet pushing its way across the Central Pacific. Troops are put ashore at Makin, Kwajalein, Saipan, the Philippines, and finally at Okinawa. During this time the shoe clerks, the farm hands, and college boys become sailormen. The ship becomes a veteran, and acquires a personality as all good ships do.
The characters are realistic. All of us have met them, or parts of them, at some stage during our naval careers. MacDougall is a competent merchant mariner who goes aboard as boat group commander, and later becomes navigator and then exec. Quigley, the Exec, is one who comes from obscurity, gets by on the ability of others and his own good fortune, and passes on none the worse for the wear. The Belinda has two skippers who have different ways of doing their job, and to some extent, becomes accustomed to them both. There is even the everpresent, insufferable ensign. The officers and men are not Hollywood types, and they are not freaks. Rather, they are normal men living on a ship during a war.
This review would not be complete without making the inevitable comparison with The Caine Mutiny. In Away All Boats, the Belinda and her ship’s company are more important as a Navy unit than is true of the Caine and her officers where the individuality of the characters is stressed. There is far more similarity to Monserrat’s The Cruel Sea than there is to Wouk’s Caine Mutiny. Away All Boats will be the subject of much comment but not controversy. It should make a bang-up movie.
Away All Boats is absorbing reading. The layman will learn much about the Navy, and the naval officer who has not had amphibious experience will get an appreciation of what happens at the line of departure and at the beachhead far more quickly than he will from a tactical publication. He may even believe when he reaches the last page that orders to the amphibious force are not necessarily orders to Siberia.
The Amphibious Force is a relatively new part of our Navy, born early in World War II. Mistakes were inevitable. The slow LST’s and APA’s have never been glamorous, and their acceptance by the Navy at large has been slow. But their importance has grown, and now much of the Navy exists for the purpose of supporting them in their mission of landing troops and equipment. In one very readable package, Away All Boats presents the Amphibious Force to the Amphibians themselves, to the Navy at large, and to the tax-paying public.
★