In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors
Doug Stanton. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2001. 333 pp. Photos. Bib. Index. $25.00 ($22.50).
Abandon Ship: The Saga of the USS Indianapolis, the Navy's Greatest Sea Disaster
Richard F. Newcomb, with introduction and afterword by Peter Mass. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. 326 pp. Index. $25.00 ($22.50).
The Tragic Fate of the USS Indianapolis: The Navy's Worst Disaster at Sea
Raymond F. Lech. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001. 309 pp. Bib. Appendices. Index. $18.95 ($17.05); paper.
Reviewed by Captain Larry Seaquist, US. Navy (Retired)
Nearly six decades after its most egregious sea disaster, which claimed the lives of hundreds and the reputations of a commanding officer and crew, the U.S. Navy in late April 2001 decided to award the Navy Unit Commendation Medal to the crew of the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) and modify the record of her court-martialed skipper, Captain Charles Butler McVay. The Navy's move comes at a time of heightened awareness of the World War II tragedy, and a number of books are available that detail the story.
In Harm's Way author Doug Stanton reports on his enchantment with the stories of the legendary survivors of the Indianapolis sinking. Assigned to write about the 1999 reunion in Indianapolis of the ever-dwindling ranks of men who survived the cruiser's loss in the last days of the Pacific War, the author became committed to telling the stories he heard from these heroes, men whose saga was a dramatic and deadly coda to history's bloodiest war.
This is the season for Indianapolis books. World War II naval correspondent Richard Newcomb published Abandon Ship in 1958. Now republished with an introduction and afterword by prize-winning war correspondent Peter Mass, the book, like the others, tells the ship's now-famous tale: under repair in San Francisco for battle damage, the ship pulled out of the shipyard early, loaded a mysterious cargo, raced at high speed across the Pacific to deliver atomic bomb components, then went down, torpedoed on 30 July 1945 on a routine transit through the war's backwaters.
Military historian Raymond Lech also tells the story. Now reprinted and retitled The Tragic Fate of the USS Indianapolis, Lech's book originally was published in 1982 as All the Drowned Sailors, an apt title for what happened next. Mortally damaged, the ship went down in minutes, taking about 400 of the suddenly waked crew with her. The remaining 800 or so, including Captain McVay, found themselves scattered in the water with astonishingly little survival gear or training.
There was no Navy reaction. The ship's distress signals elicited nothing, nor did the big ship's failure to show up in the Philippines as scheduled. For nearly five tortured days, wounds, lack of water, packs of sharks, and mental stress ate away at the floating clusters of helpless sailors. When finally rescued, only 317 stepped ashore into a controversy that remains able to generate books to this day.
Rescued just as the atom bomb they had carried helped to end the war, their story was withheld. The Navy buried the sailors' ordeal and the huge death toll among VJ Day news and the general euphoria at war's end. Admiral Chester Nimitz ordered a court of inquiry, but his subsequent recommendation against court-martial was reversed by Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King, and Captain McVay was hustled through a judicial proceeding in Washington. The survivors are among those still angry about an action all of these authors describe as tainted by a chain of command determined to place blame on the captain and avoid questions about why 500 men perished amid schools of sharks, left to die by an inert command network.
Which book to choose? Sadly, the new entry, In Harm's Way, spoils the captivating firsthand accounts by several survivors with so many errors and narrative quirks that only readers never near a ship will be able to focus their anger on the tragedy rather than on the author.
Newcomb's book seems the most comprehensive and well told, and Peter Maas's recent commentary makes it worth adding to the bookshelf. Lech is the author for those who enjoy plowing through the details of investigation reports. He gained access to the previously embargoed proceedings of the original court of inquiry. Stanton benefits from recently declassified files on Ultra, the codebreaking system that had alerted Pacific commands to the presence of the Japanese sub along the Indianapolis's transit route—information never passed to the ship.
Whichever book one chooses, dive into a remarkable story of admirable heroism and endurance by sailors and disappointing lapses by the Navy at the very moment both triumphed in a titanic naval war.
At War at Sea: Sailors and Naval Warfare in the Twentieth Century
Ronald H. Spector. New York: Viking, 2001. 447 pp. Illus. Notes. Bib. Index. $29.95 ($26.95).
Reviewed by Ken Hagan
Ronald Spector has broken new thematic ground in this study of 20th-century naval combat and technological change. The book's concluding sentence recapitulates the opening passages and the intervening analysis: "At the end of the twentieth century, as at the beginning, not technology but human interaction with technology had proved the critical element in naval warfare." To document this provocative assertion, Dr. Spector establishes an organizational rhythm in which he first describes a particular war and its prominent technological features and then traces the postwar advances in naval technology spawned by the conflict. The interplay between human beings in the naval services, he says, is central to wars and to their technological by-products. In this manner, Dr. Spector moves from the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) through the two world wars and the Cold War to Desert Storm.
Navies appear as institutions whose internal structures consist of diametrically opposed forces. They are stoutly conservative and rigidly hierarchical bodies devoted to perpetuating the centuries-old social stratification between ranks and between officers and enlisted sailors. The armed sea services resolutely preserve the dominating weapon systems of any particular era: battleships in the first half of the century; aircraft carriers in the second 50 years. Yet, according to Dr. Spector, these institutional monoliths somehow generate the technological revolutions that lead to fundamentally new weapon systems: the ship-launched aircraft in the age of the dreadnought; and the ballistic missile submarine during the dominance of the aircraft carrier.
The innovations usually emanate from within the navies rather than from outside. In the case of British advances in fire control for long-range gunnery during the Edwardian era, "most of the actual concepts and techniques were developed by individuals within the navy." As for carrier aviation, "all the significant developments from dive-bombing to the 'Thach weave' [of fighter tactics] to the fast carrier task force were developed within the navy."
Fair enough, but puzzling. Dr. Spector really does not attempt to explain how so rigid a body as a navy can safely nurture individuals who advance technological revolution without risking a fundamental structural realignment of the service itself. Nor does he attempt to evaluate the implications of technological creativity for later success in senior operational commands. Admirals John Jellicoe and Chester Nimitz are illustrative. An avant-garde sponsor of new systems of naval gunfire control, Admiral Jellicoe's tactical conservatism at the Battle of Jutland forever tarnished his reputation among the more aggressive flag officers such as Admiral David Beatty. Nimitz, as a relatively junior officer, was instrumental in introducing the submarine into the Pacific Fleet, but as Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, in 1942 he largely ignored the crippling defectiveness of the detonators on the Navy's torpedoes. It took an airplane crash leading to the appointment of Charles Lockwood as Commander Submarine Force, Pacific, before the Navy developed and deployed a torpedo that actually would explode when it struck a target.
More puzzling is the book's refusal to treat in any detail or depth the politico-industrial component of naval innovation. Every technological revolution benefited certain industries and political blocs, and they aggressively stimulated advances in ordnance, battleships, carrier aviation, and nuclear-powered submarines. The determinative effect of the advocacy or opposition of influential congressmen and senators, as well as of corporations such as Grumman, Boeing, and General Dynamics, must be assessed before the contention that innovation came primarily from within navies can be accepted as definitive.
Imperfections aside, At War at Sea is a compelling synthesis of the naval warfare of the major powers of the 20th century. It is especially refreshing because it ventures behind the favored and overworked Clausewitzian topics of naval policy, naval strategy, and great leaders to portray the nuts and bolts of naval weapons and the human beings who forged them. Elting E. Morison, who masterfully studied naval men and machinery two generations ago, would say to Dr. Spector, "Bravo Zulu!"
Technological Change and the United States Navy, 1865-1945
William M. McBride. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 333 pp. Photos. Notes. Bib. Index. $42.50 ($40.38).
Reviewed by Michael A. Palmer
Despite the title, William M. McBride's Technological Change and the United States Navy is not a history of how the Navy has changed, technologically, since 1865. One will find in the pages of McBride's work no discussion (and in some case not even a mention) of myriad technological developments that have shaped and reshaped the service. Do not expect to read explanations of how fire-control systems developed or of how communications technologies redefined methods of command and control.
This is a history of how and why the Navy's primary technological and strategic paradigms changed from the end of the Civil War to the end of World War II. One could say this is yet another book about the rise and fall of the battleship as the centerpiece of naval power. But what sets the author's subtle work apart from earlier histories is his purpose. He sets out neither to defame nor defend naval leaders. Do not expect to find even the most obvious troglodyte of an admiral belittled in this text. Dr. McBride's object is circumscribed: "to understand the dynamics through which social groups, in this case the American naval profession, have addressed technological change."
In his introduction, the author identifies two frameworks for technological analysis. The first he labels "technological determinism"—the view that technological developments inexorably drive the adoption of new military technologies. The second and competing framework he terms "social constructivism." This involves the interplay of varied groups within the naval service who react in different ways to the advent of technological challenges.
Using these two constructs, Dr. McBride sets out to track changes within the U.S. Navy's central strategic and technological paradigms in the decades after 1865. During the Civil War the U.S. Navy had embraced several new technologies, steam propulsion and iron construction for example. Nevertheless, after the war the Navy seemingly regressed as it clung tenaciously to sail power and line officers worked to limit the authority of engineers. But Dr. McBride, to his credit, avoids the temptation to portray the less technologically minded officers of the era as backward, nor does he ignore the logic of their arguments. After all, given a lack of overseas bases, reduced budgets, and the voracious appetite of steam engines, there were virtues to be found in sail-driven ships well into the 1880s.
The author continues his well-balanced analysis into and through the dreadnought era. In his account there are no villains and no heroes. Instead, there are players, each operating within a social mind-set, struggling always to maintain or reshape associated strategic and technological paradigms. In the author's narrative, the path toward the future never is the clearly laidout autobahn so evident to many historians writing with the benefit of hindsight. As Dr. McBride points out, the course of the opening European phase of World War II at sea, 1939-1941, actually reinforced the battleship-focused naval paradigm. Not until Pearl Harbor and what followed in the Pacific did the impartial "crucible" of conflict shift the naval paradigm to an aviation and carrier focus.
Dr. McBride's final chapter is more an extension of his history through the Cold War era than a conclusion. Nevertheless, the principal lessons he draws are three. First, neither the technological determinist nor social constructivist frameworks are sufficient to understand the complex processes evident in the history of the U.S. Navy. Second, the service needs to take historical study more seriously. Third, and most important, all military services need to ensure they do not possess a hierarchy so rigid that they reflexively dismiss technological developments that challenge existing paradigms. After all, as the author demonstrates, the "gun club" may well have dominated the interwar U.S. Navy, but not to the extent that the service failed to develop the new technological advances in air, submarine, and amphibious warfare that secured ultimate victory.