Reminders of military anniversaries appear month after month on our calendars. Independence Day, Veterans Day, VE Day, VJ Day—the list of holidays grows inexorably, all of them times to demonstrate national pride. Banks close; postmen take the day off; kids stay home from school. Bands play; flags fly; and after they struggle into old uniforms that seem to have shrunk with the years, men march down the Main Streets of countless U.S. towns. Some wars—Vietnam, for example, and the Korean "Police Action"—are not remembered with the same enthusiasm. Their veterans are honored with few, if any, parades.
It is left to books—histories, memoirs, novels, scholarly studies—to provide proper tribute to the men who fought in the steaming jungles of Southeast Asia and the miserable mud and cold of a desolate Asian peninsula. Thanks to books, the Korean conflict no longer can be called "The Forgotten War." The year 2000 saw the publication of a spate of books that celebrated the war's 50th anniversary. In Dog Company Six, retired Marine Brigadier General Edwin Simmons clears away the fog of war as he follows Dog Company from Inchon to the bitter winter retreat from the Chosin Reservoir. General Simmons knows well the old breed of Marines and newer troops as they get their first taste of battle. He has honored them both with an exceptional novel. The Outpost War: U.S. Marines in Korea, Volume 1: 1952 by Lee Ballenger, a former Marine tank crewman, recalls a less familiar area of the Korean War—the no-man's-land known as the Jamestown Line, where Marines and Chinese troops slugged it out in a replay of World War I trench warfare. Outpost names such as Reno, Ronson, and Bunker Hill still resonate in this book, said retired Marine Colonel Joseph Alexander in his Proceedings review. Small-unit night fighting at point-blank range "placed a premium on the leadership abilities of young lieutenants and sergeants." While truce talks ground on, casualties on the Jamestown Line between April and December 1952 amounted to 7,841—more than were suffered in the better-known battles of Pusan, Inchon, and the Chosin Reservoir.
Ship of Miracles: 14,000 Lives and One Miraculous Voyage, by former journalist and Air Force veteran Bill Gilbert, tells another all-but-ignored chapter of the Korean War: the odyssey of some 14,000 North Korean civilians who trudged alongside Marines coming down from the fight at Chosin Reservoir to the evacuation port of Hungnam. So anxious were those North Koreans to escape the approaching Chinese, they somehow managed to cram themselves onto the deck and into the holds of the Meredith Victory, which was designed to accommodate no more than a dozen passengers. By bringing their human cargo safely to the remote island of Koje-Do, U.S. merchant mariners accomplished what the Maritime Administration called "the greatest rescue by a single ship in the history of mankind."
Apart from after-action reports and stories about political mismanagement in Washington, the most interesting books about Vietnam take a close look at individuals who fought there. Fast Movers: America's Jet Pilots and the Vietnam Experience is a sharply etched picture of hard drinkers and womanizers whose motto was "live by the bottle and die by the throttle." They did not fly to defend the South Vietnamese, one of them explained. "On the contrary, we were disgusted by the pictures and stories of those long-haired, Honda-riding, drug-dealing, draft-dodging, duck-legged little bastards living their corrupt lives in Saigon." Braggadocio aside, says the author, John Darrell Sherwood, these were pilots with "a profound desire to hunt and kill." For them, time "in country" was not wasted; it was the high point of their lives.
Even after more than half a century, studies of World War II show no sign of diminishing. Nor is it surprising that few of them contain the angry criticism that erupts in almost every book that looks back on Vietnam or Korea. A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War, 1937-1945 impressed Naval History reviewer Richard B. Frank as "a magnificent one-volume history . . . a superb narrative of the massive conflict." Williamson Murray and Allen R. Millett, both accomplished historians, offer sharp-edged analyses of campaigns won and lost, and lessons learned—all based on a massive quantity of research. Flags of Our Fathers, on the other hand, concentrates on a single battle, the terrible 31-day fight for Iwo Jima. The passage of time has erased much of the public's memory of that costly amphibious assault, but Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal's evocative shot of a U.S. flag being raised on top of Mt. Suribachi remains bright and clear in the public mind. James Bradley, whose father was one of the flag raisers, has written a word-picture of the island battle that is as moving as Rosenthal's photo. Retired Marine Major Norman Hatch, who reviewed Bradley's book for Naval History, called it "a perfect microcosm of that era of American youth." Historian Stephen Ambrose described it as "the best battle book I've ever read."
Listen to the Voices From the Sea: Writings of the Fallen Japanese Students offers both a look at the Pacific War from the enemy's point of view, and some surprising corrections of many long-held American misconceptions. The suicidal pilots of the Special Attack Force or tokkotai (the Japanese never called them kamikaze) were not "crazed Emperor-worshippers" or "doped-up robots," explained Proceedings reviewer Frank Gibney, President of the Pacific Basin Institute. Their letters, many smuggled past censors, "reflected the values of an elitist prewar education that was heavily grounded in the Western classics. Kant and Newton were their intellectual heroes. ... Few of them had any illusions about the virtues of Japan's militaristic/bureaucratic government or its chances of victory." Scorn for their officers showed in almost every letter. "I shall live and die for my fatherland," said one pilot, "but I shall do so cursing all the while the Imperial Navy." Translated by Midori Yamanouchi and Joseph L. Quinn, the letters of these young Japanese, said Gibney, "have given us a very moving record that deserves to be a part of history."
In Lifting the Fog of War, retired Navy Admiral Bill Owens, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, and his coauthor Edward Offley, argue that despite its past victories the U.S. military is in dire straits today. A serious budget crisis, combined with failure to exploit the information revolution, promises "a military that will still be able to mount impressive parades. It just won't be able to fight very well." Proceedings reviewer Dr. Michael Hughes, a Lockheed Martin vice president, was not entirely convinced by Admiral Owens's solutions to the problems he sees. Taking away all of the military's authority for defining budgets and procurement requirements, and placing it in the hands of a joint committee, said Dr. Hughes, might well diminish service parochialism, but competition between the services often is healthy, and any resulting redundancy is a "prudent precaution." Moreover, said Dr. Hughes, the military does not suffer from what Admiral Owens describes as "an unreasoned, blind commitment to existing doctrine or structure." Such differences between author and reviewer bolster Admiral Owens's call for a debate on "the impending collapse of our military."
The Postmodern Military: Armed Forces After the Cold War, edited by Charles C. Moskos, John Allen Williams, and David R. Segal, collects the observations of 18 military scholars on the "revolution in military affairs" in 12 different countries. "Finally," said Proceedings reviewer retired Navy Captain Larry Seaquist, here is "a book by authors with something on their minds other than technology, analysts with a horizon that stretches beyond the Pentagon." According to Dr. Moskos, a respected military sociologist, the U.S. "combat leader" of World War II evolved into a Cold War "manager-technician" and then became today's "soldier-statesman/soldier-scholar." Captain Seaquist disagrees. "There is little evidence of increasing political and academic sophistication among our senior officers . . . and innocence about security strategy and the political calculus for the use of force seem almost a prerequisite for high command."
Of all the questions that nag at today's military (to say nothing of politicians and the public), the role of women in the uniformed services stirs the most vigorous debate. Stephanie Gutmann's The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America's Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars? tackles the problem with admirable objectivity. She is not opposed to women in the military, said Proceedings reviewer John Allen Williams, just the dumbing down of standards. The author argues that the sexes should be separated in boot camp, high physical standards should be restored, and there should be specialty- specific qualifying tests. Unconcerned with political correctness, she also insists male victims of post-Tailhook witch hunting deserve an apology. The very title of Loree Draude Hirschman's book, She's Just Another Navy Pilot: An Aviator's Sea Journal, is belied in part, at least, by her own experiences. One of the first carrier-qualified female aviators, Lieutenant Commander Hirschman found herself fighting gender discrimination throughout most of her career. At Naval Air Station Lemoore's Replacement Air Group she faced "hostility, deceit, and antagonism." Determined to become "one of the boys," she shrugged off the disappointment of failing to become a fighter pilot and worked hard to become one of the top S3 pilots on board the Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72). This is an unbiased study of prejudice in a Navy still embroiled in a war between the sexes.
III-conceived plans fashioned by interfering politicians, combined with angry disagreements between naval leaders themselves, never have been solely a U.S. problem. In pre-World War I Britain, the rush to rebuild a near-moribund navy into an efficient fighting force stirred heated arguments between Winston Churchill and Arthur Balfour. While they feuded, Admirals John Jellicoe and David Beatty battled over strategy and tactics. On the continent, meanwhile, Queen Victoria's grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was building a fleet he hoped would make him "Admiral of the Atlantic." Inevitably, the great battle fleets clashed. When they both limped back to port after the Battle of Jutland, neither side could claim a clear victory. Even so, says University of Toronto professor Keith Yates in his Flawed Victory: Jutland 1916, the Royal Navy was the real winner. After Jutland, it was free to mount a successful blockade against the Central Powers. Professor Yates makes a convincing case for his reassessment of that famous sea battle.
Revisionism is a better word to describe historian Scott Cookman's study of Sir John Franklin's doomed attempt to find a Northwest Passage across the roof of the world. In Iceblink: The Tragic Fate of Sir John Franklin's Polar Expedition, Cookman concedes that Franklin may have been "one of the unluckiest men ever born. Everything fate gave him, fate robbed back." His successful circumnavigation of Australia ended in shipwreck. Heroic service with Horatio Nelson at Copenhagen and Trafalgar earned him neither recognition nor promotion. His late-career polar expedition ended in disaster; not a man survived. Most historians place all the blame on Franklin. After diligent research in Admiralty records, Cookman is sure he found the true villain: an unscrupulous contractor who sold the expedition canned food contaminated with botulism. There is no doubt Franklin made mistakes, says the author, but he deserves more from history than he has received till now.
Size and weight may qualify The Navy as a “coffee table book,” but to use that often pejorative label here would be misleading indeed. This hefty and handsome volume tells the long, proud history of the U.S. sea service. Paintings, pictures, an introductory essay by retired Navy Rear Admiral W.J. Holland, and numerous essays by a gaggle of historians and experts cover the story of the Navy from the days of wooden frigates to the great battleships and aircraft carriers of World War II and beyond. The history of naval aviation is followed from early, experimental biplanes to today’s powerful jets. Officers and enlisted personnel are all here, their jobs explained, and their loyalty honored in a book that deserves to head its own suggested reading list. In Riders of the Storm: A Photographic Tribute to America’s Surface Warriors, photojournalist Brian Wolff focuses on the men and ships that patrol our coasts and project U.S. power around the globe. His camera lens has missed no aspect of the surface fleet, even the “ghost ships” from the Pacific War, rusting away in half-deserted yards, their decks overgrown with weeds.
Colonel Seamon writes the “Books of Interest” column for Proceedings.