Neptune’s Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal
James D. Hornfischer. New York: Bantam, 2011. 544 pp. Illus. Maps. Index. $30.
Reviewed by Robert Love
If the influence of sea power on history is often overstated, then the influence of stupidity on history is too often overlooked, both by academics and others. For instance, the moonscape of Hiroshima in August 1945 surely suggests that Japan’s World War II-era leaders were not only burdened by ignorance and superstition but also often bereft of the power of reason. Having failed to defeat republican China despite four costly exertions in the Yangtze basin alone between 1937 and 1940, Japan chose to start an additional war with the British Empire and the United States in 1941. And in doing so, its admirals and generals, unlike the leaders of every other major belligerent, devised no plausible plan to win. Instead they convinced themselves that a series of cheap, early victories against weak forces defending peripheral outposts would induce their vastly more powerful opponents to negotiate appeasing compromises—although it was those opponents’ refusal to appease during prewar negotiations that led Tokyo to inaugurate hostilities in the first place.
What transpired in the Pacific war was what one Austro-Hungarian general in 1915 termed materialschacht—material battle or campaign. As the Dual Monarchy had on the Isonzo front during World War I, Japan in World War II confronted enemies that could deploy so many more weapons, vessels, troops, and other war goods to the front that the outcomes of individual encounters, other than the final offensive, were irrelevant to the outcome of the larger struggle.
Neptune’s Inferno is an account of the naval engagements attending Operation Watchtower, the invasion and occupation of Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the South Pacific in 1942-43. It is an oft-told tale. For reasons having as much to do with the Anglo-American dispute over strategy in Europe as with the contest against Japan, Admiral Ernest J. King, the Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations, arranged to inaugurate the Guadalcanal campaign with landings on 7 August. He apparently expected that Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who commanded the Japanese fleet, would withdraw from the Solomon Islands to a more defensible line. Instead, Japanese leaders foolishly chose to strengthen their garrison on Guadalcanal and, in doing so, engage in a series of naval and air battles of attrition and a shipping contest that they were almost certain to lose. The naval encounters—from the disaster off Savo Island to the slugging matches off Cape Esperance and the Santa Cruz Islands to the Pacific Fleet’s tactical recoveries in the three phases of the naval Battle of Guadalcanal—form the core of Hornfischer’s chronicle.
This work’s major strengths are its careful organization, readable prose, and mostly well-reasoned conclusions. Depictions of battles and ships are enlivened with usually apt comments from participants and relevant character sketches of the key figures. There are too few track charts and maps, but the few available are clear and accessible. For the reader unfamiliar with the historiography of the Pacific war and interested in a restrained overview of the U.S. Navy’s role in the Guadalcanal campaign, Neptune’s Inferno would be a good start.
Its major weaknesses are shallow research, the lack of attention to basing and the shipping contest, and, to a lesser extent, the author’s one-sided approach. Hornfischer consulted some primary sources—largely after-action reports and command histories—and seven collections of papers, but the result is hardly impressive. For instance, he examined the King manuscripts at the Naval Historical Center but ignored the Whitehill-Buell collection at the Naval War College. A far more exhaustive use of the Columbia University–Naval Institute Oral History Collection would have been welcomed. One wonders how Hornfischer overlooked Ronald Spector’s Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (Vintage, 1985) or H. P. Willmott’s The War with Japan: The Period of Balance (SR Books, 2002). And, for a treatment of sea battles, he should have consulted Wayne P. Hughes’ masterful Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice (Naval Institute Press, 1986), which embodies an important analysis of the Guadalcanal campaign.
In sum, Neptune’s Inferno is an adequate account of the American side of the naval battles off Guadalcanal but lacks the depth of scholarship and historical understanding to qualify as a necessary consideration for future studies.
Dr. Love has taught naval and military history at the U.S. Naval Academy since 1975. His publications include a two-volume History of the U. S. Navy (Stackpole Books, 1993-4) and The Year of D-Day (University of Hull Press, 1994).
A Chance in Hell: The Men Who Triumphed over Iraq’s Deadliest City and Turned the Tide of War
Jim Michaels. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010. 272 pp. Illus. Intro. Notes. Bib. $25.99.
Reviewed by Charity E. Winters
In the summer of 2005, when I deployed to Iraq with an Air Force convoy security detachment, the war had taken a turn for the worse. From my perspective in a gun truck, the roads we traveled and life in general throughout Iraq looked pretty bleak. Iraqis were caught between the American military presence and a Sunni insurgency reinforced by al Qaeda’s foreign agents. However, by 2008 the security situation had improved markedly. Iraqis were assuming control of their fate. Media reports, including groundbreaking articles by Mark Cancian and Andrew Lubin in the April 2008 issue of Proceedings, described how Americans and Iraqis in Ramadi had come to cooperate and pacify the insurgency in al Anbar. Jim Michaels, a former Marine Corps infantry officer and later a military correspondent for USA Today, fleshes out the story in A Chance in Hell.
As Michaels reports, in the spring of 2006 al Anbar province was on the verge of imploding. Reports showed Americans losing ground in what had become a hotbed of insurgency. Al Qaeda had claimed Ramadi as its stronghold, from which it was imposing an incinerating dominance over the province, terrorizing Iraqi citizens, including a number of their presumptive Sunni allies. Into this furnace were thrown all the elements for an impending meltdown, but over the course of a year what emerged was an alliance between American fighters and the Sunni tribes increasingly disenchanted and fearful of al Qaeda’s harsh Sharia rule. From the top brass to foot soldiers to sheiks and their tribes, the author examines how leadership and the decisions of individuals eventually merged to expel al Qaeda and stabilize the province.
Michaels manages to avoid unnecessary commentary in favor of telling the tale of the men, the strategy, and the results of what is now known as the “al Anbar Awakening.” At the core of the alliance were leaders and unlikely friends: Colonel Sean MacFarland, a soft-spoken armor officer, and Abdul Sattar Bezia al-Rishawi, a minor sheik and showman who rallied his fellow tribal leaders to oppose al Qaeda and join the Americans. MacFarland, as Michaels describes, was a West Point graduate with a fondness for misfits and the unconventional. He was not a micromanager; like the best of leaders he gave his Soldiers a mission and expected them to execute it. He took every inch of the latitude given him by his superiors and then allowed his subordinates to do the same.
Sattar, presented as a charismatic opportunist, threw in with the Americans after al Qaeda executed his father and three brothers. He idolized President George W. Bush as a man of principle, and when the President visited al Anbar, the sheik emotionally offered Mr. Bush his assistance in taking on the Taliban in Afghanistan. Sattar’s assassination in September 2007 did not deter the al Anbar Awakening. Instead, the author asserts, his martyrdom drove his followers to spread the awakening well beyond the province’s borders.
The relationships among the Americans and tribal forces were lubricated by U.S. dollars and equipment and backed up by U.S. firepower. It would be a mistake to portray the money as the chief ingredient of the alliance, though clearly it was important. As the author tells it, the Iraqis feared al Qaeda’s bloody methods, and day by day and member by member, tribes changed sides when they became convinced that Americans were reliable partners. Michaels’ portrayal of commanders, staff members, patrol leaders, and sheiks and their followers, confirms that the strategy for stabilizing al Anbar was not so much about the victory of a particular ideology or money as it was about people aligning in the advancement of common interests.
Michaels focuses on an unconventional strategy that produced results but never lets the reader forget the profound human cost. The story begins with a death of a young Soldier and concludes more than a year later, shortly after Sattar’s assassination. In most cases Michaels is careful to reflect on the lives of the fallen, weaving in their histories, families, and personalities. A disappointment in the narrative is his oddly perfunctory mention of the death of U.S. Marine Corps Major Megan McClung. The author describes her as MacFarland’s “energetic” media adviser and a triathlete. But that’s it. This is an inadequate epitaph for the first female Naval Academy graduate to die in combat. She deserved more.
This book will to appeal to those who want to further understand the al Anbar Awakening. Do not let its subtitle, however, point to the conclusion that the war changed dramatically as a result of these events. Michaels does not make such a case. Instead he tells a story of men, both American and Iraqi, who took a chance on each other. Michaels predicts that history may reflect on the war in Iraq and show that in this one instance, “the United States got it right.”
Ms. Winters, a graduate of the New Mexico Military Institute and the U.S. Air Force Academy, served three tours in Iraq conducting security operations. She is a freelance writer, a graduate student at Tennessee State University in Nashville and a regular contributor to Proceedings.
Dangerous Times? The International Politics of Great Power Peace
Christopher J. Fettweis. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2010. 273 pp. Notes. Bib. Index. $29.95.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hanley, U.S. Air Force (Retired)
Dangerous Times? joins an expanding category of books that tries to come to terms with the changing character of war. Christopher J. Fettweis, assistant professor of political science at Tulane University, argues that major war, which he defines as armed conflict between major powers that generates at least a thousand battlefield casualties, will likely become obsolete, and small wars will similarly decline in frequency and destructiveness.
Fettweis constructs his case on what he sees as an irrevocable change in human norms. War will ultimately be shamed out of existence in much the same way slavery and dueling were. Western societies in particular have come to view traditional justifications for war—struggles for territory; the defense of national honor—as barbaric relics. Societies will always compete, but the means will be trade rather than arms. Greater cooperation between advanced nation-states, especially in the arena of humanitarian intervention, will replace belligerent rivalries.
Fettweis expects a sharp diminution of the U.S. military budget as soon as our political culture recognizes the profligacy of spending big bucks for hardware and personnel that won’t ever be used. He argues for a grand strategy that avoids nation-building and other forms of military power projection that justify “unnecessary foreign misadventures, such as the current morass in Iraq.”
Fettweis argues persuasively that much of our overseas presence can be scaled back. The South Koreans can easily take care of themselves; there’s not much of a rationale for keeping anything beyond a token presence in Europe. Even so, Fettweis’s overall argument is flawed. To conclude that we live in an exceptionally safe world ignores disquieting facts.
It would have been useful, for example, if Fettweis had reckoned with the demographic forces transforming Western Europe—along with the spirited, well-organized reaction in the Netherlands, Germany, and Great Britain. Fettweis says nothing of the imbalances between male and female births in China and India. What will happen when large numbers of young men who are not likely ever to marry dominate the polities in these countries? I don’t know. But it’s a subject worthy of consideration if one is to assert, as Fettweis does, that traditional masculine virtues, such as the veneration of personal honor, are deader than Camelot.
Fettweis says nothing about the reckless proliferation of dual-use technologies—especially biotechnologies and nuclear fuel-cycle technology. The past masters of proliferation include the very powers—China and Russia—whom Fettweis claims have no desire to fight a major war.
It’s been a mere 20 years since the end of the Iran–Iraq war—a territorial dispute between states aspiring to regional dominance—which resembled World War I a lot more closely than it did anything surmised in Fettweis’s worldview. What are we to make of China’s recent claim to indisputable sovereignty over 1.3 million square miles of the South China Sea, substantial portions of which are considered international waters? What happens if a dispute over navigation can’t be resolved through diplomacy? What of the territorial disputes between India and Pakistan? War may not be likely under such circumstances, as it has throughout human history, but it is certainly possible.
The author mischaracterizes terrorism as a “law-enforcement problem.” Law enforcement deals with episodes of causeless violence and other infractions against legal code. The thief and murderer know they are violating the law. When Fettweis claims that jihadists are outlaws fighting the international system, he imposes our view of the nation-state on millions for whom the idea is an alien or despised concept. There is no nation-state or international system in the jihadists’ world view, because the Koran is universal law. Islam means “submission.” The radical Muslim not only obeys the Koran, but everyone else—infidels—must be eliminated rather than tolerated, and certainly not recognized as citizens with equal rights. Such is not the rationale for criminal behavior; it is a worldview implacably, violently antagonistic to our own. Fettweis thinks differently, but the surest response to aggression is retaliatory aggression. The best guarantor of peace is a well-trained, well-equipped military force, given further credibility by the political will to use it.