The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942–1944
Volume II of the Pacific War Trilogy
Ian W. Toll. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2015. 562 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. Biblio. Index. $35
Reviewed by Lieutenant Commander Doug Robb, U.S. Navy
One could argue that a decisive factor in winning the air war over the Pacific was a cattle-feed shortage. Paradoxically, although Japan’s high-performing Zero fighters were manufactured in a
state-of-the-art Mitsubishi plant, there was no adjoining airstrip. Planes rolling off the assembly lines had to be hauled 24 miles for delivery by teams of chronically underfed oxen—a stark contrast to bustling U.S. factories of companies such as Boeing, Grumman, and Douglas. This anecdote encapsulates both the lack of planning that contributed to Japan’s defeat and captures the visually evocative writing style that permeates Ian Toll’s The Conquering Tide.
Toll is the the critically acclaimed author of Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy and Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942. He cites numerous such vignettes to illuminate lesser-known aspects of the war. The result is a work spanning from Guadalcanal in mid-1942 to the battle for the Mariana Islands in mid-1944 that is much more than a mere chronological recitation. Once complete, this trilogy will be the first multipart chronicle of the naval war since Samuel Eliot Morison wrote his 15-volume series in the early 1950s.
Relying on newly available American and Japanese primary sources—letters, diaries, war reports, oral histories, and memoirs—Toll uses his storyteller’s gift to provide professional and casual historians alike with fresh perspectives and gripping depictions, from infantrymen under fire in their foxholes to submariners plotting “down-the-throat” attacks through their periscope.
Among the book’s highlights is Toll’s description of the personal rivalries and interservice rancor that affected “every major action early in the Pacific War.” The acrimony that existed between the Army and Navy, sailors and Marines, pilots and ship drivers, and Naval Academy graduates and everyone else is hard to fathom, but it provides a framework frequently absent from such wartime accounts. The nascent art of amphibious warfare, which halfheartedly incorporated both Marine and Army units, exposed and deepened these fissures.
Toll accurately places this sense of unbridled service rivalry in context: Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, there was no Joint Chiefs of Staff and no mechanism for interservice cooperation. Disputes between the Navy and War departments often were resolved by the President himself, whose allegiance to the Navy, Toll observes, “was obvious to all.” In addition, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was “not in the least bit overawed by stars or gold braid,” a fact that—when combined with his apparent service favoritism—irked the imperious General Douglas MacArthur.
Although airplane losses over Guadalcanal were comparable on both sides, the Japanese lost three times the number of pilots—a prescient indicator—while cultural differences further exacerbated Japan’s shortcomings. For example, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) devalued search-and-rescue operations, which Toll attributes “to the influence of bushido, the traditional samurai warrior code that exalted an honorable death in combat.” Japanese officers also were slow to adopt antisubmarine-warfare strategies that could have saved thousands of tons of shipping and resources because, in Toll’s words, “Samurai culture prized an offensive spirit over a defensive mindset.” Such insights are incontrovertibly Toll’s strength.
Strategically, U.S. carrier raids frustrated IJN leaders, who searched for opportunities to recreate a Mahanian decisive battle akin to their victory in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. “It would be no exaggeration to say that bringing about a single, all-deciding naval battle amounted to an obsession among the Tokyo admirals,” Toll asserts. This mindset demonstrated Japan’s inflexibility and stubbornness in the face of an adaptable adversary. IJN leadership also was slow to accept that fuel-guzzling 70,000-ton mega-battleships were less relevant in modern warfare than aircraft carriers.
Toll’s masterful work confronts these and other provocative issues and simultaneously questions our beliefs and expands our understanding. It complements other recent works on the subject, including Walter Borneman’s The Admirals: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy, and King—The Five-Star Admirals Who Won the War at Sea and David L. Roll’s The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler.
The Conquering Tide is a must-read for students of the Pacific war who want to reflect on the profound changes that it set in motion. It is a work of both serious scholarship and skillful storytelling that leaves readers eager for the forthcoming final volume—even though we have some idea how the story ends.
Thinking from a Global Perspective: Routledge Handbook of Naval Strategy and Security
Joachim Krause and Sebastian Bruns, eds. Oxon, UK: Routledge Press, 2016. 422 pp. Figures. Tables. Notes. $210
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel F. G. Hoffman, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)
Given the fact that the United States is primarily a maritime power, it follows that our security and economic future are inextricably linked to a demonstrated capability to operate in the maritime domain. Some defense analysts overlook the importance of sea power and take our superior fleet for granted. But we live in a strategic environment in which competition, legal and illicit, is increasing.
These changes in context have altered the missions that maritime forces must be prepared for and shape the means they use to protect us. The ultimate objectives, however, remain constant. As the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral John Richardson has noted, “While the problems are much more numerous and complex, our responsibility remains the same. Naval forces must provide our leaders credible options to protect America from attack, advance our prosperity, further our strategic interests, assure our allies and partners, and deter our adversaries.”
This large-scale responsibility makes the weighty character of this book timely and relevant. Contributors to Routledge Handbook of Naval Strategy and Security include several familiar authors: Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, British naval historian Eric Grove, piracy and maritime security expert Martin N. Murphy, and James Holmes of the Naval War College. A number of foreign experts augment these more familiar names and provide unique insights from their respective regions.
A key chapter for anyone interested in United States naval strategy is provided by Peter M. Swartz, an important contributor to the Navy’s maritime strategy efforts in the past and a prolific researcher at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA). Swartz meticulously defines the ends, ways, and means of U.S. naval strategy. His approach is a bit mechanistic, but it is undoubtedly the most comprehensive assessment of the U.S. Navy’s strategic fundamental tasks ever produced. Another key chapter for American readers is penned by the naval historian Randy Papadopoulos, the Department of the Navy’s historian. He explores the impact of relative decline and resource constraints on U.S. Navy and Marine capabilities. He writes, “the resources to manage the globe’s oceans and littoral regions are going to be scarce for the foreseeable future,” but with greater attention to partnering with allies, who offer genuine high-end capabilities and are professional counterparts, we can balance the strategy-resources equation better.
This edition also contains excellent chapters devoted to Chinese naval issues. Displaying the commendable breadth of this volume, Xu Hui and Cao Kianyu, both from the National Defense University of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), offer their take on China’s maritime security strategy. They offer a semi-official depiction of Chinese policy, noting that “The sea plays an increasingly important role in the economic and social development as well as the maintenance of sovereignty and security of China. Hence, utilization of the sea is China’s indispensable choice.” Professor Toshi Yoshihara of the U.S. Naval War College rounds off the discussion, noting that the U.S. Navy remains the premier fleet but that it cannot afford to be complacent.
Sebastian Bruns, a professor at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University in Germany, offers an excellent overview of issues affecting the Deutsche Marine. Some elements of his analysis appear to be reflected in the recent German defense white paper.
One noticeable gap in the coverage is the absence of a chapter on the Baltic Sea. This has become the forgotten sea, with all the attention now being paid to the Pacific and the Arctic oceans. Surely the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish navies are worth addressing. Certainly, the Russian military’s potential to disrupt that region’s maritime security is relevant to its hybrid warfare techniques. The recent BaltOps naval exercise demonstrates how important the region is to NATO. (See Vice Admiral James Foggo III, “The Fourth Battle of the Atlantic,” Proceedings, June 2016.)
On the whole, however, this book is chock full of insights from both U.S. and international perspectives that address the full range of critical issues in the naval strategic community. It will be invaluable to anyone interested in the global character of modern naval power and maritime security. While its price is prohibitive for general readers, a paperback edition would serve as an ideal primary textbook for a course in contemporary naval affairs at leading security studies programs or the service war colleges. It could be preceded by a more classical naval strategy text, such as Geoffrey Till’s Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century. Professors Krause and Bruns have skillfully conceived and artfully edited a scholarly product that clearly presents the importance of naval forces to maritime security in our complex times.
Global Responses to Maritime Violence: Cooperation and Collective Action
Paul Shemella, ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford Security Studies, 2016. 324 pp. Intro. Index. $27.95
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hanley, U.S. Air Force (Retired)
In 2011, Stanford University Press published a useful collection of scholarly articles on the terrorism threat, Fighting Back: What Governments Can Do about Terrorism, edited by retired Navy Captain Paul Shemella. What made the volume unusual in the midst of what by then had become an avalanche of similarly titled books was the absence of U.S. examples among the volume’s half-dozen case studies. Many—perhaps most—books on terrorism published after 9/11 expand on U.S. counterterrorism efforts, but Fighting Back deliberately avoided any sort of parochial perspective, which can imply that the American experience is uniquely illuminating, and instead seeks to nail down terrorism as a concept.
Using a range of international case studies—Mumbai, Madrid, the IRA, the Tokyo subway attack, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and Somalia—the authors of Fighting Back examined universal characteristics of terrorism and posited universal approaches to defeating it. By focusing on terrorism as a concept and using contemporary examples to highlight timeless precepts, Fighting Back bore a glancing resemblance to Carl von Clausewitz’s treatise On War.
Shemella and his colleagues at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Civil-Military Relations have produced a second volume based on the same organizing principles. Like its predecessor, Global Responses to Maritime Violence: Cooperation and Collective Action offers a mix of theoretical and practical white papers organized under three categories: the nature of the threat, responses to the threat, and case studies. Also like its predecessor, it addresses two readerships: students enrolled in seminars and national security leaders, managers, and policy makers interested in addressing non-military threats to the maritime domain, such as terrorism directed at ships at sea and ports, piracy, sea robbery, and maritime smuggling.
Global Responses works from a pair of key assumptions, the first of which is that maritime threats are an inherently international problem that requires a well-resourced and well-coordinated effort among governmental and private-sector actors if it is to be neutralized. “Virtually every maritime security threat is transnational,” Shemella argues. “Lasting maritime security requires the cooperation of national institutions, regional partners, and maritime nations from all over the world”—if only because large portions of the maritime domain, especially the high seas, remain essentially lawless regions. Second, countering maritime violence requires securing the territory behind the beach. “Ashore is where governments develop maritime laws and build maritime institutions,” Shemella states. It is “where criminal activity originates, and from where criminals extend their networks.”
Part I surveys various forms of maritime violence. In his essay “Targeting Terrorists,” Shemella offers a strategic threat-reduction model based on adapting one’s mind to that of the maritime criminal or terrorist; these insights are then organized and developed by assessment tools that convert the judgment of experts “into numbers that political leaders can understand.” In “Maritime Terrorism: An Evolving Threat,” Peter Chalk recommends analysts pay more attention to the less striking but, to the mind of a terrorist, more alluring targets of passenger ferries and cargo ship supply chains. Attacks aimed at shutting down a port or blowing up a cruise ship, Chalk asserts, are generally beyond the skill and resources of terrorists and unlikely to succeed. In “Armed Maritime Crime,” Chalk argues that personal-security contractors—though they have a place within a comprehensive maritime security program—should not, because they cannot, supersede or displace military or law-enforcement personnel. Echoing maritime philosophers and lawmakers dating back to Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Chalk concludes that “the duty to provide safe passage is fundamentally an obligation of sovereign states.”
At more than 130 pages, Part II is the longest section of the book and tends to focus on process. It covers topics such as the legal framework and the role of institutional leadership in maritime security. Part III offers five case studies: “Defeating the Sea Tigers of LTTE” (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), “Suppressing Piracy in the Strait of Malacca,” “Maritime Violence in the Sulu Sea,” “Maritime Crime in the Gulf of Guinea,” and “Yemen: The Case for a Coast Guard.” It might be worthwhile to begin with the case studies, because they allow the reader to more effectively grasp the concepts explored in parts I and II. Indeed, the case studies can be read independently of the rest of the book, as the lessons for policy makers and strategists register well enough.
New & Noteworthy Books
On War and Politics: The Battlefield Inside Washington’s Beltway
Arnold L. Punaro, with David Poyer. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2016. Foreword by Senator John Warner. Maps. Illus. Notes. $29.95
After Major General Arnold Punaro was awarded the bronze star as a Marine infantry platoon commander in Vietnam, he entered another dangerous fray: Washington politics. For nearly 50 years he labored at the heart of the defense and political establishment, working with Sam Nunn, John Glenn, John McCain, Colin Powell, Robert Gates, Ash Carter, and many others. He sheds light on contentious issues both past and present and offers advice for future advisers and policy makers.
Iron Dawn: The Monitor, the Merrimack, and the Civil War Sea Battle that Changed History
Richard Snow. New York: Scribner’s, 2016. 416 pp. Maps. Illus. Biblio. Index. $30
The former editor-in-chief of American Heritage magazine has written a vivid account of the battle in March 1862 at Hampton Roads, Virginia, between the Virginia (former Merrimack)—the powerful, ten-gun ironclad ship the Confederacy had converted from a captured Union frigate—and the Monitor—the Union’s revolutionary new iron warship, which it had raced to finish in just 100 days. Although she arrived too late to stave off the Virginia’s first assault, which destroyed half the Union’s fleet, the next day the Monitor fought her “to a standstill”—and ushered in a new era of military shipbuilding.
The Castaway’s War: One Man’s Battle Against Imperial Japan
Stephen Harding. Boston, MA: Da Capo Press, 2016. 289 pp. Illus. Maps. Biblio. Notes. Index. $26.99
On 5 July 1943, the destroyer USS Strong (DD-467) was hit by a Japanese torpedo, which killed dozens of sailors, sank the ship, and sent scores of her crew into the sea, including Lieutenant Hugh Barr Miller, a former football star at the University of Alabama. He and several of his shipmates managed to survive three days in the water before landing on an island occupied by the Japanese. Left behind by his mates at his own request, Miller expected to die from his severe wounds. Harding reveals that remarkably, Miller not only survived but undertook a single-handed campaign against the Japanese occupiers.
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Into the Fire
Dick Couch and George Galdorisi. New York: St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 2015. 380 pp. $9.99
This Op-Center techno-thriller begins with the nighttime murder of a high-ranking North Korean general and his family, which touches off a chain of events that could threaten the global balance of power. After a U.S. naval combat ship is attacked by North Korean forces during a training exercise, her crew hides on an island wedged between the disabled ship and the attackers. Op-Center intelligence discovers a secret alliance behind the attack and attempts to uncover a plan by North Korea in time to stave off a full-scale catastrophe in this tense, well-paced tale.