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(More customer reviews)This book ought to have been a significant contribution to the analysis of the War in the Pacific. Unfortunately, it is instead a step backwards. There are so many inaccuracies, unsupportable biases and wierd causalities proposed by the author that it strips all credibility away from what ought to have been the strength of the book, a senior naval officer's assessment of the effectiveness of various US commanders in carrier battles. Add to it some really muddled thinking and imprecise writing and you have a book that is damaging to the study of naval history of the period.
There are lots of things that the author says that are just plain wrong. For example, He states that 21 ships were sunk at Pearl Harbor (correct answer: 8). Later he asserts that in the opening months of the war the Japanese had "sunk or disabled nine battleships," where the correct count is 7 (5 at Pearl Harbor, plus the battleship Prince of Wales and the Battlecruiser Repulse). He states that "Hong Kong and Thailand would be overrun as a prelude for moves against Burma and Malaya." In fact, Malaya was the opening attack in the war, and Thailand would not be "overrun," but its government would side with Japan. He states that the Japanese added drop tanks to Zeros for use against "the Dutch and British oil holdings in Southeast Asia." No, they were developed in order to allow Zeros to escort bombers from Taiwan to the Philippines, and thus freeing two carriers for the Pearl Harbor attack (see Okumiya and Horikoshi, ZERO!). In discussing the surface battles around Guadalcanal, he states that the battlecruiser "Hiei was so well armored that she was impervious to broadside gun fire" Presuming that by "broadside gun fire" Smith means gunfire against the ships belt armor, in fact, Hiei was only armored to battlecruiser standards, meaning an 8-inch belt thinned to 3 inches at the ends. The 8-inch/55 guns on the San Francisco class heavy cruisers could penetrate 8 inches of armor at 13,000 yards or less; the battle where Hiei was lost to cruiser gunfire was fought at ranges well under 10,000 yards. Smith also implies that Hiei's steering machinery compartment was part of the ship's vulnerable "topside compartments and superstructure," as he asserts that the rest of the ship was "impervious," leading one to wonder if this is just a case of imprecise writing, or if Smith is unaware that Hiei's steering machinery was located below the waterline.
Then there is my favorite: "... the first reserve officers who saw service in the war entered the Naval War College with the class of 1942." Incredible.
There are many more examples of this ilk. In addition to getting facts wrong, it is painfully obvious that the author does not know or understand naval combat in WW II in the Pacific - there are too many "throw-away" comments that attest to this lack of understanding. For example, Smith asserts that battleships were not moved to the Pacific after Pearl Harbor because "most were required in the Atlantic Theater." In the Atlantic, the Germans had Tirpitz operational and two battlecruisers damaged at Brest. The British had 3 battleships in the home fleet, one at Gibraltar, and one in workups in the Caribbean for a total of 5 battleships in theater, plus two more in home yards being repaired. The British felt sufficiently secure in their battleship numbers in the Atlantic theater that they had dispatched 5 battleships to the Far East. While the British would cartainly appreciate any reinforcements, there was no "requirement" to keep US battleships in the Atlantic, much less the 5 that were there in January 1942. The real reason was fuel: tankers were in such a shortage that the US could not deploy and support their existing Pacific Fleet battleships to Pearl Harbor, much less accommodate transfers of LantFleet battleships. Smith obviously has not read the current literature on US battleship employment during the war, and the reasons why the battle squadron remained on the US West Coast. In fact, in several places in the book Smith is totally oblivious to the logistics constraints of the Pacific Theater, which contributes to the lack of credibility of many of his arguments.
Smith's idea of causality is often strained. For example, he states that "as a result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ... only fourteen destroyers, seven heavy cruisers and one light cruiser were available to support the American Carrier groups [at Midway]." Let's examine that bizarre idea. On 1 May 1941 US forces totaled 13 heavy cruisers, 11 light cruisers and 80 destroyers in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor deducted 2 light cruisers and 2 destroyers, or under 4% of the total number of ships. One has to suspect that there were reasons other than the attack at Pearl Harbor for a shortage of ships to support the carriers at Midway. Smith's assertion that the shortage was due to "Pearl Harbor" is not credible.
So, Smith's book suffers from poor fact checking and poor understanding of causality. He also contradicts himself in several places, making for some very confusing reading. For example, the number of fighters the Japanese were to land on Midway was given in one place as 22 and in another as 33, and the carrier Shoho either carried 18 or 31 aircraft. His analyses are similarly muddled: when looking at the Coral Sea campaign, he first says that the US attack on Tulagi was *good* as it was necessary to eliminate a Japanese reconnaissance base, and later he says it was *bad* because the US forces revealed their position and might be "trapped." Trapped? By what? Where did that come from? Good or bad? Both?
All of this is prelude to the biggest problem with this book: the assertion that the evil battleship admirals of the "Gun Club" unfairly (yes, "unfairly" is the word Smith uses) held back the development of the aircraft carrier as an independent strike platform. Here Smith parrots the arguments and biases of O'Connell's truely monumental disaster, "Sacred Vessels." "Sacred Vessels'" arguments have been exploded by a number of critics; it is sad that Smith did not consult them before echoing O'Connell in his dissertation. But even then, most of the arguments that he puts forward about the path of aircraft carrier development between the wars is destroyed by Hone, Friedman and Mandeles book "American and British Aircraft Carrier Development 1919-1941," which is in Smith's bibliography, but which he apparently did not read, or perhaps just did not decide to discuss their arguments in his work. How did that get past the committee?
Smith asserts that the US Navy was in the grips of the Gun Club to keep the aircraft carrier as an auxiliary to the battleship. "Mainstream thinking within the Navy's top leadership held that naval aviation was an adjunct to battle fleet operations rather than an integral part of its offensive lethality. The Japanese attack established beyond doubt that this philosophy was seriously in error." He goes on to say that "... the most forward -looking elements of technology and doctrine were conspicuously absent from naval education of the interwar period." He complains about "the study of gun platform battles bereft of radar (not available until 1936) ..."
There are lots of things wrong with these statements. First, on a purely factual note, radar was not available in 1936. The first experimental set went on the destroyer Leary in April of 1937, and the first production radars (the CXAM) began installation mid-1940. It would be rather hard for the NWC to teach about radar's "forward-looking elements of technology" when the characteristics and performance of the technology was yet to be established at sea.
"This bias in the senior Navy hierarchy was reflected in the War College course of study." He criticizes the curriculum for concentrating on the "study of gun platform battles". In WW II in the Pacific, there were 5 carrier v. carrier battles; over that same time Vincent O'Hara has documented 40 gun engagements.
He complains that in 1925 the Navy "lacked a concrete plan for employing its air assets in operations with fleet units." In 1925! Langley was not commissioned until late 1924, and the Sara and Lexington not available to participate in fleet training until 1929. It would take experimentation and practice to determine how many aircraft could operate off a carrier, in what size groups, and with what lethality and loss and accident rates. Smith's argument that the lack of a "concrete plan" in 1925 exhibits a bias against carrier aviation shows that he does not understand the process of innovation in the inter-war navy, a process that depended very heavily upon a very sensible policy of testing and experimenting before committing the Navy to any long-range plan. Any navy "concrete plan" developed in 1925 would have had to depend greatly upon the British examples, who were at that time the leading operators of carrier aircraft at sea. A plan based on the British example would have resulted in a very different carrier force than the one that was available to the American Navy in 1941.
The American carrier development relied on experimentation and trial and error. As a result of this experimentation, US carrier aviation developed very differently than that of the British. Had we followed the British example, US carriers would have been restricted to about half the number of aircraft that they eventually carried, and would be capable of strikes out to only about 125 nm rather than over twice that distance. Strikes would have been in penny packets rather than full-deckloads of 70 aircraft or more. Smith's argument not only does not hold water, it betrays a fundamental weakness in his understanding of the Navy's process of development and progress in the carrier air arm, and...Read more›
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