Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I love books of veteran's reminiscences of World War II. It is important to capture what these men have to say before they are gone from us, and honor them. But this book, most unfortunately for the veterans who have trusted their material to this editor, is botched.
This is another example of the case where a journalist collects interviews with vets and tries to put a book together out of them, without himself having any understanding of the topic. In this one, author Olson tries to make himself a Pacific War historian, for about a third of the book is "historical context," i.e. a thumbnail history of WW II in the Pacific.
Now, context is good, but Olson takes it to an extreme: for example, we are treated to several pages of description of the battle of Midway (with some glaring errors and propagating some urban myths about the battle) only to find out that USS Dale was no-where near the battle! All the "context" is lamentable padding for a book otherwise short on content.
A good editor has two main tasks: he has to ferret out the interesting parts of the vets' tales, and he has to make sure that their memories are not changed by what they read after the war. In this last, Olsen fails badly. Over and over he puts in passages where veterans told him things that they could not have possibly known about at the time, things that they read much later. For example, some of the vets recalled how they were bombed by 16-inch armor piercing bombs at Pearl Harbor during their sortie down the channel. They said that they were AP bombs because they exploded on the bottom. The problem is that all the AP bombs dropped by the B5N Kate bombers were assigned to the first wave, only attacked battleships, and were long gone by the time second wave D3A Val dive bombers (with 250 kg general purpose bombs) attacked the Dale on her way out of the harbor. So, the veterans had read about the 16-inch AP bombs after the war, and tried to connect the dots - inaccurately. So now we have another urban myth of WW II begun, due to the author's inability to recognize reminiscence from erroneous conjecture. Things like this pop up throughout the book. A good editor would know when to edit and when to question. Olson, without any knowledge of the subject, does neither.
On other cases, the vets memories are flawed: for example, one indicated that while they were on Aleutian's duty, they would get their messages when an aircraft would drop a package in the water marked by a buoy in the open ocean, and the Dale would go to that position once a day to get their mail. The idea of an aircraft, in poor visibility, dropping on a geo location out of sight of the ship (when the state of aircraft navigation was too poor to do such a thing, particularly in northern waters) is flat impossible. The idea of dropping classified papers in the water marked by a buoy with no ship in sight is laughable from a security standpoint - what if a Japanese submarine picked up the package? Undoubtedly the aircraft was actually sighting the ship and making contact before dropping the messages, but that is not what the vet recalls, likely because he was below decks during the first part of the precedure. This is one of those items that the editor should have known enough to get some verification before printing -but Olson's specialty is agricultural journalism, and it is evident in this book that he does not know the difference between a breech block and a breeches buoy.
And as for getting to the interesting parts of the vets' stories, Olsen similarly has a checkered record. Too many of the entries are valueless: a vet essentially saying, "yes, I was there, and I sure was scared!" Olsen appears not to be able to ferret out those gems of interesting details and colorful anecdotes from the veterans that make their testimonies so important and so real. Much of the book is just banal. About a third is Olson's version of naval history, and about a 1/6th are reproductions from the Dale's War Diary. Of the 291 pages of text, about half are the words of the vets - and it is even less than that, as the book is double spaced with very wide margins. There is only about 100 real pages of content here.
Buy this book if you are knowledgable in the field, can filter out the mistakes, and sufficiently interested in the topic to mine through a lot of gravel to get to the few gems - and there are some. But if you are new to the topic, there is too much of a chance instead that you will be mislead by the many errors in the book. I would instead recommend you go to Calhoun's Tin Can Sailor: Life Aboard the USS Sterett, or Crenshaw's South Pacific Destroyer. Both of these books are veteran's memories done right, and are far more rewarding than this thin offering.
Click Here to see more reviews about:
Tales From a Tin Can: The USS Dale from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay
Get 22% OFF
Click here for more information about Tales From a Tin Can: The USS Dale from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay
