My reviews were written for a purpose other than storage on Wikipedia. For my original purpose, I prefer to write using TeX or LaTeX, a document preparation system that I encourage anyone interested in publication to try. TeX and LaTeX use embedded commands that can be recognized by the backslash (\) that precedes them. (The embedded commands are removed in the final processing. The output I choose to get is a file in pdf format.) Some typesetting conventions are incompatible with Wikipedia (double quotes, for example). When I see them, I will edit them out, but other than that I leave the file as I wrote it. Other users of TeX will be happy with this; TeXnophobes will not.
1. Secret history of Confederate diplomacy abroad edit
De Leon, Edwin, Secret history of Confederate diplomacy abroad (edited by William C. Davis). University Press of Kansas, c2005. ISBN: 0700614117
\documentclass{article} \renewcommand\labelitemi{ } \title{Secret history of Confederate diplomacy abroad,\\ by Edwin De~Leon\\ Edited and with an introduction\\ by William C. Davis} \begin{document} \maketitle \section{Why England and France did not recognize the Confederacy}
Edwin De~Leon was a native of South Carolina who had somewhat distinguished himself in the years leading up to the Civil War by his eloquent advocacy of State Rights. One of three sons of a prominent family (his father, Mordecai Hendricks De~Leon, was once mayor of Columbia), he had studied law, but had given himself over to the business of publishing and editing newspapers. In 1854, President Franklin Pierce appointed him as consul general and diplomatic agent in Egypt, where he remained until the outbreak of the war induced him to resign. While in Egypt, he seems to have performed his duties satisfactorily and even honorably, and twice he was explicitly thanked by Congress for his skill in representing American interests. After his resignation and before he returned to the divided nation, he began writing letters to the press in both Paris and London. His message attracted the attention of the Confederate commissioner in London, William L. Yancey, who persuaded him to continue his writing for the friendly press rather than seek the military commission that had been his original aim. He was still in Europe when the {\em Trent} crisis threatened to rupture relations between Britain and the Lincoln government. In that incident, an overzealous American naval officer forcibly removed a pair of accredited Southern diplomats from RMS {\em Trent}, in violation of almost every conceivable law bearing on the subject. The outrage felt throughout Great Britain was so great that war between the two nations was a distinct possibility, until Lincoln and his Secretary of State William Seward were able to defuse the situation in the North and release the Rebels to Europe. The excuse that Lincoln gave to justify caving in to British demands for the release of the captives was that the war was going so well that they couldn't do any harm. Whether he actually believed what he said or not, the fact is that he was pretty nearly correct; by the time James M.~Mason and John Slidell had arrived in London in January 1862, the time for any meaningful intervention by the European powers in American internal affairs had passed, although obviously no one knew it. De~Leon's journal, which he published in serial form in the New York {\em Citizen} in the years 1867--1868, describes his efforts to persuade the British and even more the French to go against this historical trend. Although he could not fully understand why he ultimately failed, his observations on the various pressures that bore upon the French Emperor Napoleon and British Prime Minister Palmerston go a long way toward making their refusal to pull Southern chestnuts out of the fire understandable to us today.\footnote{Biographical information is taken from the introduction to De~Leon's {\em Secret history} by historian William C. Davis.}
De~Leon's account of his efforts to sway European foreign policy is a record of doors closed to him, of failure of the important government ministries to recognize him, and of their refusal even to consider the advantages (as he saw them) that an independent Confederacy could bring to Europe. His tale contains a great deal of self-pity, as he magnified his own importance in the relations between the foreign offices of Britain and France and the putative country he represented. Whatever his diplomatic qualifications may have been, he exhibited a certain tin ear with regard to his influence. In England, he mistook support for the Southern cause by a minor back-bencher in Parliament (William Gregory, a Whig from Galway) for evidence that the government would be forced to abandon its policy of neutrality regarding the blockade of Southern ports; when Gregory withdrew his resolution to have Parliament debate the issue---to the obvious relief of the other members---, De~Leon was perplexed. He was evidently assured in his own mind that if only Gregory had been permitted to make his case, he would have been successful. He was a powerful speaker, and of fine appearance, in marked contrast to the member who would have spoken against his resolution, William Forster, from Bradford. In giving these details of appearance and speaking ability, De~Leon seems truly to believe that they were important, that the affairs of state of the most powerful nation in the world at that time could have been moved by such externals.
Soon after the withdrawal of the Gregory resolution (that was on 7 June 1861), De~Leon shifted the center of gravity of his propagandizing efforts to France. Although he did return occasionally to England, he was persuaded that the British had been bought by Northern commerce, and he had nothing to offer to counteract the power of money. France, on the other hand, showed better prospects; he thought that the Emperor Napoleon was personally in favor of granting recognition to the South, and following that more or less as a direct consequence, intervening to halt the war and guarantee the breakup of the Union. Although he may have been correct in his assessment of Napoleon's private thoughts, he gave no evidence to support his psychoanalysis. In fact, he wrote at length and more than once on the ability of the emperor to listen to all sides of an argument, and come to a decision without ever tipping his hand or disclosing his reasons. Based on what is written here, one could as well conclude that the emperor had at best (or at worst, depending on which side of the conflict he is viewed from) a mild hope that the cotton trade with the New World would be revived, but he clearly did not consider it important enough to send his troops halfway around the world to do it. Even that may be too much; his concern for cotton may have arisen simply because French mill workers were unemployed and were taking to the streets in order to force the government to improve their condition. In this view, Napoleon's rather pointless public statements, widely believed to show his partiality toward the South, may have been merely window dressing intended to persuade the populace that he was doing something to ease their plight.\footnote{I refer particularly to his offer to mediate the dispute between Washington and Richmond, if both sides would agree to a suspension of hostilities while negotiations were being conducted, and if both Britain and Russia went along. Of the other parties involved, only the Confederacy could accept the offer. The proposal was made public even before the British and Russians had rejected it, which convinced even De~Leon that it was meant for domestic consumption.}
Because the Civil War ended before the Confederacy was recognized by any of the European powers, we know that De~Leon's best efforts were in vain. The value of his journal, however, is that it reports the reasons for his failure, at least as he saw them. We can dismiss all the court intrigue, the comings and goings of ambassadors and ministers, the personal relations and public faces of the persons involved. These occupy most of the page space in his story, but throughout there is a sense that it is only a pantomime. At bottom, France did not support the South for three reasons that he recognized. In order of increasing importance, they are: \begin{enumerate} \item General ignorance of the Europeans, including the educated upper classes, of even the elementary geography of the conflict. Many thought that the war was between North and South America. A populace that is so unaware of the nature of a conflict is unlikely to be excited enough to do anything about it. \item The slavery issue would not go away, particularly in France. Although this was somewhat diluted by the initial efforts of Lincoln to define the war as one to preserve the Union and not to liberate the slaves, many Southern politicians proclaimed that the issue was to preserve their way of life. To make their point clear, they emphasized that their way of life meant White Supremacy. To his credit, De~Leon realized the negative impact slavery had on civilized opinion, and he wrote to Richmond recommending that a program of gradual emancipation be started. His recommendation was apparently not given even the courtesy of a reply. (The Richmond government was of course under no obligation to respond to the tentative suggestions of a minor official in a strange habitat, but Davis and Co. cannot be absolved of the charge of obstinacy. When a group of high military men in the Western part of the war made a similar suggestion, they were given the same short shrift. Despite persistent assertions by Confederate partisans to the contrary, the Civil War {\em was} about slavery.) \item France had more pressing problems on the Continent, referred to obliquely as the Italian question, the Polish question, and the Greek question. Something of a common thread ran through all three, as they were concerned with problems of political legitimacy, but most immediate was the Italian question. In Italy, Garibaldi had been leading the movement to unify that country, and he continued to have much support among French anti-monarchists. The republicans were quite strong, as the French Revolution was still as active a memory there as was the American Revolution to some of our Civil War generation. Although clearly Emperor Napoleon did not agree with that faction, he could not actively defy them. \end{enumerate}
De~Leon cited one more point, another historical event, to explain his failure, although he drew a rather inverted argument from it. The incident was that an unnamed French consul in Texas had suggested to a senator that the state should separate itself from the Confederacy and ally with the Maximilian government in Mexico. Although this was clearly an unpardonable breach of diplomatic standards, it was also a minor event that has been dismissed by historians. It was handled in the usual way, by a protest sent by Secretary of State Judah Benjamin to his counterpart in France, who responded by recalling the guilty party. The story would have ended there, but De~Leon used it as basis for an attack on Benjamin, who was not one of his favorites. He argued that the protest from Richmond to Paris was insulting to the latter, and so made his own job more difficult. Actually, the incident should have triggered a question in his mind of what he hoped to accomplish. He had shown himself willing to give France what would amount to a protectorate over the Confederacy. The anonymous consul had merely blundered into revealing what it might be like if French, rather than Confederate, interests were to predominate in the region. The lesson to be learned is that nations must earn their own keep. The South would have to be able to sustain itself; by its self-pitying (and persistent) belief that it could have prevailed if only France and England had acted favorably, it demonstrates why it had to die.
\section{A comment on style}
This review has not made extensive reference to the words of De~Leon's writing as they appear on the page, but one facet must be reported, with some distaste. Often, the prose of the last half of the nineteenth century is of a standard that one can refer to without blushing as a Golden Age of letters: think Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Stephen Crane. More to the point, public men also expressed themselves in print with a grace that puts our own times to shame. Think of course of Abraham Lincoln, but also of U. S. Grant and William Sherman, as well as several more minor generals and politicians who recorded their views and experiences on paper. Unfortunately, De~Leon was not in this glorious company. His writing is stiff and cliche-ridden. He attempts to soar, but leaves the reader mystified. As an example, I have culled the following passage, in which he denounces (I think) those operatives who crawled into the sunlight and offered to represent the Confederacy abroad, for a price: \begin{quotation} I shall, therefore, restrict myself to the unction of those who prove their faith by their works, and who actually did and suffered something in addition to talking and writing something at a safe distance from the field of strife---self appointed foreign agents, whose commissions were their own autographs, and whose love for the South was of that peculiar kind which burns most fervently at a distance from the object of affection. (page 18) \end{quotation} This is the worst that I noted, but it is not alone. The tone, if not the misconstruction, is present throughout the book. William L. Yancey is not merely dead: "death has set its seal upon that marked individuality, stilled that fervid heart and silenced that eloquent voice." (page 50) Most Confederate politicians were overconfident, or at least their public statements made them seem so, but "[not] into this delusive mirror gazed the anxious eye of Jefferson Davis---nor the cold clear gaze of Alexander Stephens---unblinded by this glamour was the penetrative vision of Pierre Soul\'e, or the troubled regard of Robert Hunter---the Falklands of our revolution---ever pining for peace, in the midst of the mad game of war." (page 45) The Empress Eugenie is not merely a woman of Spanish ancestry, but she is "a true woman at heart, generous, impulsive, excitable, and with a hot Spanish blood coursing through her veins." (page 25) While mortals are surely guilty of worse sins than writing with their feet, readers should be made aware that De~Leon has not given us a good example of expository writing.
\end{document}
2. No simple victory edit
Davies, Norman, No simple victory: World War II in Europe, 1939–1945. Viking/Penguin, 2006.
\documentclass{article} \renewcommand\today{\number\day\space\ifcase\month\or January\or February\or March\or April\or May\or June\or July\or August\or September\or October\or November\or December\fi\space\number\year} \renewcommand\labelitemi{ }
\title{Norman Davies, {\em No simple victory: World War II in Europe, 1939--1945} (Viking Penguin, 2006).} \author{PKK} \date{\today} \begin{document} \maketitle \section{How the history of World War II should be written} Norman Davies, professor emeritus at London University, is described by some who know him as a man of strong opinions. That description is certainly consistent with the document in hand, which quite deliberately flies in the face of most Western historical writing concerning the war, and more particularly opposes the popular conception of the war. He pursues two arguments at the same time. First is that the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was so great as to dwarf the contribution to victory by all other participants combined. Second is that the Soviet Union under the rule of Stalin and the Communist Party was guilty of sins\footnote{In the present secular world, the word `sin' is customarily replaced by `crime.' The problem with the new word, however, is that a crime is defined with reference to a recognized body of law. As such, it becomes antinomian when the law itself becomes criminal. The word `sin' is now discouraged because of its religious implications, but no other simple construction has yet taken its place. Of course, both words suffer because they embrace human activities that range from swiping candy at the grocery to the mass murder of populations.} that in practice if not in theory were as destructive of human life as anything done by Hitler and his court.
We should note immediately that Davies also is short-sighted in one respect: he largely reduces World War II to its European aspect. Although he recognizes the war with Japan and the constraints it sometimes placed on Allied---mostly American---activity, he makes little use of it. (Somebody---I think it was Basil Liddell Hart, but of this I am not sure---once said that what we lump into the one mass of World War II was actually three wars: the Pacific war, largely between Japan and the United States; the Western European war, between Great Britain, France, the United States, and several small occupied nations on the one hand and Germany and Italy on the other; and then the real war, in which the dominant parties were Germany and the Soviet Union. These three wars went on simultaneously, but with interaction only at the level of logistics.) Forgive him for his limited perspective. The point to be made is that even if the battles between the Americans and the Japanese are thrown into the balance, the Soviet-German combat still far outweighed everything else. Iwo Jima and Okinawa may have been as bloody as the Bulge or Normandy on D-Day, but they still do not compare with any number of battles in the East for loss of life.\footnote{Short-sightedness continues. If one had observed Earth from Mars, he would likely also have noted the war between Japan and China. The losses in that part of the war are if anything less well reported than those in the Soviet Union, for many of the same reasons. That conflict was furthermore confused by the civil war between Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang and the Communists under Mao Tse-tung. Anecdotes have appeared in the West indicating that Chinese losses may have approached or exceeded those of the Soviet Union. So do we have four wars, or five?}
Some historians have tried, with minimal success, to bring accounts of the battles in Eastern Europe to the attention of the English-speaking (and reading) public. A quick scan of Amazon shows many titles now available to anyone who cares to read about the war in the East; the number is probably great enough that no one could read them all in one lifetime. To that extent, Davies writes hyperbolically. On the other hand, very few of these books have commanded much readership. The only World War II history with an Eastern emphasis that I can recall to have had even modest commercial success was Harrison E. Salisbury's {\em The 900 days: the siege of Leningrad} (HarperCollins, 1985). (Note that Salisbury is a journalist, not a historian, but that is not important. Few of the popular accounts of the war in the West were written by professional historians rather than journalists.) Compare the output concerned with the Eastern war with the deluge written about the West, taking as a starting point the titles available at, say, the History Book Club. For every biography of Stalin, you will find a dozen written about Churchill, or Roosevelt, or both of them together. D-Day looms large, but Kursk is forgotten. The name {\em Bagration} draws blank stares, although it took the lives of nearly a half-million soldiers; the Battle of the Bulge was less than ten percent as costly.\footnote{Bagration, the campaign to push the Germans out of the Soviet Union in late 1944, killed 450000; 38000 were lost in the Ardennes. These numbers are taken from Davies's book, as are all others without attribution. The fact that casualties are counted in the civilian manner, so that only those killed seem to matter, does not significantly affect the argument.}
To some measure, the imbalance is inevitable. One reason is the secretive nature of the Soviet Union itself, which kept many of the important documents of its part of the war out of reach. This has been compounded by the obvious fact that they were mostly written in a language or languages that are not as familiar as those of any of the other major parties. Furthermore, the war in the West, insignificant as it may have been in comparison with the struggle between Germany and the USSR, was in absolute terms large enough to keep many generations of historians busy. Given the relative ease of finding material in the West, no one can fault the professional decisions made by most writers to slight the East in their accounts.
A second reason for the Western emphasis is also natural, and is perhaps harmless. It is simply that we are more interested in the activities of the people whom we know. Most Americans, Brits, and Canadians are related to or at least know someone who served in the various armies in Europe. Even those of the younger generation, for whom World War II was as far in the past as the Civil War was for mine, will be most interested in learning why their present military establishment came to be what it is. No one would contend that Stephen Ambrose's recent {\em Band of brothers} is anything other than what it is, an account of a single company of paratroopers in a single army, who got into the war only when it had less than a year to run. Yet no one would contend that it, and its television embodiment, is not a compelling story. Ambrose is not to be chastised for writing it, and the public is not to be criticized for reading it. (I have tried, without success, to imagine how a comparable book would be written about the Red Army. From all that I have read, it seems that no similar company of its soldiers would have lived long enough to provide the dramatic continuity needed for widespread public interest.)
The third reason is not so benign. The fact is that the Soviet Union and the Western powers were allied in the war. More, many persons in high places were enamored of Communism, and consciously ignored the brutality of its practitioners. Just as no history of the war that mentions Germany can avoid discussing the concentration and extermination camps, so no complete history dealing with the Soviet Union can neglect mention of the Gulag,\footnote{Davies renders it GULag, which may be etymologically correct, but is artistically disconcerting.} or of the Katyn massacres of Poles. An honest account would necessarily implicate many of our own citizens and would force many others to revise their opinions of our nation's leaders. Some of those who would be denounced have already been exposed, including Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss, and the Rosenbergs in the US; they are now beyond further condemnation. Many others have gone on about their daily lives, however, and when on rare occasions they have been called to account have counterattacked with the charge of McCarthyism. As a result, a somewhat enforced orthodoxy has settled over the field of study.\footnote{Some reviews of {\em No simple victory} show how it works. Although most reviews have been favorable, in a few Davies is accused of anti-Semitism. The gravamen in one instance is a casual reference on page 489 to `an attention-seeking historian from Britain' imprisoned in Austria for `expressing the wrong shade of opinion.' He violated Austrian law that punishes people who deny the Shoah. The charge against Davies cannot be sustained; at no point in his book has he shown anything but abhorrence of the Nazi policies toward the Jews. In this case, Davies is not arguing that the unnamed historian is correct; his description of the man as `attention-seeking' reveals something of how he regards him. The context, moreover, exonerates him. Davies is not arguing that the Holocaust deniers are correct, but only that they should not be tossed into jail for speaking their views. In his phrase, "If absurdity is banned by the law, wisdom too is diminished."
In another case, Davies is taken to task for making use, without negative comment, of Bryan Mark Rigg's {\em Hitler's Jewish soldiers: the untold story of Nazi racial laws and men of Jewish descent in the German military} (University Press of Kansas, 2002), which states that as many as 150000 men with known Jewish ancestry served in the Wehrmacht; for each, a certificate of Aryan blood had to be signed by Hitler himself. It is Davies's referring to these men `Jewish' that arouses ire. The reviewer points out that these men were not properly Jews according to Jewish law, but were only {\em Mischlinge}, or `mongrels.' Again the charge is unfair; while a {\em Mischling} would not have been a Jew according to the Jews, according to German law he would have been treated as if he were. The surprise to Western eyes is that the Krauts were so willing to overlook their ideology in the interest of expediency. The question of why these men would serve a regime that was opposed to their very existence will have to be addressed later.}
Davies acknowledges the reasons for the imbalance in historical treatment of East and West, but deplores it because it violates two principles that he insists are necessary for the profession: proportionality and even-handedness. Events should be studied in something like proportionality to their significance; only after the general framework has been established should the relatively minor activities be covered. And the two or more sides in a war should not be held to different standards of conduct; if Germany is to be condemned for its brutal distortion of the law, the Soviet Union cannot be allowed to escape similar judgment. If the bombing of Coventry is reprehensible, then the bombing of Hamburg cannot be treated differently. (It is not only the general public and the popular press that are guilty of partiality. As Davies points out, although he does not pursue his argument, during the N\"{u}rnberg Trials German naval officers were accused of practicing unrestricted submarine warfare, controvening treaties governing conduct of war. Those accused were not allowed to introduce as evidence the fact that the United States Navy explicitly waged unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan from the very start of the Pacific war.)
\section{The history that is actually written}
Having stated the requirements for a complete history of the European war, Davies then does not deliver it. It is not that he is either disproportional or skewed in his presentation. Rather, it is that he has not written a history, at least not in the form that has come to be accepted. He does not examine strategy; he does not discuss the allocation of resources; he does not describe battle; his prose is not punctuated by accounts of individual exploits. A book that did so in any detail would be both unreadable and unwritable, the first because it would be too long and the second because no one person can be expected to become expert enough to write about so many different armies, political systems, and societies.
Davies has produced a scaffold for such a comprehensive treatment. Painting only with the broadest brushes, he points out time after time how Western battles and campaigns are dwarfed by simultaneous events in the East. Begin with the North African campaign, in which Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery gained his reputation (in the West) as a military genius at the battle of El Alamein. While the campaign was important for maintaining control of the Suez Canal, and thus kept the British Empire alive for a few more years, it was not central to the war against Germany. It is paired with the battle of Stalingrad, which went on at about the same time, and which {\em was} central. In North Africa, Great Britain was fighting the Afrika Korps; the Soviet Union was facing three army groups.\footnote{In the German Army, as in all modern armies, divisions were organized into corps, corps into armies, and armies into army groups. To make a long story short, the British in North Africa faced only about one-tenth as many German divisions as did the Red Army.} (The majority of Axis troops in North Africa were Italians, but already by this stage of the war the Italian Army was being discounted by everyone not in the Italian Army.)
The pairing of North Africa and Stalingrad shows how cursory is Davies's presentation: the prominent leaders Rommel and Montgomery are mentioned by name, but not Auchinleck or von Arnim, nor any Americans. The only battle mentioned is El Alamein; Tobruk and Kasserine Pass do not appear. At Stalingrad, General Paulus is not named. Furthermore, the major battles are named but not described. In every respect, Davies seems to expect his readers to be familiar with at least the outlines of the campaigns.
Although the requirement that his readers cannot be absolutely ignorant of the Eastern war implies that {\em something} must have been written about it, Davies is concerned with an attitude that, although it may not be quantifiable, certainly exists. Histories written in Great Britain and the United States indeed overemphasize the respective contributions of their own armies; some who try to demonstrate a sort of magnanimous impartiality will give the Red Army lip service and assert that their contribution was of about equal importance to that of the Western Allies, but they do not (and Davies would assert that they {\em cannot}, because it is patently untrue) show the reasoning behind their conclusion. Mostly, the Eastern war is dismissed more or less out of hand. The Soviet victory, when it cannot be denied, is ascribed to two factors: the Russian winter, and a prodigious expenditure of human life. The part played by the former is not credited to Stalin and his generals, but is blamed on Hitler and his. The willingness of the Red Army to lose its soldiers is a matter of historical record; it does not follow, however, that its generals were less competent than their Western peers, or that Soviet tanks and airplanes and artillery were inferior.
For that matter, Davies himself is willing to make unsupported assertions. For example, he makes a stab at rating some of the more important generals in the major armies. Most of his judgments seem to be fairly traditional, in the sense that other historians have said much the same. The sole exception is the case of Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery, whom Davies considers to of lesser importance than do most of his countrymen. Davies explains the low marks, pointing out that no British commanders had the opportunity to show anything like true genius. The nature of the campaigns that they were forced to conduct---after North Africa, the British Army found itself to be subordinate to the newly muscular American Army---meant that no one, no matter what his personal attributes, could make an outstanding contribution to the war.
Given his willingness to downgrade the most highly regarded British soldier, Davies's view of American generalship could be expected to be interesting. He touches on only three: Eisenhower, Marshall, and Patton. He is surprisingly gentle. Eisenhower is described as a master conciliator, the man (and by implication the only man) who could make the coalition between Great Britain and the United States work. By itself, that does not make Eisenhower into a great general, but because the Soviet Union was doing most of the heavy fighting, we did not need a great general on our side.\footnote{Davies makes a point in Eisenhower's favor that I have not seen elsewhere. Eisenhower has often been criticized for halting his armies and letting the Red Army take Berlin, a decision that led to much heartburn in the days of the Cold War. The critics have forgotten, however, that the United States was still fighting Japan, and the soldiers that would have been expended in a continued march on Berlin would not be available for the projected invasion of the Japanese home islands. At the time of the German collapse, the number of expected casualties in the forthcoming invasion of Japan was approximately one million. Those who fault Eisenhower for husbanding his material will have to explain where they would get the soldiers.} Marshall is described as the ideal staff officer, a judgment that will probably be upheld by history. Patton is awarded high marks, which appears to me to imply that he has been held to a lower standard than was Montgomery.
Davies praises several generals of the remaining two major combatants, Germany and the Soviet Union. Although he regards Rommel as the beneficiary of the Western tradition of overestimating the capabilities of the men we face directly, other Germans are rated as very good indeed. First is Guderian, whose advocacy of tank warfare and the practice {\em Blitzkrieg} are among the most significant developments in twentieth-century warfare.
As for the Red Army, Davies selects three: Zhukov, Rokossovski, and Vatutin. Here, his format works against him. Because the basis for his judgment is not given, the casual reader is unable to know whether these three men are truly the best, or whether they represent merely a personal tic of the author. Other Soviet generals are known to the West; for example, Chuikov, who led the final assault on Berlin. Because Davies's thesis is largely true, that the Eastern war has not received adequate coverage among English readers, most of us simply have no basis for acceptance or rejection of his opinions. For all I know, the major event of Rokossovski's and Vatutin's careers was the battle of Kursk (which, by the way, is described somewhat more thoroughly than any other battle, including Stalingrad, in keeping with Davies's stated opinion that Kursk was in fact the turning point in the war). Let us grant that the two generals, facing the best that the Germans could put up against them, combined to win the battle. We---the non-professional public---still do not know what skilled generalship went into the victory. Perhaps Davies is right; unfortunately, we must wait for other authors to tell us.
\section{Why this book should be read despite its shortcomings}
With {\em No simple victory}, Davies has cast a very large rock into the pond of historical writing about the Second World War. Whether it will have the desired effect of bringing forth a more balanced approach to the subject remains to be seen, although I am pessimistic. When we get down to national and/or cultural loyalties, we can only with great difficulty extricate ourselves from our preconceptions. We are led to believe what we want to believe, and historians have written about what they want to write about. There is no denying that D-Day was an important event, presenting an unprecedented operational problem. The campaign in Sicily and Italy marked the real beginning of the American Army as a professional organization. The bombing raids over Germany by the RAF and the US Army Air Corps consumed an inordinate fraction of the war efforts of Britain and the US, the importance of which to the eventual defeat of the Third Reich remains in controversy. The Battle of the Atlantic occupied almost the full attention of the Royal Navy, which started the war as the foremost navy in the world; we must point out that the Soviet Union made very little contribution to the naval war. Considering all this, we must yet conclude that the Soviet Union was dominant by far in the destruction of Nazi Germany. If a quantitative estimate must be given, something like 90 percent of the land war must be ascribed to our Red ally. Throwing the Western air and naval campaigns into the balance alters the ratio somewhat, but it seems safe to say that the East-West split remains at no better than 75--25. The point deserves emphasis: the sum of the contributions of Great Britain, the United States, the French Resistance and the Free French Army, the underground movements in Denmark, Norway, and the Low Countries, Italy after it changed sides, and any other nations using the Roman alphabet that you may wish to include, came to only a fraction of that accomplished by the Soviet Union.
National pride is not the only problem that distorts our national policy. Too often, we regard warfare as a kind of morality play, with forces of Evil arrayed against those of Truth and Life. This is epitomized by the contention between Germany and the West. In a struggle like this, the Right will prevail, and even the atheists believe that God is on our side. When the war is seen like this, the West won because it had to win. Yet, as Davies emphasizes, the truth is far from this Sunday-School imagery. Nazi Germany was defeated principally by a regime that was scarcely better, and morality had little or nothing to do with it.
None of this would matter if nothing more were at stake than some elements of national mythology. We could continue to believe that it was the British-American coalition that finally did Hitler in, and it would do no harm to credit the Soviet success to General Winter and their ability to absorb casualties. Unfortunately, our seemingly harmless mythology has real consequences. Most directly, it has already inspired in us a belief in our own power. The United States is acclaimed as the only remaining Superpower, and we are regarded as friends and foes alike as the remaining pillar of Western Civilization. Not only that, but ours is perceived to be the only way to wage war. Even George W. Bush's most strident enemies do not disagree with these sentiments; the problem he presents for them is only that he has used our national means in ways that they would not. Give them the reins, and the same policies would be effected, but in different places.
In reality, however, our powers are not unlimited, a fact that is obscured so long as we contend with lesser powers such as the fractured nations of the Middle East. But at least two potential threats to our hegemony are likely to arise in the next two or three generations: India and China. For the moment, neither of them seems to wish to challenge our dominance, but that may change if conditions warrant. A conflict between the US and either of these two Asian nations would be in a sense a repeat of World War II in Eastern Europe. In that conflict, a modern industrial state brought its full weight against a primitive antagonist, and lost. In the process, of course, it exacted a horrendous toll. It does us no good to point to the numbers of dead Soviet citizens and think that no nation will ever be willing to endure such losses again. We have in China a country that is certainly willing, and in India another probably so, to squander human life on a scale that we cannot imagine, even if the Russians and Ukrainians can.
This is not to propose surrender even before any serious conflict arises. This issue has been debated in Congress and elsewhere since the 1920s, and the resolution has always been the same: the United States will defend its interests by any means, up to and including war. (Presumably, China and India, and any other state worthy of the name, will do the same.) The experience of Germany should warn us that we should not enter into a contest of arms casually. Warfare is ultimately an exercise in reality, and gives the lie to all sentimentality. If we must fight, we should understand what is being done, without expecting that our opponents will necessarily fight the way we would do under the circumstances. Nor can we expect them to collapse because they cannot match us in our industrial capacity. As was shown in Eastern Europe, even industrially backward nations can produce individuals who can exploit the resource that we cannot match, their manpower, with results that few of us would care to predict.
\end{document}
3. Power at sea edit
Rose, Lisle A., Power at sea, v. 2: the breaking storm, 1919--1945. Columbia : University of Missouri Press, 2007. ISBN 0826216838
In this second volume of his survey of seapower since the time of Albert Thayer Mahan, historian Lisle A. Rose considers the period beginning with the end of World War I and continuing to the end of World War II. Slightly less than half of the book, by page count, is given to the interval of nominal peace. The twenty years 1919--1939 were as important for understanding navies in the later conflict as the war itself, because it was then that most of the fleets that were to fight were shaped, alliances were established and broken, naval doctrine was settled, and the stage set for the final act. When we confront the enormity of the war itself, we tend to forget that it was fought largely with weapons that were more or less fully developed before they were put into use. During the six years in which they were put to the test, their sponsoring governments were so preoccupied with the task at hand that innovation had to be forsworn. The Germans were able to develop some tanks ({\em Panzerkampfwagen} V and VI). They also produced some jet airplanes and their V-1s and V-2s, but these came too late to have much effect on the final outcome. The American landing craft (LSTs, LCVPs, etc.) that figured so largely in the amphibious war were almost entirely new. We had two new fighter airplanes, the Army Air Force's North American P-51 (Mustang) and the Navy's Grumman F6F (Hellcat), and a new bomber, the Boeing B-29 (Superfortress).\footnote{The two fighters were born before the attack on Pearl Harbor, but after the European war began. The P-51 was designed in response to a British request for planes to serve in the Battle of Britain, and was strongly modified in response to evaluations of its performance there. The inception of the F6F was likewise prewar so far as the US was concerned, but it existed mostly only on paper until it was modified explicitly to counter the Japanese Zero.} We also were able to develop and produce the two atomic bombs that were used at the very end of the conflict. Aside from these and a few other scattered examples, the entire war was waged with tools that either were designed at a time when they could not be tested under the conditions to which they would later be exposed, or else were merely leftovers from the preceding Great War. Such was the pace of technological advance that few of the complex weapons systems\footnote{I use the term `complex weapons system' to refer to almost any device that cannot be carried by a private soldier in combat, but I am not sure in my own mind whether to include field artillery.} of the First World War could have any practical use in the Second. Among those that survived, most were in the navies, particularly the battleships. The battleships sunk or extensively damaged at Pearl Harbor included USS {\em Nevada} and {\em Oklahoma}, laid down in 1912, and {\em Arizona} and {\em Pennsylvania}, laid down in 1913. The other four battleships that suffered there were USS {\em California, Tennessee, West Virginia}, and {\em Maryland}, all of which joined the fleet during the 1920s, but all of which had been laid down before the end of (and therefore were designed in response to) World War I. Another notable example of naval conservatism was HMS {\em Hood}, lost with almost all of her crew in the battle with the modern German battleship {\em Bismarck}. She had been laid down in 1916 and commissioned in 1920. All of the old hulls that were kept in the service would see extensive refittings in the two decades between wars, but some basic features were inherent. It was not possible to propel a ship at 30 knots if she had been designed with a top speed of 22 knots, no matter what changes were made in the power plant; 16-inch guns could not be substituted for 14-inch guns; and so on.
In these days of rapid evolution in everything incorporating electronics, beginning with computers but not at all ending there, we have a strong tendency to be puzzled by past conservatism. We overlook the hurdles that even now would have to be overcome in order to reorient an industry, {\em any} industry, in what can be termed, in the jargon of our day, real time. Behind the construction of an object as complicated as a major ship is a chain of design, procurement, and assembly that has the momentum of a glacier. This meant that in times of peace, from three to five years would be needed between the laying of her keel and the commissioning of a battleship. Add to that the time required for design, which must of course precede construction. Given the long lead time, we need not wonder why the major change affecting American battleships in World War II was negative: two vessels of the {\em Iowa} class, USS {\em Illinois} and {\em Kentucky}, were cancelled while they were still on the ways, and another whole class, the {\em Montanas}, were never even started.
Even though the battleship remained the backbone of each of the world's major fleets, developments in several other directions took place between 1919 and 1939 (or 1941 for the Japanese and American navies). Some of these were technological, but among the most important was a round of diplomatic maneuverings in the immediate aftermath of the Great War that resulted in a drastic reshuffling of the power ratings of all the important navies, and, coupled with other features of statecraft or its absence, led to realignments that had the most profound consequences. The primary reference here is to the Washington Naval Conference of 1921--1922 and its follow-up, the London Naval Conference of 1930. The ostensible purpose of the negotiations was to cancel an arms race among the three major fleets, Japan, Great Britain, and the United States, of the sort that was widely believed to have been responsible for the outbreak of the recent war. The description of the conferences, the motivations of the participants, and the effects of the resulting treaties on their respective governments and peoples shows Rose at his best. Every student of World War II---at least, every student of the naval phase of that war---should read the first two chapters of this book. The first chapter shows the reality behind what the newspapers like to refer to as the `high hopes' of the participants, and the second deals with the collapse of pretense at a second London Conference, in 1935.
The treaties disgorged by the first two conferences, in effect abrogated by the third, set limits on naval construction for nine of the principal navies, but were important primarily for the major three. Limits were set for the sizes of capital ships and cruisers, and in addition overall limitations on tonnages in each class were established. The gross tonnage limits for Great Britain, the United States, and Japan were in the ratios 5:5:3, respectively; the argument behind the apparent disparity was that Britain had to serve its Empire all around the world, and the United States had to defend itself on two oceans, whereas Japan had only to concern itself with a portion of the Pacific. The reasoning may have been perfectly sane, as it was accepted by the Japanese negotiators, but it did not sit well with the Japanese public back home. Coupled with a series of other racial slights that are embarrassing to Americans at the present time, the fact that the Japanese were not allowed full parity with their Western competitors led to the immediate breakup of an unspoken alliance between Japan and Britain, and made a future clash between Japan and the US more or less inevitable.
Because Japan and the US eventually went to war and the origins of that war can be traced back to the naval disarmament treaties, most casual historians regard the Washington and London conferences as failures. Although Rose does not state his position explicitly, I infer that he does not agree. As he points out, there were three major navies affected by the treaties, not just two. Britain had been goaded into the war just past by the German attempt to match its Home Fleet. The mere existence of the projected {\em Hochseeflotte} was an intolerable threat to British security that had to be countered. The psychological effect of the sense of vulnerability strained relations between the two nations, causing Britain to enter into alliances against the Germans. The Germans in turn felt their own vulnerability, leading then to further estrangement. The positive-feedback loop soon went out of control, and the result was devastating war. The war had been ended with the extinction of three empires, as has been pointed out on more than one occasion: the Ottoman, the Russian, and the Austro-Hungarian Empires all were no more. In addition, the German monarchy was overthrown. The British Empire alone\footnote{Not quite alone; the Dutch had possession of the East Indies (modern Indonesia), France had a minor outpost in Asia (Indo-China), and several European countries held possessions in Africa.} still lived, no longer threatened by any European power.
Too late, the ruling class in England realized that a new threat had suddenly appeared. The Americans, who could interfere in Europe without aid only by their navy, had been a very minor power until only a very short while before. Not until the Spanish-American War of 1898 had they even had the remotest ability to confront a European nation, but that war was a series of triumphs for the rejuvenated American Navy. From Cuba to the Philippine Islands, the Yanks hunted down the Spanish fleet and sent it to the bottom. That was followed by the world tour of the Great White Fleet, President Theodore Roosevelt's pronouncement that the United States could go wherever it wanted.
In the years before World War I, Britain could shrug off the Great White Fleet and the following build-up of the American Navy, and during the war itself it could regard Cousin Jonathan as a most welcome co-belligerent. But when the shooting stopped, the American fleet did not drop back into its pre-war subservience. The threat that had formerly been posed by Germany had been removed, only to be replaced by precisely the same threat from the United States. While war with the Americans might seem unthinkable---after all, 1812 was more than a century into the past---, so too the recent war with Germany would have seemed unthinkable down almost to the day it broke out. A new arms race was on.
This time, however, was different. The cold, hard reality was that Britain could no longer afford it. It was not a matter of national temperament, or will, or spirit of sacrifice; it was simply a question of cash. The revenue streams from the Empire were no longer adequate to support the shipbuilding program that would be needed to keep safely ahead of the Americans. Put this bluntly: the British Empire was also already gone, together with the Russians, Ottomans, and Austro-Hungarians. The only difference was that no one realized it. The corpse retained its color for another twenty years, until the fall of Singapore to the Japanese on 15 February 1942. From that moment on, pretense of the inborn superiority of members of the white race over other humans could not be sustained.
That was of course unknown to the participants in the naval conferences. All that was known in the deepening economic gloom of the 1920s was that Britain could not afford to build any more ships, so the alternatives it faced were either to strike the Americans before they outmatched the Royal Navy, or find some accommodation that would placate the folks back home. That is just what the conferences did. Although the resulting treaties were presented to the world as a triumph of rationality in the wake of the War to End All Wars, they actually were the result of conventional diplomacy. Their cumulative effect was in fact a major defeat for the British. Previous to the war, one of the articles of faith concerning defense was that the Royal Navy had to be at least as large as the combined strength of any two other navies in the world. Washington and London dismissed that; from 1922 on, the United States Navy by itself would be the equal of the Royal Navy, and thus it had attained co-equal status with the greatest navy in the world. And it had reached this lofty perch without firing a shot.
The other face of the conferences, the relation between the United States and Japan, is often represented as a defeat for the former, particularly because the US did not build up to the levels allowed by the treaties while Japan did, and in fact exceeded some of the limits on individual ships. This argument flies in the face of facts: the experience of 1941 to 1945 shows quite clearly that the Japanese were indeed quite vulnerable. The pity is that the fact had to be demonstrated in a shooting war, rather than recognized by rational thought. Be that as it may, it seems safe to say that the first two conferences represented a diplomatic triumph for the United States.
The 1920s were the decade of naval contraction, and the 1930s were the last period of general expansion. Starting with the breakup of the London conference in 1935, all the major seafaring participants in the approaching new war began to put bigger, faster, and more numerous ships in the water. Some persons might wish to understand just how it was that the battleships laid down in the 1930s were superior to those of just ten years before. (Germany's {\em Bismarck} was not alone. France had {\em Dunkerque, Strasbourg, Richelieu, Jean Bart,} and {\em Clemenceau}. Italy had three ships of the {\em Vittorio Veneto} class. Britain had five in the {\em King George V} class. Most important, Japan had the superbattleships {\em Yamato} and {\em Musashi}, and the US had {\em North Carolina} and {\em Washington} already commissioned before the attack on Pearl Harbor, four of the {\em South Dakota} class already launched and ready to be commissioned in 1942, and the even more ambitious {\em Iowas} already taking shape.) Rose skims over the technical developments, and it would be hard to learn from his presentation why these vessels were so generally feared. He is looking elsewhere. The 1930s, which witnessed the culmination of the battleship design, also saw the great debate between the big gun men and the proponents of air power, and it is here that Rose puts his emphasis. (He also looks at submarines, particularly of the German variety, and I will return to that topic later.)
In the popular press, the contention between the battleship men and the airmen is too often presented as a kind of morality play, with the forces of modernity locked in combat with troglodytes who still might secretly harbor yearnings for the days of grappling hooks and boarding parties. We know how the fight came out, and we cheer the victors. What this caricature overlooks is the complexity of the issue. Every big gun man in every navy knew that aircraft would be important in the next war; what was not known was how they would be used. From the start, two evolutionary streams diverged: land-based and sea-based aircraft. The category of sea-based airplanes then went in three directions: planes that flew off and landed on ships (and were therefore quite similar to, but distinct from, land-based airplanes); float planes; and flying boats. Add to the mix two kinds of lighter-than-air craft, blimps and zeppelins. Each of these general types had its proponents, and no clear winners or losers emerged until the early 1930s.
Turn attention next to the ships that would carry airplanes. Two types immediately appeared, readily distinguishable by their outward appearance: clear flight deck, or with an island (soon enough set to one side, although some of the earliest experimental carriers had central islands) for better control of operations. As it happened, this issue was not resolved. The Japanese eventually chose the unencumbered flight deck, while the other navies mostly adopted the island. Not until after the war was the problem voided by the introduction of the angled flight deck.
Another issue was that of armor for the flight deck. Before the advent of nuclear power, the offensive capabilities of warships required a trade-off among three features: armament (meaning planes, so far as carriers are concerned), speed, and armor. By their very nature, carriers had to be fast, in order to be able to launch and recover their planes, so the balancing act came down to planes versus armor: the more of the one, the less of the other. Japan and the US both decided that the best way to protect their carriers was to have enough planes aloft to keep enemy bombers away. The British carriers, intended for use near Europe and its airfields, had armored flight decks. The result was that a British carrier could hold only from one-half to two-thirds the number of planes on one of her rivals of equal size.
All these issues, which can be regarded as rather mechanical, were also buffeted by a fundamental question of doctrine. Throughout the world, many (but by no means all) proponents of military aircraft argued that they were so distinct from all traditional arms that they should be constituted into a separate service. The result of their clamor was the establishment of the Royal Air Force in Britain and the Luftwaffe in Germany. In the US, more conservative elements maintained control, and all that the visionaries could get was the Army Air Corps, which remained very much a part of the Army throughout the Second World War. More importantly for the topic at hand, naval aviation was retained within the Navy. The fact that the US Navy kept its own air arm may have been due to the influence of its Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAer), Admiral William A. Moffett, who was everything for the naval air arm that the more flamboyant General Billy Mitchell should have been for the Other Side. That is, while he worked to advance the interests of his branch, he made sure that it was integrated into the rest of the service. Moffett, a strong advocate of lighter-than-air aviation, was killed in the crash of the airship USS {\em Akron } in 1933. His successor was Ernest J. King, destined to become Chief of Naval Operations in the coming war. During the tenure of these two men, the US Navy, meaning BuAer, was able to define the several types of aircraft needed for fleet operations: fighters, scout planes, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers. It also developed patrol aircraft, which were typically shore-based. It provided the facilities for training the men who flew the planes. And it (working with BuShips) designed the aircraft carriers.
The significance of the escape of the US naval air arm from the clutches of Billy Mitchell and his henchmen is made clear when we consider the dismal performance of the Royal Air Force in serving the Royal Navy.\footnote{Let me emphasize that the RAF is criticized for its shortcomings in naval air ONLY. For myself, I was alive during the Battle of Britain, and, although I was an American living in Norfolk, VA and not a Brit in England, the world was connected in such a way that those guys were protecting my ass. I remain grateful, and freely acknowledge my debt to them.} In the cash-strapped years of the Depression, the RAF chose not to develop aircraft that were appropriate for carrier operations. When war came, the RAF realized its limitations and handed the problem back to the RN, but it was too late. British ships continued to carry biplanes (the Fairey {\em Swordfish}) until late in the war. They served honorably and sometimes even effectively, but they never had to contend with the Mitsubishi Zero.
(There was another doctrinal issue with naval air, one not considered by Rose: What should be the relation between the air crew and the ship's company on an aircraft carrier? One possibility is that the two remain separate, so the ship becomes little more than a moving airfield, the airmen being free to move from field to field as they would ashore. The alternative is that there is only one ship's company, and if your plane lands on a ship, then, by God and Congress and the United States Navy, you become a part of that company. Note that Ernest King was captain of USS {\em Lexington} at the time this issue must have been resolved, in favor of the argument for integration. I wonder whether it was his personality that imposed the solution. Presumably, this is a topic for some historian.)
Despite the popular attention given to the aircraft carriers of World War II, the war was actually determined by a different alternative to the battleship, the submarine. The threat the U-boats posed to Great Britain, and the exertions that were required to overcome it, are well known, and are covered lucidly by Rose. With his emphasis on the prewar period, he shows how the Germans managed to keep their {\em Unterseeboot} program alive during the time of the Weimar republic. This is another piece of his book that should be read by all serious students of warfare.
The decisive contribution of the American submarines to the war in the Pacific is known to the professionals, but is often forgotten in popular accounts. This is probably because of a deliberate policy laid down by Ernest King when he became Chief of Naval Operations. In order to keep the Japanese in the dark concerning the reason that their ships disappeared, the Navy did not publicize the successes (or, for that matter, the failures) of its subs. Nevertheless, it backed their activities, so that by the end of the war US submarines had accounted for at least half of all tonnage losses sustained by the Japanese fleet, and according to some of the more strident advocates may have been responsible for as much as two-thirds.
(There is another clash of doctrine here. The Japanese submarines were about as good, boat for boat, as those of their opponents, yet they accomplished far less. The reason for the relative American success is that their orders enabled them to attack cargo vessels as well as warships, while the Japanese concentrated their efforts on the latter. In fact, tankers were considered to be prime targets, almost as important as battleships and aircraft carriers. By late 1944, the resulting shortage of fuel virtually paralyzed the Japanese fleet.)
Rose has an interesting perspective on the continuation of the interwar navies into the time of battle. He puts great stress on the methods of discipline that each nation practiced, with emphasis on the Japanese, British, and Americans. He is not the first to mention it, but he is the first I know of to examine it realistically. Coffee-shop admirals often speak admiringly of the rigorous training that the Japanese practiced, implying that the cosseted American bluejackets would suffer unnecessarily when they came up against the hardships of combat that their training did not prepare them for. Rose considers the argument critically, and finds that it is incorrect. The simple fact is that the mollycoddled American sailors and marines were able to submit to every demand of the battlefield when it became necessary, and acquit themselves well. The `soft' treatment of its seamen enabled the US Navy to keep its ships on station literally for months at a time, beyond the point where men who were daily subjected to harsh discipline and ill-treatment would have cracked. This was at least as important as the supply line for maintaining pressure on the enemy. (In fact, it was the reason for the supply line.) It should not be forgotten, although often it is, that the softies won. The evidence lies all over the Western Pacific, on its floor and on its islands.\footnote{On behalf of my Old Man, Chief Water Tender Peter K. Kloeppel, USN, I wish to thank Rose for his recognition that the men in the forecastle can be motivated to do their duty in the same way as those on the quarterdeck. Even more, I thank those numerous persons, either civilian or of high rank, who over the course of a hundred years established the system that Rose has bought into.}
Not only was the inhumane discipline of other navies irrelevant to their real mission, which was to defend national interests; Rose goes further and shows that it could be actually detrimental. The example he takes is the training of Japanese airmen. This was a process that subjected applicants to treatment that, aside from the exemption from absorbing real bullets, was actually worse than true combat conditions. The highly stressful, brutal training period eliminated most of those who entered, leaving at the end a small number of the most highly skilled flyers. What was not foreseen was that these men would know that they were good, that they could survive anything that was thrown at them, and so they would feel free to become discipline problems. Self-confident beyond mere cockiness, they showed contempt for death by doing crazy things aloft, with the result that their numbers were greatly reduced by operational losses that should not have taken place. Furthermore, because the training had so strongly emphasized individual skills, they were incapable of submitting to the discipline (that word again) of coordinating their movements with those of other fliers.
Even worse, the training that had produced a handful of the best pilots in the world could not be adapted to accommodate larger numbers of replacements, necessarily by men who were not quite so capable, when the inevitable processes of attrition kicked in. Already by the end of 1942, the US Navy was rotating its best combat airmen back to the States, there to train the next generation of fliers. The Japanese kept theirs at the front until they and their skills were lost, and they were replaced by untrained men who had to learn on the job. In the end, they were flying men off carriers who could return to their ships only with difficulty.
After all the preparations, war finally came, and Rose has to say something about it. As this is a survey, his treatment would necessarily be rather superficial, and it is made even more so by deliberate choice of the author. He relies upon the works of others to make the details of battles known. Thus, for example, if one did not already know how the sacrifice of Torpedo Squadron 8 contributed to the victory at Midway, he would not find a sufficient explanation here. Instead of describing battles, Rose occasionally discourses at length on factors that led up to the battle and then on the reactions after the contending fleets had sailed off in opposite directions. Three of these essay-type insertions are important enough that I will consider them here: the events are the attack on Pearl Harbor, the British sinking of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, and the final capitulation of Japan in response to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
As for Pearl Harbor, Rose considers whether the treatment given to Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and General Walter Short was appropriate. In the aftermath of the attack, both were charged with dereliction of duty and removed from command. Short more or less accepted the verdict, but Kimmel spent much of the rest of his life trying to have it reversed. With both men now dead, others have taken it upon themselves to rehabilitate their memories; some of the revisionists, such as Kimmel's direct descendants, have obvious interests to uphold, but others seem to be motivated more by political calculation. The injection of partisan politics into the discussion has long since obscured the issue. After weighing the arguments pro and con fairly, Rose reaches the conclusion that the punishment was what it should be. In the final analysis, it cannot be denied that Pearl Harbor was a major defeat for the United States, and the men on the spot had to go. Even if the fleet had not been caught napping, if it had performed as it was supposed to, had gone forth to meet the enemy and had suffered its losses in honorable combat,\footnote{The fate of HMS {\em Repulse} and {\em Prince of Wales} a few days later showed that battleships undefended by air could not win.} the defeat was so complete that its leaders would have had to be replaced. Someone had to be blamed, and a weak verdict such as that "everyone is at fault," while it may have been true, would have undermined the public trust that its leaders could rescue the situation and prosecute the war. Kimmel and Short may have been decent men, but war is a very cruel business.
I agree with Rose in accepting the conventional evaluation of responsibility for the defeat at Pearl Harbor, but the attack on the anchored French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir is something else again. Few American historians have weighed in, and those who have done so seem virtually unanimous in agreeing that the attack, while unfortunate, was the only option open to Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Some readers may be surprised to learn that European sentiment, including that of the British, is not nearly so favorable. For perhaps the only time in my life, I think that the Europeans are correct and the Americans are wrong. For one thing, there was an alternative: he could have ordered the Royal Navy to attack the Italian fleet, which was a more realistic threat than the French. To go after the Italians would have been riskier, but it would have been more honorable. The men who had to do the dirty work felt so at the time. Admiral James Somerville (RN), the man who had to carry out the attack against his best judgment, described it as "the biggest political blunder of modern times and will rouse the whole world against us."
Because most Americans are unfamiliar with the event in question, let us pause briefly to describe it. At the fall of France to the Germans in June 1940, one of the articles of capitulation, insisted upon by the French and accepted by the Germans, was that the fleet would not be turned over to the Germans.\footnote{The Germans had no plans to violate the agreement. Indeed, we now know that Hitler would not have known what to do with the ships if they had come into his control.} The provision was publicized and was known by the British, but Churchill chose to disregard it. He was obsessed with the possibility that the {\em Kriegsmarine} could be augmented by many if not most of the modern French battleships, and would then be better able to confront the Royal Navy. What was left of the French Navy at this time was scattered, some in France, some already taking refuge in British ports, and others in ports of French possessions in the Mediterranean Ocean. The largest concentration was a group of four battleships, two ancient and two quite modern, plus several smaller warships, at Mers-el-Kebir, a port in Algeria at the western end of the Gulf of Oran.
In early July, Churchill ordered elements of the Royal Navy to deliver an ultimatum to the French Navy, offering them the choice of either joining up immediately with the Royal Navy or sailing to some neutral port (probably meaning in the United States), there to remain at anchor throughout the rest of the war. Barring acceptance of either alternative, the British were ordered "to take whatever force may be necessary to prevent [the French] ships from falling into German hands." Admiral Somerville, quoted above, was ordered despite his strenuous objections to carry the ultimatum to the fleet at Mers-el-Kebir.
On 3 July 1940, the British ultimatum was delivered. The representatives of Admiral Somerville met with Admiral Marcel-Bruno Gensoul, who reported to Admiral Francois Darlan, Minister of the Navy in the Vichy government. Apparently the full text of the ultimatum was not delivered to Darlan, but for whatever reason, he rejected it. In accordance with their orders, the British ships opened fire on their former allies late in the afternoon. In the ensuing firefight, battleship {\em Bretagne} was sunk and three other French ships were driven ashore; battleship {\em Strasbourg} and four destroyers made their way to sea and escaped to Toulon. No hits were made on British ships in the return fire. The battle resulted in the deaths of 1297 French sailors, more than half of whom went down with {\em Bretagne}; about one-fourth as many were wounded. British loss amounted to the crew of one airplane that crashed during preliminaries to the bombardment.
Reaction to the incident was immediate. Perhaps Somerville's fear that "the whole world will rouse against us" was not realized, but that was because the world soon was made aware of even greater atrocities, and the loss of a thousand or so sailors sent a weak signal that was lost in the noise. Certainly the people of France were enraged; their reaction was very much like that of the Americans in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor, with the humiliating difference that they could not do anything about it. (The fact that the gut reactions of the French people to the loss of their flesh and bone were like those of Americans in a similar situation should give pause to anyone who thinks that the attack was nothing much to worry about.) Not even the British approved. According to Stephen Roskill, one of the foremost historians of the modern Royal Navy, ninety percent of its members believe that the attack on their recent allies was a blunder. Presumably a survey of the French Navy would reveal an even stronger condemnation.
No one to my knowledge has measured the reaction of the US Navy to Mers-el-Kebir. Perhaps a survey would be detrimental to the state of understanding that has dominated relations between the United States and the United Kingdom for the last half-century, but the question still has some historical interest. For instance, Ernie King's Anglophobia is well known, having been attested by everyone who has written about him. A similar distrust of everything British seems to have been common in the US Navy in that era. The question is immediate: How much of this antipathy was response to the attack on other sailors? The men in the wardrooms of the US ships knew that they had no greater claim to the favor of the Royal Navy than did the French. When they stood on their bridges and looked forward to see the opposing German fleet, did they also have to look aft at their allies?
Although the French could not respond as the Americans did after Pearl Harbor, they did not forget British perfidy. The strain on relations between the two nations, which did not exclude the Free French under General Charles de Gaulle, resulted in distortions of strategy for the remainder of the war. One of the early consequences was that when the Western Allies resolved to invade North Africa in November 1942, the invasion of Algeria had to be led by the inexperienced US Army instead of the battle-hardened British troops. Another consequence was that the cross-Channel reinvasion of Europe, so strongly desired by the Americans (and even more desired by the Soviet Union, desperately fighting for its continued existence after 1941), would not be supported by the French, and therefore would not succeed. Consequently, when the Western Allies again came ashore on Europe, the invasion site was Italy, topographically perhaps the worst place on the continent to face a determined and skillful foe.
Some persons who defend Churchill try to put a good face on it, saying that the incident demonstrated British resolve. With greater likelihood, their opponents can argue that it was instead an act of desperation. The message that he sent was that Great Britain was retiring from the Continent, and whatever interests the country had there were sacrificed for the Royal Navy. We know that the British---along with the Americans---did in fact go back across the Channel, but that was only after four more years had passed. In the meantime, Hitler had saved Churchill's bacon by invading the Soviet Union. Had he not done that, the Western Allies would not have been able to establish themselves on any part of Continental Europe, every square kilometer of which to the west of Poland would still be in German control. (All right, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal were still independent. Does that make it better?)
The attack on Mers-el-Kebir has long since faded from public view, if ever it attracted attention, but that cannot be said of the end of the war on Japan. A segment of the American public is convinced that dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an atrocity that dwarfed anything that the Japanese had done to deserve it, such as Pearl Harbor or Nanking. While theirs is a minority position, it is a very vocal minority, and in fact is represented in some official activities of the US government. (I refer here to the controversy a short time ago concerning the labeling of the exhibit of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.) Because these people have everything that we believe about morality on their side, those who think the bombings were justified are forced into a defensive crouch and have to resort to estimating the costs of any alternative.
Make no mistake about it. All the alternatives that were proposed were costly. The simplest and most direct, the invasion of the home islands (Operations Olympic and Coronet), was projected to cost more than $200\,000$ American lives; Japanese losses would have been far greater, but were considered to be irrelevant anyway. Some opponents of the bomb argue that the estimate has been inflated, but it seems in fact to be too low. Japanese tactics had been revised since the early days of the war, and at the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, they were able to extract one American casualty for each Japanese lost. (The difference was that the Japanese casualties were all dead, whereas only about one-fourth of the American casualties were dead, the rest being `merely' wounded.) Consider now that the Japanese Army still had four million men under arms at the end of the war, and they could be expected to fight at least as fanatically for the home islands as their dead comrades had done at Iwo Jima. Anybody can do the arithmetic.
Long after the war was over and all significant persons had passed away, a pair of security analysts, Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, discovered a memorandum that discussed one way to minimize American casualties. They found that Admiral King and General George C. Marshall had submitted to the President a proposal to drop tens of thousands of tons\footnote{The number they bandied about is incredibly precise: 56583 tons.} of poison gas on Japanese cities, which would undoubtedly have killed millions. From the context, it is not clear whether President Truman ever seriously considered using gas. The argument against doing so was primarily that it was contrary to both letter and spirit of numerous treaties that the US has signed and continued to support. (Let it be noted that the same treaties and conventions also forbade bombing civilian populations, but that had long since been forgotten.)
Then there was the Navy solution, which was simply to starve Japan into surrender. After the virtual annihilation of their fleet at Leyte Gulf in October 1944, the Japanese had no effective counter to a blockade, while the Americans had the means to make it almost perfect, down to the level of fishing boats. Objections to this plan are more speculative than usual, but they center on the use of kamikaze and similar suicide attacks. These had been introduced during the Okinawa campaign, and they were apparently more effective than the authorities were willing to reveal while the war lasted. Perhaps with time the fleet could have developed more effective countermeasures; but also with time, perhaps the Japanese could have made them even worse. Wars are fought in real time, and to give an enemy time to lick his wounds almost always leads to disaster. Blockades are effective in limited wars that are concerned with issues of trade; some other solution had to be found for the ideological war between the US and Japan.
That still leaves my personal favorite, to simply forget about the demand for unconditional surrender. The objection was (and still is) made that doing so would somehow legitimize Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, Nanking, and all the rest of it. Maybe it would, but so what? To live in this world means that we have to go to bed with some unsavory characters. We found reasons to tolerate, even ally ourselves with, Stalin's Soviet Union. From the time that the Tojo government fell in consequence of our capture of Saipan, diplomacy could have achieved almost everything that we finally had to earn by force of arms. Had we been prepared to come to an arrangement with Japan, a half-million Japanese would have lived a little longer, and that would have pleased my friends on the left. It also would have meant that something like 40000 young Americans would have lived longer, and that would have pleased my friends on the right. And me. Many believe that the Japanese government, dominated by the extreme militarists who had initiated the war, would not have engaged in meaningful negotiations, but that is conjecture. What cannot be denied is that the United States government never made any overtures on its own, and did not respond to any tentative offers from Japan.
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Joseph T. Durkin, Confederate Navy chief: Stephen R. Mallory. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1987. ISBN 0872495183
Secretary of the Navy Stephen Russell Mallory was one of the more maligned members of the central government of the Confederate States of America. Although he was one of only two persons to retain their positions in President Jefferson Davis's cabinet throughout the war (the other was Postmaster General John H. Reagan), accusations of professional incompetence were raised against him long before the war was over, and they have continued abated only by time ever since. The present work is an effort by author Joseph T. Durkin to provide a more sympathetic account of the man. Probably nothing can be done to rehabilitate him completely; the fundamental judgment must rest on the fact that the South lost the war, and if the blame that attaches to him for that is lessened because others did not give him the tools he needed, he still must be held accountable for not defending his program more strenuously. His counterpart in the Federal government, Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, started out under precisely the same handicap, but he was able to overcome it by insisting on his prerogatives. By the second year of the war, he had built a respectable navy, something that eluded Mallory. Nevertheless, Durkin has done his best to present Mallory in a favorable light, and he has to some extent succeeded.\footnote{A measure of his success is that the book, originally published by the University of North Carolina Press, was selected for republication in the Classics of Maritime History series of the University of South Carolina, whose editor is the eminent historian William N. Still, Jr.}
The biography can be divided into four parts: his early life, his prewar career in the United States Senate, the Civil War years, and his activities in the era of Reconstruction. Two common threads run through all of them: his Catholicism and his family life, particularly the relationship with his wife Angela. His formative years are dealt with in a peculiar manner; nothing is written until he arrives with his family at Key West, when he is nine or ten years old. The date, even the year, of his birth is uncertain. For that matter, his birthplace is not stated in this book; one is left to infer that it was Trinidad, in the Barbados, where his parents were married.
As presented in this narrative, his youth, education, early adulthood, court\-ship of Angela Moreno, law practice, and business affairs seem to have been quite ordinary, in the sense that nothing appears to indicate that Mallory was anything other than a moderately successful citizen. No central galvanizing experience sends him on his way to greatness, or at least to whatever greatness attaches to the office of Secretary of the Navy in the cabinet of Jefferson Davis. It may be necessary to tell this part of the story, but it provides no useful insights into his character.
As the phrase has it, the plot thickens with Mallory's entry into the United States government service as Senator from Florida. First appointed in 1851, he continued to serve there until Florida passed its secession ordnance in 1861, whereupon he took his leave. In the intervening years, he encountered several issues that bore upon his later career in the Confederate government. Foremost among his experiences was his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs, where he came face to face with many of the issues that were revolutionizing naval warfare in the period between 1830 and 1860. In retrospect, we can see the attitudes he gained while in the Senate were kept when he served the government that tried to dissociate from that Senate. He had to consider bills sponsoring construction of the Stevens Battery, a strange craft that kept evolving far from its original design, but would have been the world's first iron-covered vessel if it had been completed on schedule. The Stevens Battery finally morphed into nothing more than a boondoggle, but we can see in it the germ of Mallory's interest in armored warships. To improve a navy that needed improving, he sponsored legislation providing for compulsory retirement of infirm or incompetent naval officers who could not command ships at sea. (Among those forced into retirement was the crippled Matthew Fontaine Maury, whose resentment brought him into conflict with the chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee. Maury's hatred for Mallory continued into the time when both served the Confederacy, and Maury became one of Mallory's most severe critics.) As Secretary of the Navy, he confronted the same problem in the Confederate Navy, and was prepared to deal with it. Durkin also mentions that Mallory favored reinstituting flogging in the US Navy. That form of corporal punishment had been banished in, I believe, 1850. The Senator argued that the captain of a ship had to use the lash, or at least the threat of the lash, to make his crew carry out his mission. He clearly did not accept the notion that men in the lower rates could be motivated to do their duty by the same influences that prompted the quarterdeck. Thus, at the time that the US Navy was thrashing out a host of reforms,\footnote{The technical reforms were not independent of humanitarian reforms; the steam-powered, big-gun navy could not be operated by the riffraff who lived for nothing other than the day's grog ration.} Mallory was looking back to practices appropriate to the days of grappling hooks and boarding parties. Whether his attitude carried over into the Confederacy, and whether it had any influence on the methods of discipline in the Confederate Navy, is not traced out; in any case, it points out that Mallory's personality had a dark side. Perhaps nothing else could be expected from a man who was, after all, a slave-holder.
Although the past is indeed prologue, it is only that, and it is upon Mallory's tenure as Secretary of the Navy that his claim to notability rests. A few negative points must be gotten out of the way in discussing this. First, clearly Durkin is not a naval historian, as he makes some elementary mistakes in writing of naval matters. In the early pages of the book, he misidentifies Commodore David Porter, a hero of the War of 1812, with his son David Dixon Porter, destined to become the US Navy's second admiral for his service in the Civil War. Later, in crediting Mallory's Navy Department with inventiveness that properly should be credited to others, he mentions the submarine {\em H.~L.~Hunley}, but fails to observe that she was operating as a surface vessel when she made her epochal attack on USS {\em Housatonic}. Fair enough; almost no accounts note the fact, and in this case, the myth is indeed more important than the reality. People, including very influential people, believed that {\em Hunley} had shown that submarines could be successful, and they then were encouraged to try it again. It is not so easy to forgive Durkin for his next error, however, when he refers to the Confederate Davids\footnote{The Davids were a class of vessels, not a single craft named {\em David}. Their common features were that they would be small and low in the water, and would carry a spar torpedo as their only offensive weapon. Durkin recounts the first successful attack by a David.} as submarines. Some of them were vessels of very low freeboard, but none of them were intended to operate beneath the surface. More important than the question of what constitutes a submarine is that the development of the Davids proceeded without material aid from Richmond. The best that can be said is that Mallory did not obstruct the process.
These points are quibbles, however, because Mallory was an administrator and not a seaman (although support for development of submarines and torpedo boats should have been in his purview). He must be judged on the basis of how well he conducted the business of his department, and how effective he was in defining an overall strategy for the Confederate Navy. In regard to the first, Durkin's view is that the Navy Department suffered very much from the low expectations of most members of the Confederate government, and indeed probably of most Southerners, including particularly President Davis. (Durkin does not refer even indirectly to Robert E. Lee, but he could well have done so.) Because nobody --- at least nobody of sufficient importance --- understood sea power, the Navy throughout the war had to make do with the table crumbs left behind after the Army had its fill. A feedback system operated here: because warships were not believed to be useful, they were denied the resources needed to bring them along. Then, they would be pressed into service in a state of panic, more often than not before they were complete and certainly before their crews were trained. Under the circumstances, their failure was foreordained. Then, because they had not lived up to their modest expectations, the next generation of ships would be stinted of men and materials, and the process would be repeated.
Thus, Mallory's greatest achievement came to be brought down by his most glaring failure. He had been a leading advocate of the use of iron-covered warships. From his first days in office, he had been outspoken in his support for large, heavily armored vessels, and he had gathered about him a group of naval men who shared his passion. From their collaboration sprang CSS {\em Virginia}, built on the wreck of USS {\em Merrimack},\footnote{The spelling of the name according to the US Navy was {\em Merrimack}; Durkin, in common with much of the contemporary press, both North and South, consistently uses the variant {\em Merrimac}.} At Hampton Roads in March 1862, the Civil War not quite one year old, {\em Virginia/Merrimack} destroyed two major Federal warships, and thereby demonstrated Mallory's thesis: the day of the wooden-hulled warship was over. Unfortunately for his side of the conflict, on the very next day, the Federal ironclad USS {\em Monitor} engaged the Confederate champion. The resulting draw\footnote{Let me praise the author for not falling into the trap of trying to declare one or the other of the two ships the "victor."} demonstrated the truth of Durkin's argument that an armored vessel would be an "ultimate weapon" only if one side had it and the other did not.
Hampton Roads was the peak of Mallory's career, as the author asserts, but he was unable to remain at the top for long. Only a month and a half later, Farragut steamed his fleet past the forts guarding New Orleans, and in the process forced the Confederacy to destroy two of their ironclads before they even came into the sort of action for which they were intended. The double loss of CSS {\em Louisiana} and {\em Mississippi} was caused more by administrative ineptitude than by failure of the weapons systems. Although both had been intended to be ready early in 1862, neither was complete in late April, when Farragut made his move. {\em Louisiana}, her engines not capable of moving her against the current, was towed into position to serve as a floating battery; her guns may have fired as few as twelve shots before her part of the battle was over. {\em Mississippi} was not even that far advanced; her engines were not connected to the screws, some of her armor still lay in the railroad yards, and she had no crew. She was hastily launched and burned to avoid capture. Many reasons can be given for the schedule slippage: labor troubles, deterioration of the economy, inability of the Southern railroads to deliver materials in a timely fashion, interference with the builders by outside parties (including the Confederate Army), and so on. Whatever the reason or combination of reasons, Mallory came to bear most of the blame. Others may have interfered with his plans, but ultimately that can mean only that his plans were unrealistic; he should have overcome the interference, or at least have taken it into account.
(The author does not address the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that {\em Louisiana} and {\em Mississippi} would not have lived up to their advance billing. Certainly, if either of them had been able to perform as well as the builders claimed, she would have been truly formidable. But strong testimony indicates that the former vessel was far less impressive than advertised; and as for {\em Mississippi}, an engineer --- any person involved in the design of complex systems --- would be skeptical that any such radical design could work flawlessly from the outset.)
Concerning the loss of New Orleans, Durkin does make one additional effort to absolve Mallory, in combination with all other responsible members of the Davis government. He points out, quite rightly, that they had every reason to fear an attack on the city from above. The South had already lost at Columbus, New Madrid, and Island No.~10, and were preparing to cede Memphis without a fight. The North was moving aggressively; the author refers to spies who were active in Northern shipyards and other industries, where weapons were being forged for a thrust down the Mississippi. Davis and his advisers had to gamble that the forts below New Orleans would be adequate, and they lost the gamble. Simply put, the South was faced with an insoluble problem: If Farragut had been opposed by forces adequate to keep him at bay, the Mississippi River Squadron would have come in from the north; defending against the northern force left the door open for the West Gulf Squadron. Some checkmates are forced.
The South never recovered from the loss of New Orleans, and the Confederate Navy went into a permanent state of decline. A measure of its irrelevance for the rest of the war can be detected in the history of CSS {\em Arkansas}. Her passage of the Federal fleets at Vicksburg is often cited as the preeminent exploit of the CS Navy on the Mississippi River and its tributaries. No matter what it shows about Southern gallantry or Northern complacence, we cannot escape the fact that her accomplishment was that she was not sunk. Naval traditions are not built on such flimsy foundations.
Along with developing an ironclad navy, Mallory's chief concern was to break up the blockade of Southern seaports by the US Navy. This conceivably could have been accomplished either by direct confrontation or indirectly, by forcing Gideon Welles to draw off his own limited naval resources to combat Confederate ships on the open seas. Some of the CS Navy's ironclads, including no less than CSS {\em Virginia/Merrimack}, were intended for precisely this service. No other Rebel ironclad even approached that initial success.
The indirect approach used two classes of vessels: privateers and commissioned raiders. The privateers were not in Mallory's domain, and at any rate they were not very useful. (Durkin's favorable evaluation of privateers cannot square with the record.) By contrast, the raiders succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams; a half dozen or so ships reduced the American merchant fleet to a small fraction of its prewar size, forced most ships to move to foreign flags, and had almost no effect on the war. Contrary to Mallory's expectation, Welles and Company in the North refused to be diverted from the blockade; they looked with complacency on the reflagging of American shipping, and let the international commerce be carried on as before, now in foreign bottoms.
So Mallory's public career ended in futility. The war ended, and he, like many others in the Davis administration, was jailed on the accusation of treason. He and the others were never put to trial, and eventually he petitioned President Andrew Johnson for release. Durkin points out that his petition misrepresents his participation in the secession movement, but that is to be expected; he was, after all, trying to get out of jail. His petition was supported by his wife Angela, who went to Washington to buttonhole former colleagues in the Senate to work in his behalf. The effectiveness of his petitions and Angela's politicking is not evaluated, as Durkin does not inquire into the thought processes of the victors, but in March 1866, Mallory was paroled, with the understanding that he would not again enter politics. He was otherwise once again a free man.
True to his promise, Mallory did not seek office. His nature was such, however, that he could not refrain from observing the events of the day, and eventually commenting on them. This was the era of Reconstruction, and Florida, to which he had returned, was still run by a combination of military officers, opportunists from the North, freed blacks, and Southerners who had made their peace with the Republican party. The attitude of the former slave-holders was one of scorn for all of them (the military perhaps less so than the others), encapsulated in the terms for the governing whites: those who came down from the North were carpetbaggers, while the native Southerners were scalawags. Probably only a very small minority of people alive today can understand the emotional freight that these almost quaint terms carried; they were in their time more pejorative than the more familiar term `damyankee,' which will be remembered to have been used even by cultivated ladies. Of course, the blacks were given even worse labels.
If this had been a novel, a reader might expect that the central character might be transformed by his experiences. One could hope that Mallory would see the way to a bright future, with the defeated South fully integrated into the restored nation. Unfortunately, it did not work that way. Mallory remained very much a man of his class and time. His letters to his family reveal that he was very much an unreconstructed Rebel; his public utterances, though perhaps more temperate, also are delivered in the code adopted by succeeding generations of his breed to obscure the thoughts that they were not afraid to utter in private.
The particular code phrase that had longest duration, and greatest negative consequences, was "the Negro." It is not the word {\em Negro} that offends, although it has gone out of fashion. As recently as 1954, when this book was first published, it was perhaps the preferred term for reference to people of that particular color. I cannot tell whether Durkin uses it by his own choice, or whether he is imitating the style of his subject. Whether it is Mallory or Durkin speaking, the problem is that the phrase in question implies an attitude that produced --- and continues to produce --- the darkest side of our national culture. (I leave open the question of whether we are worse in this regard than any other nation. I concern myself only with the United States.) When one refers to "the Negro," he is lumping all members of a group united only by genetics into a single class, without the melioration of statistics. "The Negro" is nameless, faceless, even sexless; in short, deprived of every aspect of humanity except shape. Once the notion of "the Negro" is accepted, a we-they relation is established, and from that all else follows.
Mallory should not be condemned for his attitudes, as he was merely reflecting his time and upbringing. If we are not allowed to pardon a man for that, we will find ourselves deserving the scorn of future generations who, moving into a different manner of life, would hold us at fault for not seeing virtue as they see it. But neither can he be praised. Other men of similar backgrounds rose above their origins, and it is to them that we today can credit what we believe to be our better polity.
Because Mallory was clearly willing to segregate persons on the basis of skin color, one may wish to understand how he felt as a Catholic in a predominantly, perhaps overwhelmingly, Protestant society. Did the slights he received make him any more understanding of the plight of the former slaves? Indeed, was he slighted in any way because of his religion? The record presented here shows nothing to suggest that his religion was anything other than something external, no matter how passionately he clung to its externalities. I am not sure of what to make of this. On the one hand, one would hope that a higher religion, any religion that has advanced beyond mere magic, would elevate the souls of its practitioners. On the other hand, to demand that would be to require that adherents would be different from the rest of us sinners; seen this way, Mallory's story is a reminder, if we need one, that Catholics are ultimately indistinguishable from anyone else. And that is a good thing.
So in the end we are left with the image of a man who had a larger impact on history than most, even if his major contribution, the armored warship. was very much in the air and would undoubtedly have been developed had he never existed. At the same time, however, he was very much just an ordinary man. But other men were extraordinary, and they are the ones we honor, even as we fall short of their ideals.
\vskip 10pt Let me here inject a note of thanks to the editors, or publishers, or whomever, for a formatting policy that is altogether too uncommon at present. I refer to the use of footnotes, as contrasted with endnotes. I had forgotten how useful I find it to be able to drop my eyes to the bottom of the page for explanatory or tangential material that cannot be worked into the text, but still illuminates it somehow. In the days of hand-setting of type, perhaps endnotes represented a cost-cutting benefit that outweighed the additional burden on the reader. Now that the text is prepared by computer, however, I hope that we return more often to those convenient if not thrilling days of yesteryear.
Comment: I wrote this review in 2009, and shortly thereafter ran across Rodman L. Underwood's more recent biography of Mallory. It has not forced me to reconsider anything that I had written, but it does provide a somewhat different perspective. My review of Underwood's book appears below (Number 6).
5. Warlord: a life of Winston Churchill at war, 1874–1945 edit
D'Este, Carlo, Warlord: a life of Winston Churchill at war, 1874–1945. Harper, 2008. ISBN 9780060575731
Carlo D'Este made his reputation writing books concerned with the operational history of World War II, specifically his trilogy concerned with the campaigns of the Western allies in Sicily, Italy, and Normandy following D-Day. Drawing from his own military experience (he was a career officer in the Unites States Army, and retired as a lieutenant colonel before he began his second career as a military historian), he produced some of the most informative histories of their respective subjects that have yet appeared. Following the success of his operational histories, he turned to biographies of several of the persons who were actively engaged in the events that he had covered. First was his study of General George S. Patton, which was followed by a treatment of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He has now extended his work with a biography of Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister during most of World War II and very much a participant in the events that have circumscribed his writing.
Note at the outset that D'Este is a {\em military} historian. He brings his perspective to his writing, and therefore some of his biographical subjects are presented in ways that differ significantly from more conventional biographies. Some reviewers have taken him to task, arguing that it has limited his coverage, and concluding that other, fuller, biographies are to be preferred. Perhaps they are right, if one's intent is to understand Churchill the man. For those of us who are interested primarily in the conduct of the war and how its architects influenced it, however, this more limited approach is to be preferred. In the final analysis, we are not particularly concerned with Churchill's relationship with his father, his mother, his wife, his son, or his daughters. (With the possible exception of his wife Clementine, all of his personal relationships appear to have been unsatisfactory, and even Clementine seems to have had only a marginal effect on his life.) Even as we acknowledge that D'Este's biography is incomplete, for Churchill an emphasis on military affairs covers virtually all of his public life. Only men who have devoted their lives to war---that is, professional soldiers and sailors---are so intimately bound up with the military life. Seemingly from the time he was born, Churchill was propelled by a fascination for war; note the dates in the title---1874 was the year of his birth, 1945 marked the end of World War II. The implication is that Winston's childhood, which he spent playing with his extensive collection of toy soldiers, was of one piece with the adult life in which he sought glory in battle.
Emerging from D'Este's pen is a portrait of a man of overriding ambition; who was almost sybaritically self-absorbed in a time of national peril; who drank too much (at the end, some of his close advisers thought that perhaps his drinking had interfered with his thoughts); who drove his subordinates unmercifully without respect for their biological capabilities; who promoted and sacked his admirals and generals on grounds that were sometimes justified, but as often were little more than personal whim; who interfered with the conduct of the war at a level far beyond what is normally implied by the phrase "civilian control of the military," concerning himself with details that should have been left to the commander on the spot; whose grasp of strategy may have been distorted by his psychological need to redeem a disaster in an earlier war (the Dardanelles campaign of World War I) that was laid at his feet; but of whom it could be said at the end, ``He won the war.
It is that last judgment that redeems the man, if it can be sustained. Other biographers have pointed out Churchill's personal failings, although none to my knowledge in as detailed a manner as D'Este. Because he is regarded as the one person who could face down the menace posed by Hitler, however, all is forgiven. His behavior is excused either on the ground that it was needed to awaken the world to the threat of Nazi domination, or as a somewhat childish display that had no lasting deleterious consequences. One can almost hear them clucking in regard to the latter, "Naughty, naughty Winston!" I think it is fair to put D'Este into this camp. Certainly he devotes much space to representing his subject as an overgrown boy who could never overcome his desire to participate heroically in battle.
Note that there are two parts to the argument that redeems Winston Churchill. One is that the war against Hitler was won by the exertions of Great Britain and, after the period of greatest peril, the United States. The other is that he alone could have carried this out. D'Este appears to accept both.
The first, although never brought up explicitly, informs much of the historical treatment of the Second World War, and has only recently begun to be questioned. (I am referring to histories published in English; I presume that a complete Russian literature exists and could be consulted to complete a balanced tale, but I, and most of the English-speaking world, do not read Russian.) This is an important qualification. If we once accept that Hitler lost WWII at Stalingrad and Leningrad and in Operation Bagration and other ventures on the Eastern fronts, then the wisdom of nearly everything that was done in the West must be reevaluated. Consider the question of the cross-Channel invasion of Europe, postponed until the middle of 1944 because it would have been prohibitively costly at any earlier time, even if it had been successful. Yet, by failing to relieve the pressure on the Soviet Union, the West put itself into a much greater risk. Perhaps there was no real danger that the USSR would collapse in 1942; the Soviet Union under Stalin was not the same as the Russia of 1905 under the Tsar, which came to terms with a Japan that was a far less imposing enemy than Hitler's Germany. There was no way of knowing that, however. If Stalin had reached some sort of accommodation, the Germans would have been able to put their entire war machine against Great Britain and the US, with consequences that I for one would rather not think about.
The second part of the argument, that Churchill alone kept the war going in the dark days after the fall of France, when Britain stood alone, is evident hyperbole. No man is that indispensable, and if he had not come to the fore, someone else would have done so. Too many others came forward, to literally put their lives on the line, and all that was needed would be agreement that one person would be their spokesman. The Brits may be a lot of things, but one that they are not is gutless. (In response to the question, Who else?, King George VI comes to mind. He refused to leave London at the time of the Blitz, and likewise made the Royal Family endure the hardships that most other British citizens were up against. A little thing in relation to the sacrifices that others would have to make, but of such little things are most crusades born.)
Yet the fact is that Churchill did come to represent the British opposition to Hitler. Whether or not his Elizabethan phrases were necessary to prompt the nation to its sacrifices, to argue that they did not would fly in the face of the evidence. The reality was that young men climbed into their Spitfires and flew against the Luftwaffe and sometimes died, and that was enspiriting enough. But the English-speaking world has chosen to bind up their experience in Churchill's words, "Never before have so many owed so much to so few," words that were written {\em after} the world was put into the debt of the Few.
To be sure, there was more to Winston Churchill than rhetoric, and in many ways he was indeed unique. He was trained in the British Army and had served with the Fourth Queen's Own Hussars. He went to Cuba in 1896 as a military observer and correspondent, and later, after leaving the Army, as a correspondent in the Boer War. Certainly in the latter, his perception was better than that of the generals who commanded the Army in South Africa. He himself recognized their shortcomings as well as his own superior wisdom, and thus was born the contempt for professional soldiers that hampered his judgment when he came to power. With an ambition that the Army could not satisfy, he ran successfully for Parliament (all right, he {\em stood} for Parliament) in 1900, and there he remained for most of the rest of his political life. In 1911, he became First Lord of the Admiralty, a position that most closely resembles our own Secretary of the Navy. By that time he had already fallen under the spell of Admiral John Arbuthnot "Jackie" Fisher, a reform-minded seaman who would adopt any means to bring the Royal Navy out of its century-long torpor as a bastion of aristocratic privilege. Fisher's program involved among other things the reconstitution of the fleet, to base it on the then-new Dreadnoughts and, later, on the heavily-armed but lightly armored battle cruisers. The new First Lord bought into the program, and then he went beyond it to attempt reform of the army as well. He was instrumental in the development of tanks, as well as their introduction into the army.
His tenure as First Lord was truncated in the early days of World War I, however, when he heartily endorsed an expedition to the Dardanelles, with the aim of driving Turkey from the war and opening the way for British shipping to bring aid to the Russians. In the event, the Dardanelles naval campaign, and the associated army landings at nearby Gallipoli, collapsed. Together, they turned into a disaster the consequences of which reverberate in the former Empire to this day. More than a hundred thousand men died in that one abortive campaign---a number that approaches the combat deaths of each side in our own Civil War. The public outcry was unambiguous: the government of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith fell, and could not be reconstituted so long as it retained Winston Churchill as First Lord. For Churchill, the Dardanelles became a blight on his spirit. Armchair psychologists have ever since detected in his later preoccupation with the Mediterranean a need to convince the world that he was right, and he would expend any amount of money and untold blood to prove his point. D'Este neither endorses nor refutes the thesis that much of Churchill's meddling in the Middle Eastern campaigns of World War II was his effort to work out his personal demons, but he does mention them on more than one occasion. The implication is that D'Este is not interested in producing a psychological profile of his subject, but if one must be written, this is a good place to begin.
In time, Winston was forced out of the cabinet completely, whereupon he returned to the military life. With an honest-to-God war going on in Europe, he did not have to go very far to find a combat assignment. He had managed to gain command of a battalion by the end of 1915. I read all this in wonder: was he not still a Member of Parliament? Was his military rank (perhaps reconstituted) not major? And had he not been out of the army for 15 years? If all these are true, what was anyone thinking, to give him control of a battalion? Yet there it is, in black and white. Reading this in the early days of the twenty-first century, almost a hundred years after the event, one can conclude that the organization of the British Army, and indeed the entire British government, was far more haphazard than one would expect of such an advanced nation. Actually, it seems that he performed his duties capably even if with no particular distinction. He retained command of his unit until a reorganization of the parent organization, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, combined his battalion with another and left him as odd man out. With no further prospect of military glory, he returned to his seat in Parliament.
With the return of peace, Churchill once again found himself in the cabinet, this time as secretary of state for war and, later, head of the Air Ministry. This was the bureaucracy that had been created to supervise the Royal Air Force, still in its infancy. Nothing much seems to have happened to the RAF on his watch, but it did provide a third leg for his military preparation. He had already commanded ground troops in combat, and he had been First Lord of the Admiralty; with his connection with the RAF, he now was intimately exposed to the workings of all three of the services that would be involved in prosecuting World War II. Probably no other political leader in the modern era, since the military profession has become distinct from that of the ordinary citizen, has had such extensive experience in so many facets of war. (Note that his education left one gaping hole: the Royal Navy did not have much to do with submarines, and it is not too much to say that he never did really understand what they were all about. Whether it would have made any difference had he known submarines as well as he did airplanes is a different question.)
While in the Air Ministry, Churchill fell under the spell of Hugh Trenchard, who was one of the leading advocates of an independent air arm and also of the concept of strategic bombing. Churchill became the foremost civilian proponent of both. He fought to keep the Air Ministry independent of the War Office, and pushed to develop the long-range heavy bombers that were used in the war that was to come.
Following the peace conferences at the end of the war, Churchill lost elections between 1922 and 1924. In a peculiarity of the British electoral system, however, he gained a seat in Parliament by switching parties. He had started his political life as a Tory, but had changed allegiance when the Liberals swept to power before the Great War. In the aftermath of the war, the Liberal party began to wane; it soon was supplanted by the Labour party, and Winston reverted. He made no secret of his opportunism, and his numerous enemies held this against him until his dying day---and perhaps beyond.
After his return to Parliament and until the outbreak of the Second World War, Churchill was largely forgotten, although he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer between 1924 and 1929. In this period he argued against appropriations that would have enabled the armed forces to modernize. When war came, he had reason to repent the earlier stinginess that made his new job so much more difficult.
When war finally broke out again in Europe on 3 September 1939 (that is the date that Great Britain declared war, and what they traditionally regard as the starting date), Churchill was asked to join Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's war cabinet in his old post, First Lord of the Admiralty. Many assumed that it would be only a matter of a few days before he would be Prime Minister. They also assumed that he would hold the position only a short time, before some rash act would force him once again out of office. They were surprised on two counts: Chamberlain retained office longer than anyone expected, and Winston, once in, stayed on until the war was over. Chamberlain resigned on 10 May 1940. He was already a dying man, and lived only until 9 November.
The war cabinet of Prime Minister Winston Churchill had as Minister of Defence, a new office created for the prosecution of the war, none other than Winston Churchill. He used his position as Prime Minister to control the civil government and his position as Defence Minister to control the entire military establishment. His critics worried that his seizure of power was a black day for Great Britain; D'Este is not among them. From the day he took over, Whitehall (the British seat of government; as far as the military services are concerned, it is their equivalent of the Pentagon) became a scene of almost frenetic activity, at least while he was in town. The upper echelons were subjected to demands that taxed their physical abilities to their limits. Meetings to decide the fates of millions often ended at three o'clock in the morning; Churchill could endure these because he took afternoon naps, but that privilege was not extended to the mere generals and admirals who had to meet other responsibilities. These meetings were accompanied by a stream of ``Action This Day missives from the Prime Minister that percolated down and kept the entire military establishment on their toes.
Although it was undoubtedly good to shake the services out of their torpor and bring them to the reality of a relentless war, a price was paid for Churchill's intimate concern with its conduct. He could not leave control to the man on the spot. Too often, he imagined that he knew better than anyone precisely how an operation should be carried out, and gave explicit orders demanding that it be done his way. Sometimes he may have been correct, but more often he was not, and when the results were less than he expected, he refused to accept responsibility. Even worse, he would insist he was right all along, and would try to restart failed campaigns with little regard for their relation to the rest of the war. An example of this was the Norway campaign, which had failed in 1940 (when Chamberlain was still Prime Minister) primarily because of lack of air cover, but also because indecisive and conflicting orders from the First Lord of the Admiralty interfered. Norway obsessed him throughout the remainder of the war; as late as 1944, when preparations for Overlord were demanding the full attention of the Defence Ministry, he tried to push through Operation Jupiter, amphibious landings in Norway. Only with difficulty could the chiefs persuade him that the idea was logistically impossible.
Churchill's major shortcomings were not in Norway, however, where plenty of others could share the blame for the initial failure, but in the Middle East. D'Este points out in detail that his meddling at the operational level skirted disaster. Whether he was ordering the generals on the spot to hold indefensible positions, moving armies about in pointless diversions, or simply lacking comprehension of the logistics of desert warfare, he made the task of maintaining control of the region more perilous than it should have been. Add to this his willingness to sack generals who incurred his displeasure, not always for cause. Some of the men who had risen to high rank in the time of peace were revealed by the stress of combat to be unfit for their positions, and these were quite properly removed. But others were shunted aside merely because they did not satisfy the arbitrary demands of Winston Churchill. An example is General Archibald Percival Wavell, kicked out because the expedition that he commanded to Greece was unsuccessful. As leader of a failed campaign, he probably had to go; but we should note that Greece was an unneeded diversion from a North African campaign that was on the verge of success, and that it was doomed by lack of air and naval support. The North African campaign after Wavell continued to sputter as Churchill put in new commanders and ordered the troops about from London. It was not concluded successfully until finally command was given to General Bernard Law Montgomery, who handled the interference from Whitehall capably by simply ignoring it.\footnote{D'Este provides judgments on the qualities of many of the generals involved in North Africa, Wavell, Auchinleck, Wilson, Montgomery, Gort among them. I have no independent knowledge of these men, and defer to D'Este's professional opinions.}
North Africa injected a new party into the war. Operation Torch, starting in late 1942, was the first appearance of American ground troops in the war against Germany. (It was led by the inexperienced US Army rather than the British because of what was probably Churchill's most serious blunder of the war, the attack on the French fleet at Oran. That attack had so damaged relations between Great Britain and France that there was no possibility that a British-led expedition would not be opposed by the French in Algiers and Tunisia.) Although the American army did not particularly distinguish itself in North Africa, it did shake itself out, and soon ---in Italy, little more than a year later, in another campaign mounted because Churchill wanted it---it had passed by the British army in control of events.
The nature of the American presence in the European conflict was perhaps Churchill's most lasting contribution to the development of the postwar world. It is strangely treated as almost a natural course of events, although it was certainly Churchill's baby. Literally no one else could have carried out the close amalgamation of the armed forces of the two nations, a combination that was far more penetrating than a simple alliance. Others could have formed a traditional alliance; what was done was to make Great Britain almost our 51st state. As an American, I of course think that this is a Good Thing and will defend it; my British friends may think otherwise, however, and they may wish to weigh in. D'Este does not inquire further, describing only the interactions of the parties to the union, with appropriate emphasis on the major figures.
What he does not even mention is how risky it was for Great Britain and, for that matter, all the rest of us. A quite plausible sequence of events that did not take place could have destroyed all. Consider that from 1941 until 1945, the Vice President of the United States was Henry A. Wallace, a man of strange persuasions who was close to many who were more than mere sympathizers with the Soviet Union. Also consider that President Roosevelt's health was deteriorating throughout that period, and he could have died suddenly at any moment, even as he did die shortly after the beginning of his fourth term. Fortunately, Harry Truman was vice president by that time. (If one must have proof that there is a benevolent God Who protects our nation, this is it.) I presume that I need not say more.
Given D'Este's penchant for calling a spade a spade, we are not surprised when he states that by the end of the war, Churchill had become what was for him the worst possible fate: he was irrelevant. He seems to have realized this sometime about the time of the Quebec Conference of 1943. At this meeting of the Western Allied leaders (Roosevelt, Churchill, and Mackenzie King of Canada), the decision to proceed with Overlord in 1944 was affirmed, with the implication that the Italian campaign would be subordinated. As a corollary, Churchill's dream of a thrust through Europe's "soft underbelly" died. From this time on, all the shots were called in Washington. Simply put, he was no longer in control of events.
The same was true of the British Empire. Churchill had uttered his judgment that he did not intend to liquidate the Empire, but that is just what happened. Although the formal end did not take place on his watch, it was set in motion during the war. Roosevelt and his advisers were not willing to use American forces to prop it up. D'Este, like many other historians, deduces from this that it dissolved because of American pressure. Probably even if Roosevelt had been so inclined, he could not have kept India in the fold.\footnote{I presume that no one would have been willing to use nuclear weapons to subjugate India.} In simple fact, the Indians had quite a bit to say about it, as did many of the other peoples of Asia. In order to undermine the pro-Japanese faction in India, Churchill himself during the war had to make concessions that fundamentally altered the colonial relation between Britain and India. Those concessions could not be reversed when the end of the war came, as the Indians realized that their former masters were no more competent than they. The Empire had been mortally wounded on 15 February 1942, when Singapore surrendered to the Japanese. From that time on, nothing that the full might of the United States Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Army Air Corps could do to reverse Japanese conquests would erase the knowledge that white men were not innately superior to anyone else.
The ultimate blow to Churchill came shortly after the end of the war in Europe but while the war with Japan was still going on. He called for national elections in July, fully expecting to be retained in office by a grateful nation. The vote instead was overwhelmingly in favor of the Labour Party led by Clement Attlee. On 27 July 1945, Churchill departed No. 10 Downing Street and Whitehall. He became a backbencher in Parliament, and although he again became Prime Minister for a short time, this was the time of the final breakup of the Empire, a process he was unable to reverse. The most important war involving Great Britain at the time was the Cold War, but the major participants were the United States and Soviet Union.
Few things in this world are certain, but it is safe to say that we will never see another person like him.
6. Another crack at Stephen Mallory: Rodman L. Underwood edit
Underwood, Rodman L., Stephen Russell Mallory: a biography of the Confederate Navy Secretary and United States Senator. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2005. ISBN 0-7864-2299-8
Stephen Russell Mallory occupies a unique place in American history. His fame, such as it is, rests on his tenure as the Secretary of the Navy in the Confederate government throughout its short life. He held that position almost by default, because few other persons in the entire Confederacy were particularly interested in naval matters. With no serious rivals to contend with, he was limited only by the inherent lack of industrial strength of the South as he went about the creation of a navy to conform to his own ideas. Even though the Confederate States Navy was largely irrelevant to the Civil War, a person with the powers he was given deserves a full biographical treatment, if only to show how individuals can influence major institutions.
Mallory has not lacked a biography; in 1954, now more than half a century ago, Joseph T. Durkin, S.J., put forth a study that has gained general acceptance.\footnote{Durkin, Joseph T., {\em Confederate Navy Chief: Stephen R. Mallory.} University of North Carolina, 1954 Reprinted, University of South Carolina, 1987, as one in the series {\em Classics in maritime history,} edited by William N. Still, Jr.} Durkin may have been more interested in Mallory's Catholicism than other aspects of his life, and he certainly put more emphasis on it than most biographers would do. I suppose that is his prerogative. Unfortunately, he seems at the same time to have certain disregard for secular matters that some of us non-Jesuits regard as important, such as names and dates. Durkin tells us that Mallory was born in 1810 or 1811, though most historians believe that it was more likely to have been 1813. He writes that his father's given name was John, but Mallory's contemporaries and descendants state that it was Charles. He describes Mallory's departing speech in the Senate, taking his leave with others from seceding states, as being delivered "on a morning in February, 1861" (p. 121); the {\em Congressional Globe} records the date as January 21. He notes that two of his children died as infants, but fails to mention that three others did not survive to adulthood. On a matter not connected with Mallory, he does not recognize that Commodore David Porter, hero of the War of 1812, is not the same person as his son, David Dixon Porter of Civil War fame. And so it goes. In the truly important matters, such as the interpretation of Mallory and his influence on naval warfare, Durkin is correct, or at least as correct as one can be in making historical judgments, but all these niggling errors drive the interested reader to despair.
Fortunately, the situation has recently been remedied. Rodman L. Underwood has now written a biography of Mallory, avoiding most of the mistakes of his predecessor. He does not reevaluate his subject, but presents his life in a straightforward manner. Everything is there: boyhood (after his arrival in Key West from his native Trinidad), courtship and marriage, professional life as a lawyer, appointment to the Senate, participation there in the sectional controversy before secession, service as Confederate Secretary of the Navy, appearance before the Congressional committee to investigate the culpability of the navy in the loss of New Orleans, development of new methods and weapons under his leadership, resignation after the flight and collapse of the Confederate government, imprisonment by the victorious Union government on the charge of treason, his eventual parole and return to Florida. Underwood recognizes that differing interpretations are possible, and gives a fair amount of space (p. 113) to the unflattering evaluation of Mallory that Chester Hearn makes in his account of Farragut's capture of New Orleans,\footnote{Hearn, Chester G., {\em The capture of New Orleans, 1862.} Louisiana State University Press, 1995.} but in the end he does not accept it. Underwood maintains his independence, letting the record speak for itself without tipping his emotional hand.
So in the end we have a biography that is probably just about what it should be, an overview of the life of a man who, while not a great captain, was more important than most of us in the history of the world. There are some holes. We find that Mallory had slaves, but they are barely mentioned, and we do not know how he treated them or even how many he owned. We also find that while in the Senate he and the Abolitionist Zachariah Chandler, Senator from Michigan, were good friends, but nothing is said of how they worked together in the Senate; their friendship appears only after the war, when the imprisoned Mallory wrote to Chandler to seek his aid in obtaining parole. These omissions will not cause the Earth to tremble. The material that the author has provided, rather than what he has not provided, is the valid measure of the book. To sum it all up, Underwood has given us an account of the man that is less complete than would be required for, say, Jefferson Davis; but it doesn't have to be.
All in all, any person who wishes to understand the Civil War navies (note the plural) should read this book. \vskip 10pt
On the technical side: The book is fairly free from errors, including typos. I noted only four: (1.) The cover name of the raider CSS {\em Florida}, correctly {\em Oreto}, is given as {\em Otero} (pp. 117, 118). (2.) The Union gunboat {\em Sassacus} is misspelled {\em Saccasus} in two places on p. 159. (3.) In the index, Attila Fitzpatrick Mallory is identified as Stephen's {\em daughter} (my emphasis); fortunately, the text has it right. (4.) Something is wrong with the printing of page 237, part of the bibliography. A little less than half the page is blank. It is obviously not the fault of the author; it can be corrected in any future printings.
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\title{Howard J. Fuller, {\em Clad in iron: the American Civil War and the challenge of British naval power} (Naval Institute Press, 2008).} \begin{document} \maketitle
Once upon a time, war between the United States and Great Britain was not only a theoretical possibility, it was actively considered. This was obviously true during our Revolution and the War of 1812. Then, after nearly a half-century of increasingly peaceable trade, the Civil War unleashed passions that came near to renewing the old antagonisms even while it made the maintenance of normal if not friendly relations imperative. The war was not yet a year old when the headstrong actions of the uncontrollable Captain Charles Wilkes touched off what has come to be known as the \emph{Trent} Affair. Only some skilled politicking by Abraham Lincoln and William Seward on this side of the Atlantic, and some calming diplomacy by the dying Prince Albert on the other, kept the lid on events. Once the \emph{Trent} Affair was resolved, war was no longer immediately likely (even if Lincoln, and the rest of the American public, were not so sure of British intentions), but the developments of the US Navy continued to raise concerns in its Royal counterpart. Great Britain relied on its navy both to maintain its empire and to defend the home islands. It could not afford to fall behind the technological achievements of any other nation, no matter how favorably disposed.
The Civil War came at a time of radical innovation in naval warfare. Someone (I think it was John Keegan) has pointed out that the ships that fought in the War of 1812 were not vastly different from those that had met the Spanish Armada. They may have been larger, and they may have carried more and heavier guns, but there was a continuity in ship construction and methods of combat that would have enabled Sir Francis Drake to feel almost at home had he been with Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar. By contrast, Nelson himself would have been nonplussed had he come back a mere fifty years after his death. Sails had given way to steam propulsion (and the steam revolution had already produced its own subsidiary revolution when screw propellors replaced paddlewheels); methods of shipbuilding had to be altered in order to accommodate the increased weight and overall size of guns, which were also on the verge of subsidiary revolutions: rifled and breech-loading ordnance, together with shell projectiles. And on the verge of the Civil War itself, the two most advanced navies in the world, France and Great Britain, had persuaded themselves that some fraction of their fleets should carry armor.
The last of these revolutions has occupied the attention of most historians who have written about the Civil War. The common perception that the meeting of the two ironclads \emph{Merrimack}\footnote{known as \emph{Virginia} to the present-day pedants who are more Confederate than Jefferson Davis.} and \emph{Monitor} at once overthrew all then-current naval practice has long since been debunked. The definitive account, James Phinney Baxter's \emph{Introduction of the ironclad warship}, first appeared in 1933 and has recently been republished by the prestigious Naval Institute Press. Baxter showed that the American ironclads culminated rather than initiated the use of armored ships. The first important modern use of armor was by the great French naval architect Stanislas Charles Henri Dupuy de~Lome, who was inspired by armored floating batteries that had been used in the Crimean War. His inspiration got concrete form in his ship \emph{la Gloire}, now generally regarded as the first modern armored warship. \emph{Gloire} prompted the Royal Navy to meet the challenge she represented, and a naval arms race was on. At the outbreak of our Civil War, France had five ironclad vessels in service, and the British had two. Moreover, plans were already being laid for the eventual replacement of all unarmored warships. All this is not to say that the meeting of the two American ironclads was without significance. If they had not fought to a draw (and if \emph{Merrimack} had not sounded the death knell for wooden-hulled warships on the day previous to her encounter with \emph{Monitor}), the conversion of the fleets of the world would have proceeded at a slower pace. It would also have received much more critical scrutiny from a public that would object to paying the bills for a project that, absent the concrete demonstration of the inadequacy of wooden hulls, would have been regarded as a theoretical exercise by engineers who had never been in a battle at sea.
Not much new was written of the interplay between the Royal Navy and the US Navy in the three-quarters of a century since Baxter's history came out. That has now changed, however, with the appearance of \emph{Clad in iron}, by British\footnote{The fascination of the Brits for \emph{our} Civil War puzzles me, in the same way as the attention paid by the American public to the British Royal Family. Don't these people realize that we occupy separate countries?} historian Howard J. Fuller. With access to documents on both sides of the Atlantic, offered cordially on this side in a manner that would probably have been impossible before the Second World War, he has produced a balanced account showing that much more came out of the Civil War than the acceleration of plans that were already laid out. As he tells it, the emphasis of the US Navy on coastal and harbor warfare, exemplified by what has been characterized as ``monitor mania, owed as much or more to apprehension of British intentions than of any realistic threat from the Confederate Navy. Furthermore, the strange design of \emph{Monitor} and her successors, including in particular their big guns, presented a threat not only to the wooden hulls of the world's navies, but also to the \emph{armored} vessels then in existence and contemplated. To counter with heavy guns of their own was not easy; traditional ships firing broadsides were found not to answer, so the topic of debate came to be how best to incorporate turrets (``towers in British parlance of the time, ``rotating shields in American) into ships that would satisfy the varied demands of the Royal Navy.
Several threads run through Fuller's account. In no particular order of either chronology or importance, these include: \begin{itemize} \item \emph{Monitor} was conceived as a coast or harbor defense vessel at a time when the Confederacy had no navy to threaten Northern ports---but Great Britain and France did. Her designer John Ericsson quite explicitly measured her defensive capabilities against the European ironclads and not against \emph{Merrimack} (all right, I'll call her \emph{Virginia} this time), which did not exist while \emph{Monitor} was being built. Furthermore, the time of her construction coincided with that of the \emph{Trent} Affair. After that diplomatic problem was smoothed over, Ericsson's successor vessels were even more explicitly aimed at countering potential European intervention. \item Baxter was correct in showing that \emph{Monitor} and \emph{Merrimack} were not the first ironclads, but his debunking exercise missed another point: \emph{Monitor} was the first ship that was designed around her guns. That is, there was a unity to the vessel, so that her armor, armament, sea-keeping, crew accommodations, and whatever else had to be considered when making a warship, all worked together. Previous to this, as long as the broadside line-of-battle ship was the rule, the hull came first, and the guns came very near the end, and were placed, like sleeping places for the crew, wherever they would fit. \item The offensive weakness of the traditional line-of-battle ship compared with \emph{Monitor} and her successors\footnote{The brief battle between USS \emph{Weehawken} and CSS \emph{Atlanta} (17 June 1863) was extremely significant. One of two shots \emph{Weehawken} fired from her 15-inch guns shattered four inches of iron backed by three inches of oak and fifteen of pine. For comparison, note that the armor of HMS \emph{Warrior} was $4\frac{1}{2}$ inches of iron backed by 18 inches of teak---somewhat stronger than \emph{Atlanta}, but not markedly so.} was noted, and the Royal Navy tried to meet the challenge. Some hope was held for improved guns that would still be light enough to be distributed along the gun-deck in the time-honored fashion, but technical problems made that increasingly unsatisfactory. Eventually, all realized that the only adequate solution was to mount a small number of the heaviest guns on the centerline. \item Protection for the guns and their crews was provided in the Ericsson models by a shield that rotated with the gun. The Royal Navy already had in house its own advocate of shielded, centerline-mounted heavy guns, Captain Cowper Phipps Coles. Coles had not had much success in persuading his government to make use of his ideas, but after the \emph{Merrimack-Monitor} duel, his ideas came into increasing favor. The debate in the RN soon came to be between those who preferred the Ericsson design, a low-freeboard vessel that offered only small target area to enemy guns, and hence required minimal armor, or those who felt that the Coles design, with high freeboard and hence less dependence on calm seas for action, would better suit the open-ocean needs of Britannia. (As Fuller points out, the reasoning in this debate eventually led to the concept of the all-big gun warship exemplified by HMS \emph{Dreadnought}. I find it interesting that \emph{Monitor} and \emph{Dreadnought}, the only two vessels to give names to entire types of warships, are thus associated.)
Both Coles and Ericsson had to overcome opposition in their respective fleets, much of which seems to have been of a personal rather than professional nature. Ericsson in particular was known to be `difficult.' I confess that I had a hard time following the nuances of their struggles as Fuller has described them, but fortunately they are not very important to the main history. \item One topic that Fuller did \emph{not} consider was the likelihood of war after the \emph{Trent} Affair faded away. While we may wish to know whether Prime Minister Palmerston's cabinet seriously considered the prospect, the question would have diverted the author from his purpose. It would also have required a much longer book, as it would have involved the intermingled foreign affairs of France and Russia as a minimum, and probably other European states as well. If I infer correctly from what is written but is not stated explicitly, it seems that Palmerston would have been glad to see the United States broken up, both because it was a potential rival to the Empire and because of his own monarchical beliefs. He was constrained, however, as the Royal Navy could not guarantee success against the monitors. For the moment, its absolute superiority had been challenged; the consequences may have been serious in the course of time, but the challenge was withdrawn at the end of the war. The United States turned inward, and allowed the European powers once again to take the lead in naval innovation.
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It is too much to expect that Fuller will have the last word on each of the points he has raised, and he is completely silent on other issues that bear on his general topic. (For example, he overlooks completely the debates in Congress concerning the modernization of the US Navy that was accomplished by the 37th Congress. Although the {\em Trent} crisis was already settled by the time of the debates, and furthermore in early 1862 the restoration of the Union could hardly be regarded as assured, the Navy was reshaped in order to defend against European, not Confederate, fleets.) He has, however, brought a fresh perspective to this period of our history, reminding us that we have much yet to learn about the Civil War. I wish to thank the Naval Institute for putting its institutional prestige behind Fuller's book.
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