Last Pacific Book For Awhile

Because of the influence of HBO’s mini-series The Pacific, I’ve been reading a bunch of stuff on the WWII in the Pacific lately. Latest is Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War by William Manchester. Frankly, I’m not sure what to think of this book. I first read it as a teenager in high school and remember being absolutely enthralled with it. But I’m pretty sure I didn’t read the ending bits of the book, the bits where Manchester reveals that his entire combat experience was two months on Okinawa in 1945. Essentially, all of his other descriptions of combat, on Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, and Peleliu were all incidents from Okinawa that he had transposed to those other islands because….well, I honestly don’t know why he chose to do that.

The really weird part is that even now that I know about it, this bizarre literary device didn’t really spoil the book for me. Manchester has written the most thoughtful, erudite, complex and, well, I guess the term is “literary”, memoir of combat I’ve ever read, with the possible exception of Quartered Safe Out Here by George McDonald Fraser.

The book is equal parts travelogue and memoir, with Manchester going from Pearl Harbor to Okinawa, stopping at each of the islands mentioned above and describing the strategic situation that brought the fighting to this particular island, the actual fighting on the island (with his “transposed” Okinawa adventures seamlessly interspersed throughout) and a summary of the modern status and condition of the island. The result is a very moving book, that not only gives a brief sketch of the Pacific War, but also the reflections of one of its most literately gifted participants 30 years after wards.

If you can get past the weird transposition of experience, I recommend it highly.

33 for the year.

Ah! Now I am Beginning to Understand

Some of you may recall that in August of 2009, I read Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 (Tales of a New Jerusalem) by David Kynaston. At the time, I was trying to figure out why Britain suffered such economic straits immediately after WWII.  I mentioned in that review that I had ordered Peter Clarke’s The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire to try to make sense of it. Well, it took me eight months to get around to reading it, but the book performed as advertised.

Clarke’s book does an excellent job of explaining that the roots of Britain’s post-war problem were created by the very thing that had saved her, Lend-Lease. Before Lend-Lease, Britain had (because of the Neutrality Act) liquidated virtually of her foreign investments and incurred massive sterling debts to India and the Dominions. During the war Britain focused virtually her entire economy on war production leaving nothing for the export market. Then in Sept 1945, when the Americans precipitously ended Lend-Lease, Britain was left with a large import requirement, no exports or foreign investments to generate cash and a huge sterling debt to the Dominions.

Despite these problems she still had large commitments overseas including feeding the Germans in her occupation sector, and military commitments to India, and Palestine. At the same time, the new American administration was suspicious about British attempts to reclaim her Empire.

The book does an excellent job of laying out the causes of Britain’s economic problems and is very even handed about how they were made worse by circumstances, including Roosevelt’s antipathy toward British Imperialism, which was of course, exacerbated by Churchill’s intransigence on issues like Greece and Poland. The sudden change in American administration resulting from FDR’s death on the cusp of victory in April 1945 as made things worse when Roosevelt was replaced by Truman who knew nothing of the informal, verbal assurances FDR has issued.

Interestingly, another factor was the sudden end of the Japanese War. Allied planning foresaw the end of the War sometime in late 1946, leading the Brits to believe they would have a year or so to figure things out before Lend-Lease would be yanked out from under them.

The book also does an excellent job of dealing the ending of both the British mandate in Palestine and her occupation of India. It provides not only a good narrative of these two situations, but providing their context within and effects on the British financial situation.

Essentially, this is everything I wanted to know about why Britain was such an economic basket case immediately after WWII. Highly recommended!

32 for the year.

Once more into the Pacific….

Just finished Helmet For My Pillow by Robert Leckie. What a great book! For those who don’t know, Leckie was a sportswriter for the Hackensack Record who enlisted in the Marines on 8 December 1941. The book is an authentic memoir of Leckie’s career as a Marine from boot camp at MCRD Paris Island through his wounding at Peleliu.

Leckie is a gifted writer, his prose is very evocative and descriptive of his environment and the men around him. One of the most interesting things about the book is that throughout Leckie makes no effort to “polish up” his own image. He is quite forthcoming about his sojourns in the brig and about his disdain for officers. He makes no attempt to sanitize or rationalize the behavior of himself and his buddies in Melbourne. He is even frank about his affliction with enuresis (bedwetting) during the Cape Gloucester campaign.

As a result of his candor, his writing skills and his personality, a picture of Bob Leckie emerges that is almost stereotypical of a smart-ass, pugnacious, Irish reporter from back east. He comes across almost like a character played by Jimmy Cagney in a Ben Hecht screenplay. Whether that is an accurate description of the actual man, I can’t say, but it is the one he paints of himself.

This was simply a thoroughly satisfying book, in fact it will remain on my shelf among other outstanding WWII memoirs such as Manchester’s Goodbye Darkness and Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here

Note: Helmet For My Pillow is one of the two primary source materials for HBO’s mini-series The Pacific. Whether or not you like that series, you really should read this book, it is (as always) far better than the TV show.

I recommend this book unreservedly!

31 for the year

The German Version of the Lost Cause Mythology

I just finished The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture by Ronald Smelser  and Edward J. Davies ll. This was an eye-opening little book on the roots of American perceptions of the Nazi-Soviet portion of WWII. The authors show that at the end of WWII, a small band of German officers, with the unwitting help of a few Brits and Americans, leveraged the growing American antipathy toward the Soviets at the beginning of the cold war, as well as American fears that they would have to fight the Soviets, to essentially rewrite the history of how they lost to the Soviets. It goes something like this:

• Hitler was an idiot – without his interference we would have beaten the Russians
• There were too many of them!- We could beat 4 or 5 to 1 adds, but we were overwhelmed by superior numbers
• It was too cold/too muddy – Their best generals were “General Mud and General Snow”

This created a kind of “lost cause” mythology similar to the one that emerged from the Confederate POV after the American Civil War. The authors then go on to catalogue current manifestations of this mythology in; memoirs and fiction, wargames, popular websites and in the reenactment community.

The authors do an excellent job of supporting their thesis, their cites are comprehensive, thorough and relevant. I was particularly impressed that they didn’t seem (to me at least) to over step and equate “romancing” (their term for espousing this tenets of this “lost cause” mythology) with acceptance of the underlying philosophy or beliefs of the Nazis. They seemed to view “romancers” as more misguided than evil.

I found the book to be an excellent summary of the situation, it really tied a bunch of threads together for me. I highly recommend it as a “corrective” to anyone who has ever read and admired Panzer Leader by Heinz Guderian, Lost Victories by Erich von Manstein or Panzer Battles by F.W. von Mellenthin.

30 for the year

Brits in the Pacific

Grave of a Dozen Schemes by H.P. Willmott

This was in interesting little book from one of my favorite historians, H.P. Willmott. Willmott reviews the efforts on the part of the British High command to find a meaningful way for Britain to participate in the final destruction of Japanese power.   Essentially, Britain had two issues, first they fundamentally disagreed with the American strategy in China. The Americans saw China as the ultimate base for its B-29s which would bomb Japan back into the stone-age. Large scale operations from Chinese air bases implied opening a land communications route, which in turn necessitated large land operations in Northern Burma. The British felt that any Chinese contribution to the ground war would be nominal at best. Interestingly, the British were divided even among themselves. With the service chiefs inclined to support the American desire for Northern Burma operations, despite their better judgment, while Churchill was more interested in amphibious operations to regain lost British possessions. The second problem was Britain’s desire to field a major carrier force in the central Pacific, while unable to logistically sustain such operations.

In the book Willmott traces shaping of the policy addressing these two difficulties. I was particularly interested in the difficulties Britain had fielding and maintaining its carrier force in the central Pacific. The carriers, were really operating outside their design envelope in terms of climate and tempo of operations. Ventilation of crew spaces was inadequate, being designed for the more temperate, Northern European/Mediterranean climate. Because the carriers were built with the hanger deck inside the “armor box”, they had limited ceiling clearances, which in turn limited the types and numbers of aircraft they could operate.  In fact, the aircraft the Brits got from the Americans required extensive modifications before they could be used on British carriers, but when they got them they were unmodified. A significant portion of the RN’s very limited maintenance capacity went to modifying new aircraft to replace destroyed and damaged ones. Another issue was the great difficulty Britain had in establishing an adequate fleet base. It took them over a year to create and stock the facility in Sydney Australia.

IN the final analysis, this is an excellent book, on a very esoteric subject. Unless you are really, really, interested in this very limited area of British naval planning, I’d advise giving it a miss. On the other hand, if you are interested in that area, then this book is a “must read”.

29 for the year.

Doomed from the start.

This week I also finished Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East by David Stahel. This book is actually Stahel’s doctoral dissertation and does an excellent job of advancing his thesis that Operation Barbarossa never really had a chance of knocking the USSR out of the war.

The book is divided into two sections, the planning of the operation and the actual attack, up to the end of September. First is the planning. Through archival documents Stahel gives a day-by-day account of the planning of operation Barbarossa. He has exhaustively researched the archives and conclusively shown that even as far back as the planning for Barbarossa the seeds of Germany’s ultimate defeat were sown.  Part of the problem was the fact that the Army and Hitler had widely divergent, and to some extent mutually exclusive, views on how to prosecute the war, with Hitler insisting upon the capture of Leningrad and the Ukraine, while the Army was focused on Moscow. Another problem was that the Army completely ignored the logistical shortcomings of the operation. In fact, General Staff planners knew going in that they couldn’t actually supply their panzers all the way to Moscow.

Stahel’s description of the divergence of opinion between the Army and Hitler on the operational goals of the operation and his account of Halder’s duplicity is priceless! Halder knew Hitler’s priorities were Leningrad and the Ukraine, but he instructed is staff to plan for operations against Moscow, assuming he’d be able to talk Hitler into it at some point!

The planning portion of the book ends with a succinct summary of the state of the German armed forces on the eve of Barbarossa. This summary highlights the manifold problems the Germans experienced. First, was the huge variety of makes and models of trucks and tanks with which the Germans were equipped. This variety led to hopelessly inadequate stockpiling of spare parts for the trucks and panzers (at one point AGC carried 3 million different stock numbers of spares for its vehicles!). Another problem described was the Luftwaffe’s more or less continued wastage of aircraft and crews in operations against the RAF in both Western Europe and the Mediterranean theater, wastage which German industry was unable to make good.This wastage led to a gradual decline in Luftwaffe strength such that, by early August, the Luftwaffe could no longer achieve air supremacy over the Soviet Air Force, and in fact, could only achieve air superiority over limited sectors of the front for limited times.

Finally the actual composition of the German army was laid out. Stahel’s premise is that Germany actually invaded the Soviet Union with two separate armies. A small, highly mobile, 20 division force of panzers and motorized infantry and a large, 100 division force of leg infantry that wasn’t very different from the force that invaded in WWI. Only 20-odd of the 120+ German divisions invading the USSR were panzer or motorized, with the balance being infantry which marched at approximately the same rate as Napoleon’s army 130 years before. In fact, the vaunted Wehrmacht depended primarily on 300,000 horses as the prime movers for its logistical system.

The second part of the book is a fairly straightforward account of the first couple of months of the war. The narrative is interesting with the German panzers achieving breakthroughs, and pocketing vast numbers of Soviet troops, but, lacking close infantry support (the poor foot sloggers are still marching up, far behind the panzers), are unable to completely close the pockets, allowing the escape of thousands or tens of thousands of Soviet troops to fight another day. Stahel also shows how the Panzers so far outran their infantry that tens or hundreds of thousands of armed enemy troops were left in their wake, in the netherworld between the advanced panzers and the trailing infantry. These armed troops formed the nucleus of many partisan units and caused a great deal of trouble, playing merry hell with efforts to resupply the advanced panzers with fuel and ammunition.

Also interesting is the almost continual expectation on the part of the panzer commanders, that “the next line of Soviet resistance is the last one”, that once it is breached, the panzers will be in the Soviet rear area and will have operational freedom to disrupt the formation of further lines of resistance. As each line was breached, the panzers found another one. Stahel shows us how it gradually dawned on the German generals that there were far more Soviets than they had planned for, and that the German army would be forced to fight through the Russian winter.  Stahel also illustrates how thoroughly the German planners had underestimated Soviet manpower reserves. In fact, because of the vast pool of manpower, at nearly every stage of the operation, the Red Army was actually gaining in strength (!) in absolute terms, to say nothing of comparatively with the steadily ground down Wehrmacht.

At any rate, this is simply an outstanding book. It makes a compelling case that the Nazis were probably doomed the moment they decided to invade Russia.

There are only two basic cautions I would issue, first, this book assumes a great deal of familiarity with WWII in general and the Nazi-Soviet war in particular. Readers who aren’t familiar with this conflict could find themselves in over their heads. Second, this is actually a doctoral dissertation, and to some extent, it reads as such. It can be a bit dry in places, don’t expect great writing. But in the end, its definitely worth the slog.

28 for the year.

Sowing the Whirlwind

First up, was Whirlwind: The Air War Against Japan, 1942-1945 by Barrett Tillman. This is a very engaging and readable account of the Allied air war against the Japanese home islands during WWII. The book starts with Doolittle’s Raid in April 1942, continues with the early, unsuccessful, China based B-29 efforts and the redeployment of the B-29s to the Marianas. Along the way it also describes the massive carrier based raids that constituted the Navy’s contribution to grinding Japan to powder. The book also covers the “receiving end” of the air war with several accounts from Japanese survivors which give their perspective. Finally, the book includes a brief summary of the training and deployment of the 509^th Composite Group, and its two atomic bomb missions in August 1945.

The book is particularly strong on details of the development of the B-29 and the operational history of the bomber. Good account of the technical problems with cooling those huge Wright R-3350s. The parts dealing with the US Navy carrier raids and the effects of the raids from the Japanese perspective weren’t quite as well fleshed out.  Despite these rather minor quibbles, this was an excellent book. I highly recommend it.

27 for the year.