International Journal of Naval History

Kevin Dockery, Operation Thunderhead: The True Story of Vietnam’s Final POW Rescue—And the Last Navy SEAL Killed in Country, Berkley Press, 2009. 294 pp., photos, appendix, index.

Review by John Darrell Sherwood
Naval History and Heritage Command

The story of the American prisoners of war (POW) in Vietnam has been told many times with the definitive account being Stuart Rochester and Frederick Kiley’s Honor Bound: The History of American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia, 1961-1973 (Naval Institute Press, 1998). This “new” POW book by Kevin Dockery re-hashes the story of John Dramesi’s ill-fated May 1969 escape attempt and ends with a coda about an aborted June 1972 U.S. Navy special operations mission to assist Dramesi in a second attempt that never happened.

Air Force Captain John Dramesi was a brash young officer from South Philadelphia who in May of 1969 made a daring escape attempt from the “Zoo Annex” prison in Hanoi with fellow Air Force Captain Ed Atterberry. The two men planned to break out of the camp disguised as Vietnamese peasants, steal a sampan, and paddle down the Red River to the Gulf of Tonkin , where they hoped to be picked up by the U.S. Navy. Escaping from the prison proved to be the easiest part of the mission, but the two men never fully considered how they would be able to travel over 110 miles through hostile, heavily populated territory to the coast. The fact that neither man was of Asian heritage or spoke Vietnamese compounded their difficulties.

The escape attempt occurred without the blessings of compound’s senior ranking POW, Air Force Captain Konrad Trautman. Trautman felt he could not order Dramesi and Atterbery to cancel the attempt because the Code of Conduct specifically demanded that POWs make every effort to escape, but he did believe that the attempt was ill-advised and could cause severe repercussions for other POWs held at the Zoo Annex.

The two men escaped from the compound at night by crawling through an attic above the cells and clamoring down the roof of the facility to the street. A North Vietnamese patrol discovered the two men at sunup the next day in a bramble thicket about four miles from the Zoo Annex. Over the course of the next two months, the prison authorities severely tortured the two escapees plus two dozen other American POWs. One officer, Lieutenant Eugene “Red” McDaniel, received 700 lashes as well as electric shocks and a form of rope torture during the ordeal, which he called his “darkest hour.” After seven days of severe torture, Atterbery died—a death Dockery attributes to pneumonia, but which Rochester and Kiley argue had to have been caused by excessive torture and medical neglect.

Dockery, a “radio broadcaster, gunsmith, and historian” and the author of a number of popular histories of the SEALs, staunchly defends Dramesi throughout the book as an American hero. But other historians of the POW experience view his actions in a more critical light. Rochester and Kiley define him as an “accident waiting to happen,” whose actions caused unnecessary pain and suffering for their fellow POWs. Operation Thunderhead also yields no new information on Dramesi or his escape, and because no sources are cited in the book, I am left wondering if Dockery even interviewed Dramesis or simply constructed his narrative from Dramesi’s memoir Code of Honor (Norton, 1975). There are also some embarrassing errors in the book, such as the misspelling Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robinson Risner’s last name, “Reisner,” in several places in the book. A Korean War ace, Risner was one of the longest serving senior officers in the Hanoi Hilton, and the recipient of the Air Force Cross. Any historian of the American POW experience should have been able to spell his name properly.

But what irritates this reviewer the most about Operation Thunderhead is the book’s misleading title. Only the last 62 pages of the book focus on the SEAL effort to assist Dramesi in a second escape bid in the spring of 1972. This portion of the book focuses solely on the SEAL operation to penetrate North Vietnamese territory, using the special operations submarine Grayback (LPSS 574). According to Dockery, the SEAL mission was plagued by problems from the very onset. During an attempt to land on an island in the Red River , a SEAL Swimmer Delivery Vehicle (SDV) ran out of battery power while fighting the strong currents of the river, forcing the 4-man SEAL and Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) crew to abort the mission, and destroy the SDV. After being rescued by helicopter and transported to Long Beach (CGN 9), the four operators attempted to return to Grayback by dropping from a helicopter and diving to the boat, but in the insertion attempt, one of the SEALs, Lieutenant Spence Dry, hit the water too hard and died, and several of the others were badly injured. A rescue helicopter eventually retrieved Dry’s corpse along with the three survivors.

Communications difficulties had prevented Dry from informing Grayback of their attempted return to the boat, and so the boat launched a second SDV before their jump. This SDV, however, sunk almost immediately after launch, forcing the operators to scramble out of the vehicle and swim to the surface, where they were eventually rescued by a helicopter. The SEALs planned to make a third attempt with an inflatable boat, but this attempt was ultimately cancelled after the Grayback’s commanding officer suddenly shifted his boat’s location upon hearing chains being dragged near his boat.

Dockery does not reveal his sources for this section of the book either, but presumably, he gleaned his details from interviews with some of the surviving special operations personnel. No official documents or after action reports are cited. The author also does not discuss Operation Mole—Dramesi’s second escape plan in which he and several others were to tunnel out of Hoa Lo Prison and pose as German tourists. Operation Mole was cancelled after some of the participants were transferred out of the jail, and Air Force Colonel John Flynn, the Senior Ranking Officer at the time, decided that the chances of success were minimal and the probability of severe reprisals against the other POWs, extremely high.

Operation Thunderhead offers no new insights on the American POW experience during the Vietnam War and limited new material on Operation Thunderhead. It is a work of popular history of little use to serious scholars of the war in Southeast Asia . Until more official documents are released on special operations in North Vietnamese territory, this chapter of the war will remain shrouded in mystery.

Dan O’Sullivan, In Search of Captain Cook: Exploring the Man Through His Own Words, I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd., 2008. 233 pp., illustrations, references, suggested reading, index.

Review by Mark M. Hull
Department of Military History,
U.S. Army Command and General Staff College

It is reasonable to assume that everything that could possibly be written on the life and achievements of Captain James Cook has been written. However, in this brief, thematic look at this enigmatic British explorer, Dan O’Sullivan advances an interesting perspective. He makes no effort to overturn the definitive work on Cook – J.C. Beaglehole’s The Life of Captain James Cook – and he happily avoids either of the two partisan extremes usually associated with the subject of 18th and 19th century exploration: hagiographic treatments or the all-explorers-are-racist-imperialists school. Sullivan wisely skirts the more recent, largely esoteric debate between Gananath Obeyesekere and Marshall Sahlin as to whether Hawaiian islanders reaction to Cook indicated a “Western” rationality.

Instead, In Search of Captain Cook returns to what are practically the only surviving records – the logs from Cook’s three voyages – and tries to present an accurate portrait of the explorer’s personality by measuring it against several situational templates: how Cook interacted with the officers and men of his ships, Cook’s contribution to science and health, and his understanding and treatment of the native peoples he encountered.

The process of unraveling the “real” James Cook is complicated. Aside from the logs, a handful of surviving letters, and the recorded impressions of but a few officers and men, there are scant primary sources. The traditional picture of Cook is of an almost stereotypical hero: brave, resolute, determined, and far-sighted. Even Cook’s murder in Hawaii in 1779 has an appropriately iconic feel to it. Any sense of humor or more prosaic personal trait is simply missing from the image we have. But, as O’Sullivan points out, even the best surviving sources can be misleading.

When Cook returned in 1771 from his first voyage on HM Bark Endeavor, both the Royal Navy and government were quick to appreciate the domestic public relations benefit of Cook’s words and deeds. They considered, however, that Cook’s diction needed polishing, and so the more fluent writer John Hawkesworth was hired to shepherd the book to press. Not only did Hawkesworth reword some of Cook’s more stoic and technical diary entries, but he used the works of other voyage participants (principally botanist Joseph Banks) to augment Cook, merging them all into what appeared to be a seamless whole, and presenting the completed package as the unvarnished thoughts and actions of Britain’s newest hero.

The fact is that James Cook was a self-taught naval officer, not a professional writer. He recorded his log entries in such a way as to keep an accurate record of information intended to assist other ships’ captains. Talk of tides, winds, and locations in minutes, degrees, and seconds might be essential for another seaman, but were judged to be excess for the well-read target audience. Cook was displeased with the artificial result, and during the course of his next voyage (1774-1776), he kept the public end-goal in mind. Accordingly he went through several drafts of his own log entries, gradually improving as a less-technical writer. To get even close to the truth of James Cook, then, it is necessary to plumb his original words and thoughts, not those later adapted by others for public consumption.

O’Sullivan’s statement that “Since Cook’s death there have been many Cooks,” refers to the praise or damnation heaped upon James Cook by authors living in different eras, with different axes to grind. It is an accurate assessment. Stripping away the myth – some of it started even in Cook’s lifetime – is a challenging business.

The author’s James Cook comes across as a human being, not a statue. He has likes and dislikes (he refers to the Malekulans of the New Hebrides, for instance, as “the most ugly and ill proportioned people I ever saw”), opinions – some of them prescient, some erroneous; he has a sense of obligation to his crew and the people he encounters; he operates from a singular sense of duty and purpose. While not afraid to flog offending sailors, he nevertheless provides intelligent leadership in places that could not be more remote or different from the Yorkshire village where he was born. Cook was in almost every sense a scientist, although even that word was unknown to his era. He understood the importance of diet on crew health but never made the critical link to citrus fruit (he advocated fresh meat and vegetables); he displayed a delicate understanding of diverse cultures, and the possible negative impact of Western society on those cultures weighed heavily on him despite his duty to make first contact. Cook makes errors, too, but generally ones that are understandable when viewed through an 18th century lens – and even his final error on Hawaii fits into this paradigm.

The debate over the nature and significance of James Cook and his voyages will certainly continue. In Search of Captain Cook is a welcome addition to that search for meaning.

Jörg Hillmann (ed.), „Erleben – Lernen – Weitergeben“ Friedrich Ruge (1894-1985), Kleine Schriftenreihe zur Militär- und Marinegeschichte, 2005. 568 pp., illustrations, glossary, appendices.

Reviewed by Sebastian Bruns
University of Kiel

Who was Friedrich Ruge? “The first Inspekteur der Marine after World War II,” some may say, “and someone who passed away some 25 years ago.” The answer, obviously, is much more complex. Dr. Jörg Hillmann, Captain in the German Navy and currently based in Bruxelles , Belgium , underscores the significance of this man by showing that his work and his motto “Experience – Learning – Sharing”, is still very much relevant today. From Ruge’s strong lifelong relationship to the United States (in particular with Admiral Arleigh Burke, U.S. Navy Chief of Naval Operations from 1955-1961, whom he met during his first official visit to the U.S. in 1956), to issues of defense, maritime thinking, and conscription in the German Armed Forces, many issues are still highly relevant for today’s armed forces and society, whether German, European, or North American.

Hillmann achieves this objective not by writing a single dedicated essay or book, but by assembling and commenting on a selection of Ruge’s own papers, speeches, letters, essays and autobiographic recollections, with a handful of other contributors filling in here and there. The essays range from 1912, detailing Ruge’s pre-naval experience in his own words, to the obituaries upon his death in 1985. All of these contributions are prefaced by a brief write-up by Hillmann detailing the circumstances under which the various texts were published. The defining moment of Ruge’s professional life was and continued to be “No more 1919’s” – he served in World War I and witnessed the end of the Imperial German Fleet at Scapa Flow – instead of a more plausible “No more 1945’s.” Some of Ruge’s positions might draw explicit criticism from today’s readers, such as contemporary papers on the navy of the Third Reich, leadership issues in World War II, or naval tradition (i.e. the role of the Admirals Dönitz and Raeder who were still imprisoned at the time when the post-war German Navy took shape ). In some instances, Ruge withdrew from some of his ideologically charged positions in later publications.

Two essays introduce to the anthology. The editor himself details Ruge’s career development in the ever-changing currents of German politics in an essay under the heading “Friedrich Ruge – Naval Officer and Professor.” It becomes evident that Ruge’s life was shaped by extraordinary events and was, by no means, linear.

Quite possibly, even though Ruge grew up in a non-democratic environment, he was able to master the later challenges of the Bundesmarine by strictly emphasizing jointness and international cooperation. The selected articles in the book call attention to the personality development of a man who served in four navies (the title of Ruge’s autobiography).

Despite the radical changes that shaped history in the early 20th century especially in Central Europe, and thus Ruge’s own career, Hillmann is able to point out some overarching issues of concern for Ruge. The very close personal and working relationship to the United States since the 1920’s, his pledge for an Atlantic framing of German foreign and security policy, for character development and education of sailors and naval officers, and the question of tradition in naval forces are recurring topics for Friedrich Ruge. Moreover, some light is shed on Ruge’s family and their relationship to the profession of the father. Consequently, Hillmann provides information on Ruge’s oldest daughter, whom he shared a crucial bond with: Ingeborg Eggert engages in the question of researching her own father as well as her relationship to him, setting the stage for the topical anthology.

Hillmann has published widely on subjects such as the Battle of Jutland in World War I and the World War II admirals Dönitz and Raeder. He was fortunate enough to obtain a large variety of papers detailing Ruge’s broad experience (some of which have never been published) on diverse topics such as the end of World War I (1918), torpedo and minesweeping boats in the Reichsmarine of the 1930’s, and the foundation and consolidation of the Bundeswehr after World War II (1956). Ruge’s later years in the highest Bundesmarine positions and publications after his retirement are also covered extensively. The tremendous variety of topics covered is nothing short of overwhelming. Nevertheless, it remains an enlightening reading for anyone interested in different aspects of maritime strategy, naval tactics, the career progression of a naval officer in rough and challenging times, and the foundation of the Bundesmarine, “a Navy with limited tasks, but with an unlimited horizon.” Keeping a written record of his experiences had been of central importance for Friedrich Ruge, and thankfully, Hillmann’s anthology allows us delve into this trove of personal papers and publications. Ruge’s professional writing should serve as a model for today’s officers, as has been pointed out, among others, by one of Ruge’s successors, Lutz Feldt (Inspekteur der Marine from 2003-2006 and author of a short preface to this book).

Donald G. Shomette, Flotilla: The Patuxent Naval Campaign in the War of 1812, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 520 pp., illustrations, maps, line drawings.

Review by Andrew Lambert
King’s College, London

Originally published in 1981 a revised and enlarged edition of this essential volume will be a major contribution to the bicentenary literature of the War of 1812. From his initial search for the archaeology of an abandoned gunboat flotilla in the shallows of the Patuxent River Donald Shomette has become the historian of Commodore Joshua Barney and his mosquito force.

By 1813 the war with Britain , essayed so lightly only a year earlier, had turned sour. Humiliating defeats on the Canadian border had been temporarily assuaged by stunning naval successes, but as Royal Navy forces on the coast steadily built up Americans came to recognise the reality of taking on the Leviathan of the deep. Although the British were fighting for their very existence against Napoleon they were determined to defend Canada , and the oceanic commerce that funded their war. They had no desire to wage war with America , and had no plans to re-conquer the old colonies. They wanted to secure peace with minimum effort. With the Army tied up in Spain they were unable to provide a significant military force, relying on the Royal Navy to translate sea control into effect on land, to shift from naval to maritime strategy.

With small, agile forces the British would practise intelligence-led warfare, relying on an uncontrolled American print media, and the willingness of many men to take the King’s gold. Already well informed of the bitter sectional divisions between Republican and Federalist politics the British carefully chose targets that would influence the administration. The rich tidewater region of Chesapeake Bay, close to the new national capitol, and the main privateer base at Baltimore , produced the export crops of the very men who had voted for war. By striking here the British hoped to take the pressure off the Canadian frontier. The destruction of public and private buildings in the Canadian towns of York and Dover provided an occasion for punitive measures.

In the summer of 1813, with the Royal Navy running riot along the Maryland tidewater, Barney, a Revolutionary war hero, and a successful privateer skipper, proposed building a flotilla of shallow draft gunboats, 50 or 75 feet long, to exploit local knowledge and challenge the British in areas where heavy sailing ships could not operate. The U.S. Flotilla Service was created to operate these craft, with Barney in command. In 1814 Barney and his men, less than a thousand all told, would be the only effective forces placed between the British and the civilians of the area. When the British landed local gentlemen tried to save their estates, but militia units generally ran away, as did many the slaves. Many former slaves joined the British as ‘Colonial Marines’, proving themselves good soldiers, and local experts. By contrast to the part-time soldiers Barney’s Flotilla attacked the enemy, and when cornered put up a hard fight. Much of the credit must go to Barney, a resourceful, brave and professional leader. The actions of the Flotilla, and of the flotillamen ashore at Bladensburg provided a heroic contrast to the endemic ineptitude of their military counterparts.

Making all allowance for the professed subject, the real hero of this book is Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn. A protégé of the immortal Nelson, and a veteran of twenty years of war at sea and on the littoral, Cockburn combined vast experience with an incisive intellect and a brilliant grasp of the higher direction of war. Without a single soldier his 1814 campaign ripped aside the tissue thin veil of American defence, exposing the Government, capital and army to humiliation. Lacking the resources to tackle the major ports, Baltimore , Norfolk and Annapolis , he relied on a tiny naval raiding force to keep the enemy guessing. The British offensive targeted American weakness, incessant raids kept the militia moving, provided a plentiful supply of fresh food, water, lumber to build a fortified base on Tangier Island , and hogsheads of tobacco to generate the prize money that kept sailors interested. When an army of less than 5,000 men finally arrived, Cockburn cajoled his superior officer and the commanding General into a stunning stroke that left Barney’s gunboats, Washington and the Navy Yard in ashes. His campaign should be taught at every Staff College . There is no better example of maritime strategy at work; flexible, quick, and always operating inside the enemy’s decision-making cycle. Cockburn planned the whole campaign to distract and demoralise the enemy, gather vital navigational intelligence and build up for a dramatic conclusion that would teach the enemy not to attack the British, even when they were at war with Napoleon. The legacy of those campaigns would be the immense stone fortifications that surrounded every significant American port. If vituperation be any measure of a man’s impact on his foes then George Cockburn must have been a titan. No insult was too scurrilous to be published. He took his revenge quietly, his official portrait, reproduced on page 126, shows him ashore, with spurs on his boots, the public buildings of Washington ablaze in the distance. In 1832 Cockburn was sent to command the American station, just as a border dispute threatened the fragile Anglo-American peace. Roger Morriss’s 1997 biography of this amphibious expert would have been a useful addition to the bibliography. At page 232 Cockburn’s Commander in Chief in 1814, Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, is conflated with his more famous nephew, Thomas, Lord Cochrane, the model for every fictional Royal Navy hero of the Nelson era from Marryatt to O’Brien. While he lacked Cockburn’s local expertise Sir Alexander was also an amphibious warfare expert, having overseen assault landing at Aboukir in 1801 and other major disembarkations.

Based on a wealth of primary evidence Flotilla is a delight to read, carefully crafted and nicely paced, mixing telling human interventions from key players with analysis of the unfolding drama. The illustrations, contemporary drawings, portraits and modern maps are ideally placed to illustrate and explain the flotilla craft, personalities and operations. This will be an essential text for students of the war, and of maritime strategy. Barney’s gunboats did well, but they had no answer to Cockburn’s squadron.

N. A. M. Roger, Essays in Naval History, from Medieval to Modern, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009. 344 pp., map, charts, graphs, notes, index.

Review by Jeffrey G. Barlow
Naval History and Heritage Command

Nicholas Roger, a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, is most recently known for his first two volumes of a projected history trilogy of Great Britain’s rise to naval power—The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, Volume 1: 660-1649 (1997) and The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, Volume 2: 1649-1815 (2004). The book under review, Essays in Naval History, from Medieval to Modern, a volume in Ashgate’s Variorum Collected Studies Series, is a collection of articles by the author that were originally published in British, French, German, and Greek journals or edited volumes in the years from 1995 through 2004.

Roger’s book contains a fascinating series of articles on the creation and growth of European navies and developments in naval warfare over the centuries. The reader should be aware, however, that despite the book’s title, the majority of the included pieces have to do with navies in the period from the second half of the Sixteenth Century through the first third of the Nineteenth Century. This, of course, should not be surprising, given the author’s particular interest in the Royal Navy of the Eighteenth Century—an interest that dates back at least to his 1986 book The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy. Among the seventeen articles in this volume are pieces on the naval service of the Cinque Ports; naval warfare in the Sixteenth Century; medicine, administration, and society in the Eighteenth-Century Royal Navy; navies and the Enlightenment; and commissioned officers’ careers in the Royal Navy, 1690-1815.

A fascinating article in the initial portion of the book is Roger’s “The Development of Broadside Gunnery 1450-1650.” In this piece, he takes to task Sir Julian Corbett and other naval historians of the late Victorian era for arguing that the English fleet in 1588 had sailed and fought its ships in “line ahead” and had relied upon broadside gunnery to overwhelm its enemies. After carefully sifting through the evidence, Roger concludes that while basic aspects of both concepts were known to English sailors by that date, a full understanding of their value in battle was still decades off. As he expressed it, “So in the end the English, and with them no doubt the other northern nations, discovered that in setting out to match the galley, they had arrived at an entirely unexpected destination, with a new type of warship and a new style of fighting. In material terms, they were ready for the line of battle [a specific form of line ahead] by the 1580s if not before, in that they already had ships which mounted a majority of their guns (though not usually their heaviest guns) on the broadside – but this does not mean that they had yet understood the tactical implication, clear though it might be in hindsight.” (Article III, 317 [continuous pagination is not used in this book]).

Another article of great interest is the author’s “Weather, geography and naval power in the Age of Sail.” In this piece, Roger walks carefully through the difficulties of navigation imposed on sailing ships by their utter dependence upon favorable winds, tides, and currents to make progress toward many of their intended destinations. As the author sums up the matter, “ Britain ’s eventual success [in achieving naval dominance at sea] can be explained in terms of a prolonged process of learning how to exploit the favourable, and overcome the unfavourable, aspects of the situation. None of this was inevitable, and not much of it is intelligible to the historian who ignores the real world of winds and currents, navigation and pilotage.” (Article XII, 197).

This intriguing volume containing many of Nicholas Roger’s naval history articles deserves to be placed on one’s bookshelf, alongside the several substantial studies on the history of Britain ’s rise to naval power that he has written during the past three decades. That being said, even those readers with a more than casual interest in the larger framework of naval history will find much to ponder within its pages.

Roger Dingman, Deciphering the Rising Sun: Navy and Marine Corps Codebreakers, Translators, and Interpreters in the Pacific War, Naval Institute Press, 2009. 340 pp., illustrations, notes, index.

Review by Mark M. Hull
Department of Military History, US Army Command and General Staff College

In Deciphering the Rising Sun, Roger Dingman has crafted an interesting and highly readable story concerning a little-known but important aspect of the intelligence war in the Pacific: the Navy’s recruitment, training, and employment of Americans as translators of the complex Japanese language.

While the Army and Navy had been sending selected officers to Japan for years, by the period immediately before Pearl Harbor, there were only a handful of those officers on active duty. Compounding this difficulty was the on-going rivalry between the services to recruit likely candidates. The Army established its own Japanese language training school at the Presidio in November 1941 as it became clear that war with Japan was all but inevitable. Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum of the Office of Naval Intelligence – himself a Japanese linguist with interwar experience in Japan – stepped forward to find the right place, right faculty, and right students to allow the Navy to maintain parity.

Although there was a ready pool of ethnic Japanese who could have performed this work, in most cases their employment was impossible due to existing, often misplaced, security concerns. This forced the Navy to turn elsewhere for people with the necessary background or aptitude. Following a highly successful pilot program at Berkeley (and a somewhat less-than-successful one at Harvard), the Navy Japanese Language School was relocated to Boulder, Colorado, where the first batch of civilian recruits pioneered an eight-month intensive language course in spoken and written Japanese. They were a mixed lot; some had grown up in Japan or China (experience with non-Japanese languages was an acceptable substitute), others had lived or worked in Japan before the war, while still others had no first-hand experience upon which to draw, only the hope that their facility with languages would be enough to see them through. At the end of the fast-paced, high-pressure course, the students were commissioned as reserve officers in the Navy or Marine Corps.

While ethnic Japanese were not considered sufficiently trustworthy for employment as Navy translators and interpreters, they nevertheless made up the critical core of the Language School faculty, and provided a living link between the students and a language and culture that was entirely foreign to them. The graduates, male and female, went on to perform well in a myriad of assignments, some landing in the first waves with the Marines to aid in prisoner interrogation while other graduates focused on the translation and evaluation of captured Japanese documents. The author ably points to the dramatic differences in the linguists’ attitude about the Japanese after the Boulder linguists came face-to-face with war; some echo the racial stereotypes which were very much the norm, while others – particularly those assigned to post-war occupation duty – developed a sincere affection for the people, their culture, and their language. In every meaningful respect, the Navy program, as demonstrated in the field by the fledgling linguists, was a success in the war against Japan.

It would have been useful if Dingman had compared the Navy interpreter/translator program to that used by the U.S. Army, where enlisted, Japanese-speaking Nisei were used in significant numbers. While he exclusively highlights the successes of the Boulder school graduates, it is invariable that some were more capable than others. To fairly evaluate the program it would be useful to also mention those cases where the Boulder alumni were less than perfectly effective.

Deciphering the Rising Sun is very much a history focused on the individual experiences of the linguists themselves, rather than an operational or strategic overview of the Human Intelligence gathering and evaluation aspects of the Pacific War. It is also a welcome reminder that good, readable military history can remain on the micro level without becoming trivial.

M. S. Reidy, Tides of History: Ocean Science and Her Majesty’s Navy. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008

Reviewed by Howard Fuller
University of Wolverhampton

Tides of History is a fascinating book, both a scientific history and a maritime one that demonstrates the close links between these two areas of historical investigation as it charts the development of scientific enquiries and methods into tides. In today’s information age of good charts, data and satellite navigation it is easy to forget the difficulties, dangers and risk that mariners once faced. While the development of accurate charts and the ability to calculate a position while out of sight of land has attracted attention, the problems caused by tides have escaped serious study until Michael Reidy’s excellent work.

It might be thought that something as mundane for today’s world as tidal theory would make dry reading; such a view would be wrong. Reidy writes in an accessible and readable style, and the story he lays out is one of great interest, as he charts the formation of ‘tideology’ notably by concentrating on the efforts of William Whewell and his associates in the first half of the nineteenth century, before showing how from its foundations in tidal theory the maritime sciences moved outwards to encompass a multitude of phenomena such as mapping the magnetic variation of the earth’s oceans – a task just as important to safe and accurate navigation as Whewell’s work on tides, or Harrison’s chronometer and the measurement of longitude the previous century.

It is hard, sitting in a warm office or in a comfortable chair, to understand the importance of the advances made in the marine sciences during the nineteenth century – perhaps a few good tales of maritime misfortunate complete with the Victorian melodrama might make the process of understanding how vital this work was to the mariner. Tidal science when combined with accurate charts, an accurate log of speed and distance run, a good compass (made even more accurate in by the 1830s with the understanding of magnetic variation), the ability to calculate latitude and longitude made navigation more precise and safer tool for the mariner. Once the ground work of understanding tides had been achieved, understanding tidal streams – their speed and direction soon followed – then dead reckoning (course and speed only) could be replaced with the more accurate estimated position (course, speed and the influence of the tidal stream during the period) as the mainstay of the navigator’s art particularly in coastal waters where the effect of tides was most felt. Only the ability to see through the night, fog and driving rain could do more to improve the safety of navigation, and this would have to wait for the development of navigation radar in the 1950s.

Reidy is right to emphasise the level of support the early investigators and scientists of tidal theory received from the British Admiralty. What Reidy does not do, however, is go into detail as to why the Navy felt the marine sciences were of such importance during the late 1830s and 1840s. Yes, there was genuine interest from some officers about the use of science to improve understand of the natural world such as Beaufort, who as the Hydrographer had great influence over what research the Navy got involve with. Yes, the advances in understanding tides made navigation safer, but why was the Navy interested in tidal theory in that particular period? Was there more to the issue than just safe navigation and the increasing trade of Britain’s merchant marine? It is therefore important to consider strategy and naval policy with regard to the Royal Navy’s relationship with scientists and laymen who were involved in formulating tidal theory.

For many years the Navy had been vexed by the problem of what to do if an enemy refused to do the decent thing and leave its harbours and fortified anchorages behind and sail out to be beaten by the Royal Navy’s squadrons. The answer was to be able to seek out the enemy in harbour – steam and shell firing guns had made this more practicable, while understanding tides made it safer. At the same time, steam and the French development of Cherbourg as a major naval arsenal had undermined Britain’s traditional strategy of being able to command the English Channel with a Western Squadron up-wind of the main French base and Brest. The Royal Navy’s answer to these problems was to develop a coastal attack strategy in the 1840s that would neutralise the French threat at Cherbourg and which saw use in the Baltic during the Crimean War against the Russians. As Andrew Lambert has pointed out, the Royal Navy put a great deal of hydrographical effort into accurately charting and understanding the waters off Cherbourg in the 1804s and perhaps we should see the more general enthusiasm for the marine sciences in this period as an aspect of this coastal attack strategy.

Tides of History is a well written and engaging book. It is warmly recommended for all those interested in the development of the Royal Navy and Merchant Marine during the nineteenth century.

David Stevens and John Reeve (eds.), The Navy and the Nation: The Influence of the Navy on Modern Australia, Allen & Unwin, 2005. 438 pp., illustrations, pictures, endnotes, and index.

Review by Charles Steele
Department of History,
United States Air Force Academy

In putting together The Navy and the Nation David Stevens and John Reeve have assembled something far more valuable than a mere narrative history of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN). In many regards it is an historical argument against taking something of great value for granted. At a time when navies the world over are having their funding cut and their worth questioned, the editors of this volume have cobbled together a significant statement of the enduring value of the RAN to the nation it serves. The book, a collection of essays drawn from the biennial King-Hall Naval History Conference, provides a plethora of examples detailing the immense contributions of the RAN to Australia .

While there is no escaping the fact that this is a compilation of conference papers, and not a coherent narrative, it should not be dismissed as the intellectual equivalent of being made to eat leftovers. This is history written, compiled, and edited with a purpose. As a collection of arguments begging the consideration of a host of events, personalities, and contributions made either in connection with or on behalf of the RAN, The Navy and the Nation provides forceful testimony to the importance of this navy to its island nation. Rather than a single author advancing a thesis, Stevens and Reeve provide the theses of several writers that serve the greater purpose of demonstrating how the RAN has benefited Australia .

Divided into four parts, the book has a sensible organization that carries readers from “concepts and contexts,” a Mahanian macro-view of Australia ’s place in an evolving naval epic, through sections entitled “the Navy and the nation,” “ships, industry and technology for Australia ,” and “naval people and the nation.” Among the 19 essays contained in these sections are those touching upon everything from hydrographic surveys, the RAN’s place in furthering the foreign policy aims of Australia ’s political leaders, the most famous ships to have served the nation, the historic importance of ship building in Australia , and the value of naval experience in the Australian populace. The most compelling of these essays extol the traditional strengths of navies while managing to place those strengths in particularly Australian contexts.

The editors draw on a wide range of talents and the essays are representative of a vast expanse of knowledge. In some regards this compilation’s greatest strength, a wonderfully diverse testament to the value of navies, the RAN specifically, is also its greatest weakness. Lacking the coherence of a single storyline, this collection might seem to some readers as being a bit too all encompassing. However well the editors may have chosen individual essays to suit their purpose, the fact remains that this is a compilation that lacks natural transitions and it requires close attention if large sections are to be digested at a single reading. For instance, Neil Westphalen’s interesting account of the naval and medical services nexus is, in a strict sense, the only essay of its kind in the book. Similarly, Geoff Cannon’s contribution “Technology transfer, knowledge partnerships and the advance of Australian naval combat systems,” is more contemporary and in some regards more specialized than most of the other offerings. That quibble aside, the book’s essays make several cogent arguments that do great credit to the editors and the RAN.

As unorthodox as this book might appear at first glance, it should be noted that it does contain impressive examples of what might best be called traditional naval history. The contributions of Geoffrey Till and David Stevens are perhaps the best offerings of this genre to be found in this collection. Till does an admirable job of setting a strategic backdrop upon which other developments/essays can best be viewed and Stevens offers a compelling, if not touching account of one of the most famous ships in the nation’s history. In many ways Stevens’ account of the life and death of HMAS Australia is reflective of the book’s aim to place the navy at the fore of the nation’s quest for identity. In general, it would be difficult not to be impressed with all that the RAN has contributed to Australia ’s rise as a nation, based upon the contents of this book. Whether one is interested in the history of navies in general, or of Australia’s navy alone, The Navy and the Nation contains a wealth of useful scholarship and is worthy of a place in the library of any student of naval history.

Geirr H. Haarr, The German Invasion of Norway, April 1940, Naval Institute Press, 2009. 474 pp., illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, name index.

Review by Timothy J. Demy
U.S. Naval War College

On April 9, 1940, forces of the German Kriegsmarine, Luftwaffe, and Wehrmacht commenced Operation Weserübung, the invasion and occupation of neutral Norway in order to protect the Scandinavian ore resources and also deny them to Britain . This combined naval, amphibious, and airborne invasion surprised Norwegian and Allied forces, whose leaders did not believe Hitler would attempt a full-scale invasion and occupation. The German move signaled the last days of the “Phoney War” that had begun in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland . The Norwegian invasion also inaugurated novel activities such as combined land, air, and sea operations and the use of paratroopers. From a naval and air perspective, the first successful dive-bomber attack (a British Blackburn B-24 Skua) to sink an enemy ship (German cruiser Königsberg in Bergen harbor) also occurred during the campaign.

Focusing primarily on the naval operations, The German Invasion of Norway , April 1940, provides readers with an exceptionally detailed and well-documented volume. Drawing from Norwegian, German, and British primary sources and archives as well as numerous secondary sources, readers are given a balanced and thorough account of the naval aspect of the invasion. The book provides a highly readable and a compelling narrative of the German invasion and failure to repulse it.

The first third of the volume is devoted to the German rationale for and planning of the invasion. It was amazing to read that when Hitler told General der Inafanterie Nicoulaus von Falkenhorst that he was responsible for the planning the operation and occupation, von Falkenhorst went across the street to a bookshop and purchased a Baedeker’s travel guide to Norway in order to orient himself to the country and begin his planning. Interesting to readers in this section are the political miscalculations of the Norwegians, Germans, and British with regard to the intentions of all parties involved. Haarr does a good job showing the tensions among the Kriegsmarine, Luftwaffe, and Wehrmacht, and in noting Grossadmiral Erich Raeder’s concern that the German Navy not be shortchanged in the allocation of resources. It was Raeder who initially pushed the concept of a Scandinavian campaign. In the greater war strategies of the belligerents, no one initially envisaged a full-scale occupation (although Churchill had considered the idea earlier, giving rise to the ethical issue of “supreme emergency” wherein ethical norms of war may, under some circumstances, be abandoned) although both Germany and Britain began planning operations in early 1940. Also significant in this section for students of strategy is the recounting of the breakdown of the civil-military relations between the Norwegian government and military leadership wherein each assumed the other knew of the ill-equipped condition of the Norwegian military forces and the lack of cooperation between the forces as well as a void in contingency planning. Norwegian political miscommunication, hesitation, and an atrophied military hastened the German victory.

The latter two thirds of the work studies the major areas of operation (Oslofjord; Kristiansand —Arendal, Stavanger —Egersund, Bergen , Trondheim , and Narvik), interspersed with narrative of the political and military responses during the conflict. The volume does a superb job of recounting the naval operations on all sides and tracking naval vessels and units. The work is naval centric and students of the air and ground aspects of the operation will wish for an equally detailed book even though the author discusses these aspects. Haarr largely ends the story of the invasion with the events of the second day, April 10th, giving only slight attention to ground and air actions that followed. The author rightly concludes that although the campaign was a minor one compared to the rest of the war in Europe, it forever changed the history of the people of Norway .

Although previous works have discussed the German campaign in Norway and Denmark , what has been missing is an exceptional work from the Norwegian perspective. This volume fills that void. The author not only shows how the operation was viewed by the Norwegians, Germans, and British, but also the Dane, Swedes, and French. Detailed appendices and numerous black and white photographs significantly enhance the volume, as do charts of operational areas. A fuller index would have beneficial, as would an overall map of Norway at the front of the book to orient readers to the area and to the smaller regional maps within the book. The work is especially beneficial for readers limited to English. The book fills a needed void in naval studies of the Second World War and naval historians and enthusiasts will not be disappointed.