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Barbara
Brooks Tomblin. With Utmost
Spirit: Allied Naval Operations in the Mediterranean, 1942-1945.
Lexington
: The University Press of
Kentucky
, 2004. 578(+) pp., index, maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography,
index. ISBN 0-8131-
2338-0.
Reviewed
by Samuel Doss
Russian
and East European Partnerships, Inc.
Leesburg
,
VA
____________________________________________________
The Mediterranean theater of operations is an often forgotten and
neglected area of Second World War historiography. With few
exceptions--such as Samuel Eliot Morison's multi-volume History of
United States Naval Operations in World War II--Mediterranean naval
operations have rarely been addressed. There may be the occasional
popular history or scholarly journal article on Mediterranean warfare,
but seldom a significant book-length work. Now respected author
and historian Barbara Brooks Tomblin delivers a detailed account of
Allied naval efforts in this often ignored theater, and pays proper
tribute to Allied forces involved.
California-based Tomblin is the author of several
military history articles, as well as G.I.
Nightingales: The Army Nurse Corps in World War II. She taught
military history at
Rutgers
University
. As she explains, the Pacific theater has received the lion's
share of attention from US naval historians, to the neglect of other
navel theaters. Tomblin therefore decided to invest her
intellectual energy in a proper assessment of Allied operations in the
Mediterranean
. With personal ties to participants, the author spent a good deal
of her lifetime studying the subject, interviewing veterans, and
preparing this volume. It was clearly a labor of love, consuming
over thirty years.
With Utmost
Spirit is an in-depth tactical and operational history of specific
operations from 1942 to the war's conclusion in 1945. She examines
both British and American efforts, as well as "joint" and
"combined" operations. This titanic struggle began with
Royal Navy’s--and later US Navy’s--efforts to wrest control of the
sea lanes and
Mediterranean Sea
from German and Italian air power and submarines. In order to put
later operations into context, she quickly reviews already well-known
British naval activities, such as the siege of
Malta
, various fights with the Italian Navy, and the securing of convoy
routes to the
Suez Canal
. But Tomblin spends the bulk of her book on the invasion of
North Africa
(November 1942) and subsequent amphibious campaigns.
Her narrative provides detailed, accurate accounts of
the five major amphibious invasions of North Africa (Torch),
Sicily
(Husky),
Salerno
(Avalanche),
Anzio
(Shingle), and
Southern France
(Anvil-Dragoon). Each of these operations is examined in fair
detail with respect to logistics, anti-submarine ops, counter-mine
measures, naval gunfire support, air cover and close air support, ship
to shore movements, beachhead establishment and support, follow-on port
activities, and future naval actions. Major decisions involved the
allocation of combat vessels, landing craft, carrier air support, and
ground forces to the various, competing theaters of war.
Tomblin's well-documented utilization of US archives
and official histories is only a start: her use of primary source
documents is the strength of this book. She effectively uses vivid
personal accounts, such as diaries and letters, interviews, after-action
reports, and ships' logs document the triumphs and tragedies of
individual soldiers, sailors, airmen, and civilians. Having
started her research in the 1960s, Tomblin was able to interview many of
the surviving senior naval officers who took part in operations from
both a planning and command perspective. This integration of
personal documents gives life to every page and almost every paragraph.
The author does a nice job of intermixing individual combat accounts,
yet keeping sight of the bigger picture, and of describing the battles
at both the tactical and operational levels. Her passionate style
reminds the reader of Stephen Sears and his superb narratives of the War
Between the States.
Throughout all this action, there were intra- and
inter-service rivalries competing for ships, planes, and men.
Some Allied leaders—most prominently General George
Marshall—considered the Mediterranean Theater to be a sideshow and
unnecessary use of finite resources, especially in comparison to the
Northwest Europe Theater. However, this main effort would never
have been possible had it not been for the combat experiences of Allied
air, sea, and ground forces in the
Mediterranean
.
The British and Americans commands faced enormous
complexities in joint and coalition warfare. The Allies had to
fight what was, arguably, the most effective military force in history,
the Wehrmacht. Recent efforts by distinguished authors such as
Rick Atkinson have studied US Army operations in
North Africa
, our mistakes, and lessons learned. Military classics such as
Carlo D'Este's works on the
Sicily
and
Anzio
campaigns described our successes and failures during subsequent
operations, particularly failures in intelligence planning and combined
arms integration.
In this continuum of warfare, Allied forces developed
ever-more effective air, sea and land battle doctrines, while constantly
attiring Italian and German forces. But what Churchill described
as the "soft underbelly of
Europe
" did not prove to be soft at all. Important lessons were
learned, especially with regard to amphibious operations. Although
the efficacy of our efforts in the Mediterranean in general, and the
Italian campaign in particular, has and will long be debated, the
invaluable combat experiences in this "minor theater" afforded
greater and ultimate success in northwest
Europe
. Each operation was an important stepping stone in the Allied
march to victory.
Tomblin provides fifty three pages of notes and a
lengthy bibliography. This section is worth the price of the book
alone! However, the sources are almost entirely in English, and
mostly American. Primary
source British documents are not utilized to nearly the same degree.
French, Italian, and the very extensive German WW II archives are
virtually ignored. Operations in the eastern Mediterranean and
Adriatic
are given little attention. Maps could be better marked and more
maps would be advantageous. There are a handful of editorial
mistakes in the book, leaving the reader occasionally wondering what was
meant by a passage. Fortunately, these are few. Glaring
errors are fewer still. Nonetheless, given her goal of
concentrating on US naval operations, she still achieves her objectives.
Proper attention is given to the personalities and
complexities of those in command. Training before invasions,
logistics, intelligence, and minesweeping operations are included to a
degree rarely found in other books. Tomblin also discusses the
transformation of the French navy from an enemy combatant during Torch
to an able ally during Anvil-Dragoon. Her last chapter covers
lessons learned. It would be time well spent for today's modern
warrior to read this chapter alone.
This book is highly recommended to the serious
scholar of WW II. With her judicious scholarship, Barbara Tomblin
has now achieved what may be the definitive account of American and
British naval operations in support of the five major amphibious
operations in the
Mediterranean.
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