Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 by Ian W. Toll
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Absorbing, Well-Written History of an "execrable business" Ian Toll's Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 (2012), focuses on the first two years of World War II's Pacific theater and on the two main antagonists, Japan and America. After a prologue setting forth US (and world) naval philosophy before the opening of the war, oriented around the Mahanian Doctrine of concentrated forces, big battleships, and decisive battles, Toll starts the main part of his book in December 1941 (Pearl Harbor) and takes us up to June 1942 (Midway). Being American rather than Japanese, Toll gives more weight to American points of view and anecdotes and men. For example, he gives more physical details of the features of key American navy men than he does for those of their Japanese counterparts, which makes us more sympathetic to the former than the latter, as when he writes things like, "Hornet's Torpedo Eight was skippered by Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron, a lean, hatchet-faced South Dakotan, bronzed by long exposure to tropical sun." At times he perhaps goes into too much detail in that vein, like with his introduction of Admiral Nimitz, including information about his being a devoted father and his riding a train across America to California, when he tried to teach Lt. Lamar cribbage and drank whisky before going to bed, etc. While Toll provides such detailed sketches into the backgrounds and personalities of a variety of top American naval officers like Admiral King, he pretty much only does the equivalent thing with one Japanese officer, Admiral Yamamoto, the leader of the Japanese navy then, revealing his candid nature and vaudevillian sense of humor and affinity for gambling and geisha. And although he gives a fair amount of detail from the Japanese point of view before, during, and after a particular battle, he goes into more detail about the American point of view. All that said, he is objective in his depiction of the conflict, treating both the Americans and the Japanese with dignity, sympathy, and understanding. Throughout his book Toll provides vivid details about various aspects of the war in the Pacific: about what it was like to take off from and land on an aircraft carrier deck (in windy weather, strong seas, or nighttime), about the tricky nature of refueling at sea, about the different kinds of planes in use and their different strong and weak points and roles etc. (torpedo planes, dive bombers, fighters, and reconnaissance planes for both sides), about the intense heat in an aircraft carrier around the equator, about the preparations before a sea battle between carriers, about the role of war games in naval planning, about what happens when a bomb or torpedo hits a carrier, and so on. He effectively conveys the change in naval strategy and warfare from battleship based to carrier based. He also effectively conveys the confusion (fog) of battle. Perhaps the most fascinating part of his book for me was his account of the burgeoning military communications intelligence and code-breaking field, including the competition between rival units, the suspicion with which the intelligence guys were viewed by the regular navy men, the way they intercepted radio broadcasts and cracked codes and put all kinds of data together to predict what the Japanese were going to do, and so on. Toll's accounts of the several battles leading up to and including Midway are riveting, even if we generally know the outcomes. He can turn a nice phrase, like "The sixteen B-25s heaved and strained at their tie-downs, like butterflies clinging to a windblown leaf." He writes some witty lines, like "Like Mae West, he did most of his best work in bed." He ends his book with an interestingly sober look forward (he stops his account right after the Battle of Midway in June of 1942, so if you want to continue the journey with him, you'll need to read his The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942–1944): "They [the Americans] would go on fighting, killing, and dying, overcoming fear, fatigue, and sorrow, until they reached the beaches of the detested empire itself. There, in 1945, the Yankee war machine would meet the immovable object of the 'Yamato spirit,' until two mushroom clouds and an emperor's decision brought the whole execrable business to an end." Which makes me think that although Toll recognizes the heroism of both Japanese and American men during the war, he also believes that war is nothing glorious to be proud of, being "an execrable business." The audiobook reader is the consummately professional and appealing Grover Gardner, who gives his usual fine reading of a book. Thankfully, he does not assume accents when reading British or Japanese people or Southern men, which is nice. People interested in the first stages of World War II as it developed in the Pacific--especially those readers not well-versed in the field--should be enriched by this book. View all my reviews
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
May 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University