by Douglas V. Smith. Naval Institute Press 2006. $32.95. ISBN 1591147948. Hardcover. 352 pages.When I write for publication, I ask friends to criticize my draft manuscript: "Be nasty! I can take it. I can fix it now but I’m stuck once it goes to press." Professor Douglas V. Smith needs friends like mine. His book Carrier Battles proposes to show how U.S. Navy commanders during 1942–44 capitalized on their pre-war professional education to fight the five battles of the Pacific war in which aircraft carriers opposed each other. It further proposes to serve as a single-volume history of those battles. Despite two friendly forewords and his acknowledgments to many historians, he falls short in his chosen purposes.The battles were:
Mission-capable (MC) aircraft carriers (status of ships only)
Japan
US
Engaged
MC at end
Engaged
MC at end
Coral Sea, May 1942
3
1
2
1
Midway, June 1942
4
0
3
2
Eastern Solomons, August 1942
3
1
2
1
Santa Cruz, October 1942
4
2
2
1
Philippine Sea, June 1944
9
6
15
15
The book appears largely to collate lecture notes and viewgraph slides, possibly ancient, from the U.S. Naval War College. Some of his observations are interesting. In particular he notes that Japan attempted land-style operations at sea, such as double envelopment. A worthy analysis, albeit outside Professor Smith’s own objective for the present book, might ask whether Japanese belief that the IJN could accomplish such a tricky operation with effect at sea engendered its overconfidence, as it apparently did to the Germans at Stalingrad and to the US during Operation Desert Storm. Another good point is that by putting to sea for Midway, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku isolated himself from communication with his carrier group lest radio transmissions betray his location.The book features 45 graphics. Some track charts are lobotomized copies of much clearer versions such as found in E. B. Potter (no relation) and C. W. Nimitz, The Great Sea War (1960), raising a question of Professor Smith’s research. In two cases the same chart is repeated a few pages apart. The charts often lack information such as times of positions. With careful reading one can figure out which unit is which. One chart has 26 lettered points in the caption but five are missing from the chart itself. The same caption shows two indistinguishable black dotted lines for different units that in any case show as white dotted lines on the chart. Or maybe those lines track only one unit. Without labels, who knows?Errors indicate lack of expertise and reliance on faulty and archaic sources. The family names of Japanese personnel are cited last, an anachronism. "The American submarine SS Flying Fish" and "the U.S. submarine SS Seahorse" fare no better. He asserts the presence of a nonexistent fourth aircraft carrier ("Hayataka") at Santa Cruz and imaginary losses of a Japanese light cruiser in the Coral Sea and of Japanese submarines in the Eastern Solomons.
As the book proceeds Professor Smith seems to lose interest in his chosen subject: the operational and tactical phases at Midway get 55 pages; Santa Cruz, 14; the Philippine Sea, 18. He omits the battle off Cape Engaño in October 1944, although the U.S. forces prosecuted it as a carrier battle, not realizing that the Japanese carrier force by then was a decoy.
At Midway and Santa Cruz the U.S. commanders employed over-the-horizon targeting and launched air strikes toward targets whose relative locations were still only reckoned from intelligence, not yet fixed by sightings by the carriers’ aircraft. The USN project manager for the Tomahawk anti-ship cruise missile has written that he cited Midway to refute doubt that a naval commander would launch a strike before his sensors held the targets. The actual use of this tactic goes by without analysis.Professor Smith grades (literally: A, B, C, …) the American commanders on their performance at particular activities. His first focus is on the commander’s estimate of the situation. He offers no explanation of why his vague concept of a commander’s estimate of the situation falls short of the present specification (http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/dod/docs/pub1_97/Appenf.html). Since he prints no such estimates, one must wonder what the grades really measure.And not only in that subject. He notes that at Midway Admiral Spruance using Admiral Halsey’s staff missed the rendezvous with returning aircraft; yet awards an A+ for communication. A plausible explanation, not mentioned in this book, is that the Halsey-experienced staff expected Spruance similarly to tell them what to do while the reclusive Spruance imagined the aviation-experienced staff knew what to do without being told.Professor Smith awards high marks too for Santa Cruz, an avoidable gamble that risked the last two operational US fleet carriers in the theater and left one sunk and one badly damaged. Those commanders created an exposure, a new risk to the support of Guadalcanal, for three critical weeks during October–November 1942. That is not an example for modern commanders to follow, and for that matter it was not repeated at Guadalcanal.For today’s military this book is potentially misleading. Professor Smith misuses terms such as "strategic" when he means "operational" and "tactical" when he means "material." His statement, "And by his act of defiance of Congress in sending a fleet on a global circumnavigation without funding authorization for the trip, President [Theodore] Roosevelt empowered the American people in support of that destiny," panders to extremists. He mentions operational (pre-engagement) warfare methods such as deception and logistics arrangements mostly in passing. His analysis leaves the impression that at least in the 1942 battles, like their Japanese counterparts the American commanders too became overconfident, a susceptibility that the commander’s intent analysis is designed to prevent.Office PC software enables researchers to create original charts, to store large amounts of data to generate time lines, and to repeat an outline to elucidate patterns in battles that the author hypothesizes have systematic similarities. The elements of operational warfare are well documented, including by the U.S. Naval War College, Professor Smith’s institution.To be informative and useful to the modern military, an analysis needs to be rigorous, to be comprehensive by accepted theory, to be accurate based on bottom-up research, and to be presented in valid graphics wherever graphics are more effective than text. Carrier Battles fails every requirement, notwithstanding that it has a good premise in considering the Pacific carrier battles as a distinctive series of events.
No comments:
Post a Comment