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Sunday Book Review: Live From Jordan

[ 1 ] May 5, 2008 | Robert Farley

In mid-2002, Benjamin Orbach traveled to Jordan. Orbach was 27 at the time, and wanted to improve his Arabic language skills. This is hardly unusual; a handful of Patterson students travel each year to the Middle East and elsewhere to work on languages, an experience which is shared by any number of other young professionals. Orbach’s story is interesting for two reasons; he spent much of his time writing letters, and he lived in Jordan (and later in Egypt) during the build up to the Iraq War.

Live from Jordan is structured as a series of letters to friends in the United States. The book doesn’t simply reprint these letters; they’ve been edited and pasted together to make the whole more coherent. Orbach’s thoughts on the war were muddled; this is to be expected, I think, of what amounts to eight months or so of thinking through the long buildup to the conflict. Orbach made every effort to avoid Monday morning quaterbacking, although of course different things will appear important in hindsight than at the time. Eventually Orbach was forced to leave Jordan out of concern for his safety, moving to Cairo to continue his studies. He took advantage of his time in the Middle East to travel, visiting Syria, Palestine, and Turkey. Orbach is Jewish, but didn’t publicize the fact while traveling in Islamic countries. When I asked him about this he said that he’d act differently if he had it to do over again, but I kind of get the sense he made the right decision in 2002-3.

Like most good travel literature, Orbach portrays some scenes of genuine peril. His description of his first day in Jordan is interesting enough, but I found his accidental visit to a Turkish nightclub even more entertaining. The effort of the brother of one of his Jordanian friends was probably less dangerous, but somehow felt more disconcerting. That said, I’m not sure that his experience was all that different or more perilous than that of any American traveling this part of the world immediately prior to the war; I recall that even in Germany Americans were given warnings about how to carry themselves in public areas.

I’m not sure that Live From Jordan is a must read from a policy standpoint; there’s some interesting stuff here, but it’s not really eye popping. For example, his description of America-hating terrorists as “nihilists” really misses the mark, although it is unfortunately reminiscent of Christopher Hitchens; people who believe in nothing rarely take the time, trouble, and expense to suicidally blow things up. Still, as a travel book there’s a lot to like. Orbach has a lot of experiences that seem pretty typical of an American visiting the Middle East, and anyone who’s about to venture to that area (or anywhere else unfamiliar, really) could find a lot that’s of use in his work. I do have to wonder whether the epistolary travel narrative is long for this world, however. It seems to me that the blog will come to dominate this kind of story, having the advantage of near real-time distribution and of immediate feedback. Several friends of mine have travel blogs, and Ben himself now has a blog.

Sunday Maritime Book Review: Thunder in the Night

[ 9 ] April 27, 2008 | Robert Farley

In early 1972 the heavy cruiser Newport News deployed to Southeast Asia. Newport News was one of the last of the big gun cruisers, commissioned in 1949 and carrying 9 8-inch guns with an automatic reload system that allowed the cruiser to fire ninety shells per minute. The cruiser was playing a role similar to that played by the battleship New Jersey in 1968, but the amount of ordnance delivered by Newport News (nicknamed “Thunder”) was greater than that of the battleship. Newport News was dispatched to Vietnam to assist in Linebacker I, an operation designed to stop a North Vietnamese conventional invasion of the South. Often at night but sometimes during the day, Newport News would close with the shoreline and either give fire support to South Vietnamese forces or attack targets within North Vietnam. The cruiser was never seriously threatened by North Vietnamese attack, but would regularly take fire from shore artillery batteries, along with the occasional encounter with a torpedo boat. Unfortunately, the North Vietnamese weren’t the only problem. Towards the end of its tour, the B-turret on Newport News exploded, killing about twenty sailors.

Thunder in the Night, by Raymond Kopp is the story of Thunder’s deployment. Kopp served on Newport News during its tour of duty, and was present when the B-turret exploded. We have a lot of narratives of maritime life, but most are focused on the experience of officers. Kopp gives us a story from the point of view of a sailor. Most intriguing is his description of how information moved around the ship. A ship at sea is unlike an infantry company or army brigade; especially in 1972, there weren’t a lot of ways for the individual sailor to communicate outside of the ship. Consequently, the treatment of information that would otherwise be sensitive or confidential seemed to be much more lax than would be expected on land. Kopp describes the rumor mill that engulfed shipboard life, with different information coming in from different sources and being put together in what amounted to a giant game of telephone. On a couple of occasions the Newport News put into Subic Bay for replenishment, repair, and rest. Kopp does a good job of capturing the culture of Subic Bay, particularly of how its economy became oriented around the US presence. Kopp isn’t a social scientist, but he does paint a nice picture of the impact of the base on Philippine life.

Kopp doesn’t go into a lot of detail about the construction of Newport News, but I was forced to wonder whether any thought was given to designing automatic weapons for battleships. The 8″ guns on Newport News and her sisters fired at a little more than twice the rate of normal guns, which would translate to five rounds per minute for a 16″ weapon. I’ve never seen any thought or any design for post-Montana US battleships, but the idea of a ship that could fire 60 16″ shells per minute is pretty impressive. The Japanese went the other direction; Yamato carried 18.1″ guns, and both the Super and Super-Duper Yamato designs were supposed to carry 20″ weapons. I’d put my money on the 60 16″ shells/minute over the 10 20″ shells/minutes. Newport News and her two sisters were useful enough as bombardment ships to keep around for a long time; Newport News was scrapped in 1993, Des Moines in 2006, and Salem has been converted into a museum ship.

This book is primarily going to be of interest to those who really dig naval artillery, and to those with particular interests in either the naval aspect of the Vietnam War or the 1972 campaigns. The account has substantial weaknesses. Kopp takes some defensible liberties in terms of reconstructing conversations that happened thirty-five years ago; no one expects that he would remember specifically what was said at a particular time, and it’s reasonable in this context to try to recapture the gist, rather than the specifics, or a given conversation. Nevertheless, many of his dialogues have a pat quality that leaves them nearly unreadable. Kopp also has a strangely dissonant treatment the reaction of the country to the war; at one point he insists that patriotic young men joined the military at a rate unseen since World War II, while at other times he recognizes the very serious tensions that the war evoked in the United States. Kopp concludes with a fairly long and reasonably interesting discussion of his life after Vietnam. His unfortunate coda relates his Vietnam and post-Vietnam experience to the Iraq War. It’s fair enough to argue that national unity is a good thing to have during a war, but it’s not so fair to suggest the essential suspension of politics. Kopp asserts that the only time for the American populace to make its preferences known is during an election, yet the long history of American democracy is replete with examples of political action that have nothing to do with elections. Electoral politics is one way to change a policy, but it is not now and has never been the only way. While I appreciate the difficulties that Kopp and other Vietnam veterans have faced, nothing that they have experienced is worth sacrificing any part of America’s democratic tradition. In any case, the digression is unfortunate but brief.

Sunday Book Review: Republic of Suffering

[ 15 ] April 21, 2008 | Robert Farley

Drew Gilpin Faust’s Republic of Suffering is about memory and the Civil War, but not in the conventionally understood fashion. Although Faust writes a bit about the memory of the war in the national narrative, she’s more interested in how the raw butchery of the war affected American culture on a micro level. The understanding of death in the family and in literature, she suggests, was transformed by the immense human cost of the war and the distance of major battlefields from the homes of many soldiers. Death, as it were, was conducted differently after the war than before.

Faust suggests that a particular understanding of the “Good Death” predominated in the United States before the war. The Good Death involved dying at home, with one’s family, and with the presence of mind to understand and accept the process. The United States had thus far missed out on the opening stages of industrial war, participating only on the periphery of the Napleonic Wars and defeating Mexico without substantial loss. The Civil War represented a demographic event, so to speak, that made the previous appreciation of death difficult. Death came suddenly, often with great pain, and sometimes left no identifiable remains. Even when remains could be identified, the state lacked the bureaucratic and physical infrastructure necessary to transfer the bodies home. Technology also presented a problem, although the use of embalming expanded exponentially during the war.

The Civil War represented a unique expansion in the capacity of the state in nineteenth century America, including growth in its capability to manage death. The raising of large armies, their operation in war, and the management of their demobilization all stressed and expanded the bureaucratic apparatus of the state. Faust details how the managing of Union war dead during and after the war required the state to act in previously unimagined ways. There was substantial difference between the North and the South, of course, in part because the war was fought mostly on Southern soil but also because of the poverty of the South after the war.

The war transformed death bureaucratically, but it also changed how Americans understood mourning at the family and community level. Belief in the literal Resurrection of the body, for example, ran up against the difficulty of missing or scattered remains. The demographic impact of the death of over 600000 military age men left a common set of holes in families and communities. The war also taxed what were widely believed to be pacifist Christian commitments. Christians in the North and the South justified the war in their own ways, but as the United States had not previously experienced a large mobilization for war and had substantially smaller military forces than its European counterparts, pacifist resistance to the idea of killing remained a factor. Faust writes a bit about the problem of killing, but doesn’t really add much to the literature on the creation of the citizen-solider-killer.

It’s an interesting book, and it included quite a few interesting stories, but in the end the effort left me cold. From a social science point of view I would have liked some comparison; the entire nineteenth century was an era of social transformation, and in particular the expansion of the bureaucratic expansion of the state, so I’m skeptical that the Civil War played a singular role in the transformation of the management of death. In fairness, Faust doesn’t explicitly argue that it was such, although I think she heavily implies it. A less social science-y way of approaching the book is to think of it as a story about the reaction to a social shock in early modernity, without judgment about any particular cause or effect. That’s OK, but I guess I want a little bit more analysis. As I suggested, the story that Faust tells is interesting, but perhaps not quite interesting enough that, sans analysis, it can carry a full book.

Fronting

[ 0 ] February 28, 2008 | davenoon

Feral Mom admits to having conversed from time to time about books she hasn’t actually read.

[A]s I reflect on my literary sins, I have to admit that Pride and Prejudice is just the tip of this fraudulent iceberg. There’s all sorts of books that I’ve fronted like I read–so effectively, in some cases, that I’ve even fooled myself–for years now. Books I always intended to read, hell, books sitting on my goddamn shelf, that I just haven’t gotten around to reading.

The sad part is? I’m an, erm, English major. Hell, I have an advanced degree in literature. Should I be stripped (heh heh) of my degree? You be the judge. In any case, confession is good for the soul, so I present for your perusal the Fraudulent Five. These are all books that I’ve talked about in mixed company and have never actually read–in some cases, haven’t even cracked the cover.

To Kill a Mockingbird, Crime and Punishment, and Moby Dick make the list, among several others.

I’m not sure I could come up with a similar list, mainly because I’ve successfully persuaded most people that I’m illiterate. I did eventually get around to reading Crime and Punishment in college, three years after writing a high school term paper about Raskolnikov’s tortured conscience; same thing for Huckleberry Finn and Inferno, both of which served as the basis for my junior thesis. As for Moby Dick, I started reading that eleven years ago and have been about 100 pages from finishing ever since. Meantime, I’ve forgotten everything about the book, which means I’d pretty much have to start all over. Screw that. I’m just going to assume he gets the goddamn whale.

Nevertheless, during the ordinary course of lecturing, I occasionally mention books I’ve never seen or picked up. I don’t necessarily make any direct claims, but I imagine students actually think I’ve read them. Last week, for example, I discussed James Peck’s Freedom Ride, which I can discuss for about 45 seconds only because I’ve read about it via second-hand sources. It’s a short book that I really should read, but like Feral Mom, I’d guess the likelihood of that happening is somewhere beneath 50 percent.

By far the strangest unread book I discuss in class is The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, a notorious specimen of anti-Catholic propaganda/soft porn from the mid-1830s. I spend a couple of minutes on it during conversations about antebellum nativism. A slightly edited version is apparently available through Google Books, so I really have no excuse now.

Sunday Maritime Book Review: Stalin’s Ocean-Going Fleet

[ 14 ] February 24, 2008 | Robert Farley

Jurgen Rohwer and Mikhail Monakov wrote Stalin’s Ocean-Going Fleet in 2001, after the opening of Soviet archives had let considerable light onto Soviet Navy doctrinal and procurement decisions during the Stalin period. Rohwer is a German historian, and Monakov a Russian naval officer. The book concentrates on the period from 1935-1953, but inevitably compares that period to what came before and what came after. It’s a book that will appeal mainly to specialists, but that’s nevertheless chock full of yummy data and insight.

The Soviet Union emerged from the civil war with a small, obsolete fleet. While the Imperial Russian Navy had been a player, much of its strength had been destroyed at Tsushima, and new construction had not been sufficient to replace the losses before the beginning of the war (although the ships lost at Tsushima would of course have been obsolete by 1914 anyway). World War I served to weaken the reduced Russian Navy. Of the seven dreadnoughts built before or during the war, one exploded accidentally, one was scuttled by its crew to prevent seizure by the Germans, one was stolen by counter-revolutionaries and taken to Bizerta, and one burned down. Moreover, the three survivors were hopelessly obsolete by contemporary standards. The rest of the fleet wasn’t in much better shape.

Initial plans for reconstruction focused on the development of a force capable of executing a “jeune ecole” strategy; that is, an asymmetric force concentrating on sea denial and anti-commerce operations. Given the perilous state of Soviet industry, the weakness of the existing fleet, Russia’s geographic maritime limitations, and the profile of Russia’s most likely security threats, this was a sound assessment. However, there were other considerations. Although a revolutionary state, the Soviet Union proved just as susceptible to conceptions of prestige and power as any other state. The lesson of Mahan was that great powers had great fleets, and World War I had not sufficiently dissuaded the international community of this idea. Consequently, to be a great power the Soviet Union must possess a great fleet.

Plans were, to say the least, grandiose. The Soviet Union was cursed by bad maritime geography, in that the fleets protecting various parts of the USSR (Northern, Baltic, Black Sea, and Pacific) had great difficulty supporting one another in time of war. The solution was to build a fleet in each area that could establish local superiority. The 1937 construction plan called for the building of fourteen battleships and six battlecruisers by 1945. Eight would go to the Pacific, six to the Baltic, four to the Black Sea, and two to the Northern Fleet. Curiously, the battlefleets were to be complemented by only two aircraft carriers, one in the Pacific and one in the Northern. The irony of these plans is that, even in all of their unachievable grandiosity, they would have been insufficient to deliver victory on any front other than the Black Sea. By Soviet calculations, both the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Kriegsmarine would dwarf the Soviet contingents opposite them by 1945, and this assessment did not include an appreciation of the dominance that Japanese naval aviation would provide, much less an assessment of the German and Japanese geographic advantages.

The ship designs varied over time, with the battleships more or less resembling 60000 ton versions of the Italian Littorio class with 16″ guns, and the battlecruisers resembling the German Scharnhorsts, but with 12″ or 15″ guns. The aircraft carrier designs were considerably behind those of foreign contemporaries, being smaller, slower, and with a lower capacity than their American and Japanese counterparts. In addition to the capital ships a group of ten heavy cruisers was planned, displacing over 20000 tons and armed with 9 10″ guns. A substantial number of destroyers, submarines, and auxiliary vessels were also planned. In 1937 the Soviets approached the United States with a proposal to build Soviet battleships in American yards. Plans eventually emerged for a class of battleships displacing 45000 tons and armed with 10 16″ guns, but the US suspended cooperation after the Soviet invasion of Poland in fall 1939. Had plans gone forward, it’s likely that any construction would eventually have been incorporated in the USN.

The “big fleet” plans met resistance in the Navy, which resulted in the execution of a significant percentage of the naval officer corps. The Red Army also resisted the expansion of the Navy, as it would have placed a severe strain on Soviet industrial capacity during the mid to late 1930s. Nevertheless, Stalin felt that the prestige effect of having a large fleet was worth the expense. Indeed, he made the argument explicitly as early as 1933. The Soviet experience in the Spanish Civil War bolstered Stalin’s case, as he believed that intervention by the Kriegsmarine and the Royal Navy had given their respective governments a larger voice in matters on the peninsula. The focus on prestige also led to some odd claims in internal discussions, such as the argument that existing Soviet battleships (which, by objective measures, were some of the worst battleships in the world) outclassed all but a few of their foreign contemporaries.

A combination of the danger of war and the serious limitations of the Soviet industrial base forced a curtailment of naval procurement in the late 1930s. Two battleships were laid down, but never completed, along with a host of smaller craft. Interestingly enough, the battleship ambitions survived the end of the war. Although the new construction had been destroyed, new plans for battleships and battlecruisers were drawn up, including a 1950 plan for a class of 70000 ton behemoths. Two battlecruisers (35000 tons, 9×12″ guns) were actually laid down in 1951. In spite of the apparent dominance of the aircraft carrier during World War II, Stalin remained interested in naval aviation only in a supporting role. To his mild credit, this was defensible in the context of the Black Sea or the Baltic, although it would have proved disastrous in the Pacific or the North Sea. The response of the naval staff to these demands was polite acquiescence, but the battlecruiser and battleship projects were cancelled shortly after Stalin’s death.

Rohwer and Monakov aren’t going to win any awards for prose styling, and they don’t make much of an effort to reach an audience that isn’t already abnormally intersted in Soviet interwar naval policy. Nevertheless, there’s a lot of data here, and in particular a lot that would be of interest to scholars of statebuilding and international society. What we have here is a country which understood itself to be an international pariah, and that suffered from the most severe economic and geographic roadblocks to maritime power. Nevertheless, whether because or in spite of the Soviet disdain for international society, the USSR embarked on an amazingly expensive effort to match foreign navies on a metric of international prestige that was deeply tied to conceptions of imperial, colonial power. Naval professionals understood the roadblocks (both before 1933 and after 1953) and adjusted their plans accordingly, but the civilian leadership had different priorities. It’s tempting and at least partially true to chalk the programs up to Stalin, but nevertheless interesting that socially driven conceptions of prestige loomed so large in his decision-making, or alternatively that they structured his understanding of the meaning of Soviet national security. I suspect there are also some lessons to be learned regarding recent Russian proposals to build half a dozen carrier battle groups and deploy them in the Pacific and with the North Fleet.

Awards

[ 0 ] January 22, 2008 | davenoon

About he best I can say about this award is that winning it might be slightly more prestigious than emerging victorious from a mayonnaise-eating contest.

Perusing the list of some of the finalists, we find the soaring literary contributions of Norman Podhoretz, Michael Ledeen, Hugh Hewitt, Melanie Phillips, and Amity Schlaes — all of whom were unfairly overlooked by the National Book Critics Circle and Pulitzer committees, who seem averse to the disgorgements of noted hacks.

Sunday Maritime Book Review: The U.S. Navy Against the Axis: Surface Combat, 1941-1945

[ 13 ] December 31, 2007 | Robert Farley

Over the break I finished Vincent O’Hara’s U.S. Navy Against the Axis. I strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the Pacific War, and in surface naval combat in the 20th century in general.

O’Hara makes the argument that surface combat in the Pacific is tremendously understudied, and that it contributed far more to the eventual decision that is commonly given credit. Carrier battles were consequential but rare; especially in the Solomons, surface combat made the difference between victory and defeat. As a strategy for emphasizing the relevance of the subject matter this makes sense, and I’m willing to go along with it up to a point. Certainly the surface battles of the second half of 1942 helped determine the fate of the Solomons; had the early Japanese advantage been more pronounced, or if they had made better operational decisions and accepted some additional risk, the IJN might well have driven the USN from the Solomon Islands simply with surface units. However, I’m not sure just how far that goes. To consider the relative impact of surface and carrier engagements, imagine an alternative scenario in which the Japanese win a resounding victory at Midway. Such a victory would, in all likelihood, have “decided” the Solomons campaign such that no campaign would have taken place. The larger point is that the carrier battles in 1942 and 1944 may have been rare, but their outcome set the strategic and operational terms under which surface combat would be conducted. I don’t think that O’Hara would disagree with any of this, but it’s nevertheless important to emphasize that carrier combat set the terms for the rest of the war.

For academic purposes the book is a godsend. That is, it’s a godsend for anyone who’s ever thought about putting together a research project based on an analysis of Pacific theater naval battles, a population which probably amounts to me and a small handful of other academically inclined naval enthusiasts. The battles are divided into campaigns, and each battle is accompanied by a table listing the launch date, major armament, speed, and fate of every major combatant. As the book is about all USN surface combat, not just that which took place in the Pacific, he includes a chapter on the action against the French fleet at Casablanca during Operation Torch. The carrier battles aren’t included, although they are briefly summarized in the campaign histories. I found this a trifle jarring, but it made sense in context of what he was trying to do with the book.

The book gives a good overview of Japanese and American surface doctrine throughout the war. Early in the war, of course, the 24″ Long Lance torpedo proved a great advantage for the Japanese, although not as much of one as is commonly supposed. American surface effectiveness increased considerably when a) effective torpedoes became available, and b) when commanders developed an effective torpedo attack doctrine. Both of these developments were critical, and helped turn the tide in the Solomons campaign. American gunfire, especially as provided by the 5″/38 gun, also eventually proved to be a great asset. Japanese tactical and operational doctrine, although advanced at the beginning of the war, was less flexible than that of the USN. In particular, O’Hara notes that the Japanese successfully conserved their major surface units (battleships and heavy cruisers) through 1942 and 1943 to no great effect; the units that might have been decisive in 1942 were overwhelmed in 1944. Also, in spite of what has become their historical reputation, Japanese commanders demonstrated considerable tentativeness in battle, and in many cases pursued risk-averse tactics that precluded them from following up major opportunities. The USN officer corps proved far more flexible, aggressive, and capable than its IJN counterpart.

O’Hara has only a minimal discussion of the role of the older US battleships, apart from the action in Surigao Strait and the strategic situation following Pearl Harbor. Earlier this year, an LGM correspondent forwarded me this article, in which David Fuquea argues that the older battleships were underutilized in the Pacific campaign, particularly towards the latter part of the Solomons campaign. Fuquea suggests that the older ships had enough speed to intercept Japanese ships in the Slot, and enough firepower to tip the balance strongly in the US favor. The major objections to using the battleships seem to have regarded fuel efficiency and vulnerability. The former makes sense, but apparently does not apply by the late 1942 portion of the campaign. The latter does not make sense; it seems that the older battleships were simultaneously considered too valuable to risk, yet to useless to use. Given that the USN (and the Allied navies in general) was lousy with old slow battleships by 1943, it seems to me that the use of the older ships would have been worth the risk. Had the Second Battle of Gualdalcanal gone differently, and had USS Washington been sunk or seriously damaged, the use of the older ships in the Slot may have been forced in any case.

O’Hara also briefly discusses some tantalizing missed engagements. In his review of the battles of Leyte Gulf, he mentions three; Hyuga, Ise, and the surviving surface elements of Ozawa’s force against American cruisers in a night action, three of Oldendorf’s battleships (California, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania) against Kurita off Samar, and the Iowa, New Jersey, and attendant cruisers and destroyers against Kurita following the latter’s retreat towards San Bernadino Strait. It is of course beyond the scope of O’Hara’s work to discuss battles that never happened, but it’s nevertheless interesting to think about how the engagements would have played out, especially the latter two. I’m inclined to think that in both cases the American ships would have prevailed against Kurita’s battered, disorganized, and demoralized force, but either would probably have been tight in spots. Evan Thomas recently published a book on Kurita, Halsey, and Leyte Gulf which I’ll review at some point; it’s more readable than the O’Hara for a non-specialist, but isn’t as strong overall.

I was extremely happy with the book, and heartily recommend it. Here and there I could quibble with various points (was the USS Washington really the most powerful battleship in the world in November 1942? Advocates of the Duke of York, the Yamato, and the South Dakota class might have cause for complaint…), but overall it’s an outstanding piece of work.

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