The Long Road to Annapolis: The Founding of the Naval Academy and the Emerging American Republic
William P. Leeman. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 281 pp. Illus. Intro. Appen. Notes. Bib. Index. $39.95.
Reviewed by Jack Sweetman
At its inception the U.S. Navy adopted the traditional British approach to the development of midshipmen, which was simply to "catch 'em young" and send them to sea for on-the-job training.
Formal education did not figure into the program. Later, provision of a sort was made for educating and training American midshipmen by assigning civilian schoolmasters to some of the Navy's ships and yards, but this expedient was no substitute for a naval academy. Between 1814 and 1844, the creation of an academy was advocated by seven secretaries of the Navy and a President. John Paul Jones had written of the need to educate naval officers as far back as 1777, and a military academy was established at West Point in 1802. Yet not until 1845 did the U.S. Naval Academy
originally the Naval School open its doors. This well-researched and meticulously documented work sets out to answer the question of why it took so long.That question has been more or less briefly addressed by various histories of the academy and some Proceedings articles. These have focused on the arguments advanced for and against an academy and the unsuccessful attempts to establish one through the legislative process. The Long Road to Annapolis takes a much broader view, relating the argument over an academy to the social, intellectual, and cultural evolution of the early republic, most notably perhaps to the emergence of the middle class. Significant space is devoted to the development of West Point, in many respects the prototype of the Naval Academy and a barometer of changing American attitudes toward military education in general. Author William P. Leeman also provides delightful cameos of the key figures in his story, among them Jones, Sylvanus Thayer, Samuel Southard, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and, of course, George Bancroft, the devious scholar who finally cut the Gordian knot.
Over the decades, as perceptions of the ideal officer became more sophisticated, the debate gradually swung in favor of the academy advocates. Nevertheless, opposition to a formal academy was never directly overcome; it was circumvented. Within months of being named Secretary of the Navy in 1845, Bancroft executed an end-run around Congress. First, he persuaded the Army to give him an obsolete little fort at Annapolis. Having acquired physical facilities suitable for an academy free of charge, Bancroft proceeded to send five of the Navy's best schoolmasters there (plus two officer instructors), placed most of the other schoolmasters on unpaid leave, and used the savings on their salaries to fund the school's first year of operation. Newly appointed midshipmen were ordered to Annapolis for two years, interrupted by three years at sea.
In his 1846 budget Bancroft was scrupulous to request no more money for the new school than previously had been appropriated for the schoolmaster system. Congress was not obliged to take action; it had merely to accede to an action already taken. This it did. In 1850 the school's curriculum was extended to four years. In recognition of the change, the institution was renamed the U.S. Naval Academy. What the author characterizes as "the professional and cultural center of the modern U.S. Navy" had been established on the Severn River's shore.
Leeman endorses the claim Peter Karsten put forward in The Naval Aristocracy that, as the academy's opponents had feared, graduates of the four-year program were not as skillful seamen as their predecessors. In evidence of this assertion, Leeman and Karsten point to the unfortunate example of Alfred Thayer Mahan (Class of 1859). Granted that Mahan was no great shakes as a shiphandler, to lay so sweeping a conclusion largely on his prim shoulders appears somewhat excessive. Conversely, to identify Stephen B. Luce, the founder of the Naval War College, as a former academy instructor understates Luce's association with an institution at which he served no fewer than three tours: first as an instructor, then as a department head, and finally as commandant of midshipmen. But these are minor matters in the context of this ambitious synthesis. Anyone interested in the struggle for a naval academy or the history of the early republic will find The Long Road to Annapolis an absorbing study.
Red November: Inside the Secret U.S.
Soviet Submarine WarW. Craig Reed. New York: William Morrow, 2010. 386 pp. Illus. Notes. Index. $27.99
Reviewed by Norman Polmar
"With orders to conduct a top-secret espionage mission, the USS Blenny (SS-324) sped toward danger on the last day of April 1952." Thus begins Red November, the latest effort to reveal "the secret U.S.
Soviet submarine war."But the diesel-electric submarine Blenny took more than a month to "speed" from San Diego to a position off the Soviet port of Vladivostok. If the mission was as vital as author W. Craig Reed would have us believe, the Blenny would not have stopped for several days at Pearl Harbor and Yokosuka, and would have transited faster (on the surface), or one of the several U.S. submarines then in the Western Pacific would have taken on the mission.
Indeed, Reed's latest book is inundated with such drama as well as continued references to the "almost" loss of U.S. submarines. Combined with the many errors of fact and a lack of understanding of U.S. and Soviet submarine practices and operations, the book makes poor reading for the professional. The author, a former Navy diver and photographer, did spend time in several submarines during the Cold War, but as a "rider," removed from the world of submarine warfare. Reed did interview numerous men who served in U.S. submarines and a few Soviet submariners. But his printed sources are secondary or even tertiary accounts
including Wikipedia and, sadly, the memories of some participants in the operations Reed relates have become less accurate with time.Red November
obviously a play on the title of Tom Clancy's outstanding Hunt for Red October tells three major Cold War stories. The first is in large part a biography of the author's father, William J. Reed. He served mainly with Naval Security Groups (NSG), the highly classified units that sought to intercept Soviet communications. The description of his father's career and NSG operations are both interesting and provide useful information for the uninitiated.Reed's next major story describes the Soviet diesel-electric submarines that reached the Western Atlantic during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and U.S. antisubmarine efforts. Little information is new here, and there are several errors. U.S. fleet submarines did not sail for Cuba during the crisis, the U.S. designation SS did not indicate "ship submersible," and there is no sixth floor in the Pentagon (Navy flag plot room 6D624). The conversations attributed to many of the officials in the Pentagon during the crisis stretch credibility and do not agree with other narratives.
Still, Reed's account of Navy signals intelligence during the crisis is of value. Again, these accounts are derived from his father's career with NSG.
The third major story in Red November is the loss of the Soviet ballistic-missile submarine K-129 in March 1968 and the partial salvage of her wreckage by the CIA, employing the lift ship Hughes Glomar Explorer. This account is also faulty, beginning with the K-129 leaving port on 23 February 1968 (she departed just after midnight on 24-25 February). Then, virtually every subsequent paragraph contains errors or "drama"
hyperbolic conversations that cannot be verified. For example, Reed has the K-129 completing "two back-to-back seventy-day combat patrols in 1967." However, the submarine had completed her conversion to a Golf II configuration in 1967 and had time for only one 60-day patrol, from which she returned on 30 November 1967. As the submarine is about to sail, Reed recounts that 11 "strangers" walked across the gangplank onto the K-129 and "To this day, aside from a few Soviets in command at the time, no one knows who these strangers were or why they were on board." Not quite correct. In 1993 the Russian government published a list of all 98 men on board the K-129, providing the names, ranks, positions, years of birth, years entering service, and even the home addresses of all, including the "strangers." Further, Rear Admiral Viktor A. Dygalo, the K-129's division commander, has written extensively about these last-minute additions to the ship's crew.Reed commits his most serious error in his statement that "Several SOSUS [seafloor acoustic arrays] recorded-an isolated, single sound of an explosion or implosion, a good-sized bang'." There is no record of such a SOSUS detection. Rather, the only known sounds emanating from the death of the K-129 are those picked up by a hydrophone suspended from a Navy cable ship and from U.S. Air Force acoustic arrays, albeit using one line from the Adak SOSUS installation. Further, several acoustic "events" were recorded, none of which could be interpreted as an implosion or explosion.
The list of errors continues.
The book's only value to naval professionals, historians, and buffs appears to be its discussion of U.S. Navy communications intercepts, that is, the NSG story. Unfortunately, even that story is badly flawed when related to the K-129 tragedy.
British Destroyers: From Earliest Days to the Second World War
Norman Friedman. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010. 320 pp. Illus. Bib. Notes. $85.
Reviewed by John Jordan
The present volume precedes Dr. Friedman's British Destroyers and Frigates: The Second World War and After for the same publisher. Some readers found the starting point for the latter book slightly odd, in that the destroyer classes covered in its early chapters were a natural development of their interwar predecessors, whereas the ships built in the post-World War II era were conceptually different, being primarily antiaircraft and antisubmarine escorts equipped with radars and guided missiles. That problem does not arise with Friedman's new book, which benefits from the technical and philosophical progression from the early torpedo boats to the interwar A-I series, which arguably marked the apotheosis of the fleet destroyer armed with torpedoes and ordnance QF 18-pounder guns.
Ten chapters outlining the development of the destroyer as a type are followed by a bibliography, detailed endnotes, a data list with the specifications of each class, and a list of individual ships including building dates, pendant numbers, and fates. The quantity of information packed into this 320-page, large-format book is a tremendous credit to the author, who has scoured all the relevant British archives to produce a work that will undoubtedly remain the key published source on British destroyers for years to come.
British Destroyers is illustrated with stunning photographs, all reproduced on quality paper to a size that makes possible detailed captions. There also is a series of line drawings
plans, profiles, and numbered inboard profiles prepared especially for this volume by A. D. Baker III, most of them from plans held in the National Maritime Museum in London. The illustrator's acknowledgements in the book's front matter give a fascinating insight into the difficulties he experienced in working with and interpreting these plans. In the earlier volume there were some reproduction issues with the line drawings, but these have been completely resolved; the drawings occupy the full width of the page and are every bit as impressive as the photographs.As with any work of this scale and ambition, there are minor blemishes. The references to the "A-1 Series (sic)" in the title and running page heads in Chapter 9 should have been picked up at some stage in the production process, and there are some minor misspellings of foreign ship names. One might also argue that, in his desire to be comprehensive, Friedman sometimes fills his extraordinarily detailed captions with accounts in prose that would be better extracted as data tables in the chapter, thus providing a clearer comparative reference resource for the reader. Examples include the caption on page 143, which lists all the designs featured in the Armstrong Portfolios from 1909 to 1916 along with their characteristics, and the one on page 194, which details the system of funnel bands adopted for Royal Navy destroyers during the interwar period. The choice of an unusually small typeface for these captions makes the more detailed ones difficult to read.
Despite these minor flaws, this is a superb book. While there are times when the author's prose almost sinks under the weight of the research he is attempting to make available, the gunwales always remain above water. Friedman is at his best when he rises above the mass of data he has assembled to create a synthesis that aims to provide a rationale for the design philosophy of the ships he is writing about. This book does not disappoint in this respect, and there are some striking observations concerning the conceptual development of the torpedo boat, the torpedo cruiser, and the destroyer. The author also points up the symbiotic way tactical theory interacts with technological progress. Chapter 4, "The Changing Role of the Destroyer," is an outstanding account of the period in which the type matured from a short-range coastal vessel to a ship able to accompany and operate with the fleet.
Sovereignty at Sea: U.S. Merchant Ships and American Entry into World War I
Rodney Carlisle. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2009. 232 pp. Intro. Notes. Bib. Index. $69.95
Reviewed by Lieutenant Jim Dolbow, U.S. Coast Guard Reserve
Naval history buffs and presidential scholars alike will be pleased with Rodney Carlisle's latest book. Making a much-needed and long-overdue contribution, Sovereignty at Sea examines at the strategic level the loss of ten U.S. ships between 3 February 1917 and 4 April 1917 and how these attacks sparked President Woodrow Wilson to abandon his policy of neutrality and ask Congress to declare war against Germany.
On the evening of 2 April 1917, President Wilson, after weeks of discussions at the White House and years of professed neutrality, addressed a joint session of Congress and asked for a declaration of war against Germany. Four days later, Congress granted Wilson his request, and the United States formally became a combatant in the Great War.
The book begins with a brief survey of the state of the fledgling U.S. Merchant Marine fleet from the turn of the century to the beginning of World War I. Following this helpful introduction, Carlisle breaks the book into chapters that cover the inner workings of the Wilson administration and the sinking of the following ships: the Housatonic, the schooners Lyman M. Law and Marguerite; the freighters Algonquin, Vigilancia, City of Memphis, Aztec, and Missourian; and the tankers Illinois and Healdton. The names of these ships, with a cumulative weight of 38,534 gross tons of shipping, are forgotten no more. Bravo Zulu to Carlisle for documenting how the loss of 24 Sailors on board them set the stage for U.S. entry into World War I, which claimed at least another 117,000 U.S. lives.
The most fascinating chapters in Sovereignty at Sea are those that go behind the scenes of the Wilson administration from the time Germany announced its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare to the President's speech before a Joint session of Congress.
Carlisle, a professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University and the author or editor of 30 books, has a gift for writing as if he were a member of Wilson's inner circle by mixing skillful prose with meticulous research of Wilson's papers and archives from the Library of Congress. Carlisle deserves praise for overturning the conventional wisdom that has predominated for nearly a century that the sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania and the interception of the Zimmermann Telegram were the dual causes of the entry of the United States into the war. Moreover, the congressional debate detailed in Sovereignty at Sea is just as fascinating.
The book's 8 tables and 19 photos and sketches are superb and greatly enhance the telling of the tale. The same can be said of its notes, appendices and bibliography.
After the war, noted historian Captain Dudley W. Knox, U.S. Navy, wrote, "It will be recalled that the United States entered the World War after Germany's declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare." With the centennial of World War I just around the corner, Sovereignty at Sea does just that in great detail and is a must-read, in my view, for anyone with an interest in naval history, World War I, the U.S. Merchant Marine or the presidency of Woodrow Wilson.