Coming off the heels of Midway and Coral Sea, our book club for Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two-Ocean War, a history of the USN in WWII, heads to the South Pacific for our longest chapter yet, an account of the string of naval battles around Guadalcanal. While each is individually less famous, there's a strong argument that the whole campaign was even more pivotal than the actions discussed in the previous chapter, as well as the last time the two navies met on equal terms.

As usual, we'll begin with the recitation of the errors. Here, Morison spends less time on the Hudson that spotted the Japanese on the way to Savo Island than he did in The Struggle for Guadalcanal, and as such is less unfair to the crew. (In that one, he's so unfair to the crew that the US Navy officially apologized decades later.) Second, there's the bashing of Fletcher that we talked about last time, which is often hilariously over the top. We also see him disliking someone else, Capt. Bode of Chicago, although with somewhat greater justification. Still, it's kind of weird to see him speaking highly of Callaghan, who screwed up far worse than Fletcher ever did. I'm also confused by his claim about there being shells on the decks of the Japanese battleships in the opening stages of First Guadalcanal, which does not match my understanding of what happened there. I was under the impression that the Japanese initially opened fire with the bombardment shells, but couldn't find confirmation in later accounts either way. In any case, I can't see how you'd end up with shells out on deck while trying to get them back to the magazines, and suspect Morison got carried away here.

Beyond that, it's a very solid account of the battles, although with effectively no analysis of why they turned out the way they did, which gives me something to talk about. The Japanese, knowing they would be outnumbered in a war with the US, had sought to equalize this by fighting at night, and it had been a major pillar of their training in the interwar years. The Americans had not taken this nearly as seriously, and while their advantage in radar should have been enough to compensate, they were still figuring out how to use it. Also barely gestured at is the superiority of Japanese torpedoes, which were significantly larger than their American counterparts, and ran on pure oxygen for greater range and speed. These "Long Lances" (a name coined by Morison himself) had also been the beneficiaries of an extensive (and expensive) test program, which the Americans hadn't bothered with for their torpedoes. We'll see even more of this in future chapters.

And of course I would be remiss if I didn't say a few words about the battleship action we see here, one of only three times in the war when US battleships fought their Axis counterparts. South Dakota suffered a power loss due to the shock of her guns firing, and with the radar cut off, maneuvered into a position that silhouetted herself against a burning destroyer, turning her into a punching bag for the Japanese fleet and exacerbating the power loss as hits lead to shorts throughout the superstructure. And we have more exciting battleship combat to look forward to next week, when we go back to the Atlantic.

In 1956, Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, imperiling European access to oil and humiliating Britain and France, who had previously controlled it. Diplomatic efforts to solve the crisis failed, and the two nations came up with a plan to recapture it by force in cooperation with Israel, who hoped to preempt an Egyptian attack. Israel would invade the Sinai, and the two powers would issue an ultimatum for both sides to withdraw from Suez. When Nasser refused, they would have their pretext for an attack.

Eagle, Albion and Bulwark together

The Israeli invasion kicked off on October 29th, and Britain and France quickly issued their directive for both sides to withdraw. As expected, Nasser was entirely unwilling to suffer the humiliation of backing down in the face of Egypt's former colonial overlord, allowing the military plan to go into effect. Unfortunately, the plan was rather hindered by the lack of bases. While Britain had extensive bases in Cyprus, there was no harbor on the island suitable for the invasion force to assemble, forcing them to stage out of Malta, about four days steaming from Egypt. Read more...

It's time for our monthly open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

Overhauls are Classes, Weather at Sea, Auxiliaries Part 0, Revolt of the Admirals Part 1, Modern Propulsion Part 4, The Nimitz Class and for 2025, my reviews of the Naval Aviation Museum and Alabama, Measuring Fleets and Iowa and Kahoolawe.

After a brief detour into the Atlantic, our book club for Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two-Ocean War, a history of the USN in WWII, returns to the Pacific to cover the pair of carrier battles that are probably the most prominent of the Pacific War.

We open with the briefest descriptons of the Battle for Wake Island, which brings up one of the (mercifully short) list of major flaws that Morison has. Normally, he's extremely positive on US leaders, to the point that I was sort of expecting his half-page word kiss to Admiral Nimitz to end with "and he walked to work across Pearl Harbor without even getting his shoes wet". But for reasons that nobody has ever worked out, he really disliked Frank Jack Fletcher. The tonal dissonance this provokes in the main series is actually pretty amusing, where he goes out of his way to shower everyone else with praise, while Fletcher cannot do a single thing right. Obviously, this is an area where modern historians have taken a rather different approach, most notably in John Lundstrom's Black Shoe Carrier Admiral. Current views are that Fletcher was generally a competent and effective admiral, and in particular that he really did need to fuel before approaching Wake. Read more...

I didn't comment on the latest conflict between the US and Iran last week for two reasons. First, it broke out on Saturday, and that didn't leave me a lot of time to write something up. Second, in that time, the fog of war was still pretty dense, and I didn't see anything I could say where I would add value above and beyond what you'd get following the news.

But that changed pretty dramatically on Wednesday, when the Pentagon announced that an Iranian frigate had been sunk by a US attack submarine, revealed on Friday to be USS Charlotte, one of old Los Angeles class boats.¹ This is only the second time in the history of the nuclear submarine that torpedoes have been used in anger, and the first in over 40 years, since HMS Conqueror put General Belgrano on the bottom of the Atlantic. Even better, we have video of the torpedo hit, and I thought there was enough interesting stuff going on there that it was worth dedicating this week's post. Read more...

Chapter 5 of Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two-Ocean War, a history of the USN in WWII, pivots from the Pacific to the Atlantic, covering the "second happy time" and the early stages of the war against the U-boats.

I got a surprise on the first page of this chapter. I had not previously heard about the Chicago Tirbune publishing the leaked warplans on December 5th, and it makes Hitler's decision to declare war on the US, previously extremely high on my "what were they thinking" list for WWII, make at least a bit more sense.

Beyond that, this is the first chapter that was really what I was hoping this book would be, a condensation of the best bits of The Battle of the Atlantic, with Morison's superb prose and ability to sample the entire picture really coming to the fore. Everything from a beautifully evocative picture of a convoy under attack to the German campaign against American coastal shipping to a discussion of the operations research teams that I love so much to a paragraph on the Civil Air Patrol, which has long been one of my markers for how much Morison covers in the main books. Yes, there's a bit of halo-polishing on King, and I think he's unfair to criticize the lack of units in the Eastern Sea Frontier, which was stripped because there simply weren't enough destroyers to go around. But on the whole, it's an excellent, lovely description of the early battle with the U-boats.

One thing that isn't mentioned in this chapter, and that I should talk about, is ULTRA. For those who don't know, ULTRA was the codename for British efforts to decrypt the German Enigma machine, and it played a significant part in the Battle of the Atlantic. However, it remained classified until 1974, a decade after this book was written. Morison was aware of it, having been cleared for it in 1956, but obviously couldn't include it here. This oversight has since been rectified, and if anything, ULTRA is probably overdiscussed relative to its contribution to the war. All that said, this chapter would have been largely unaffected. The German Navy introduced a new, more sophisticated Enigma in February 1942, and it wasn't broken by the British until December. They were able to struggle on with direction-finding data and the work of the OIC, which comes up late in the chapter. Here, I'm pretty sure that when Morison talks about HF/DF, he actually means it, but in later chapters, it's often a code for ULTRA.

Relevant Naval Gazing Posts:

• ASW in WWII - Forces
• ASW in WWII - Sensors
• ASW in WWII - Weapons
• Liberty Ships

One of the great and generally unsung wonders of the modern world is the array of submarine cables that knit together continents, carrying everything from news and fiscal transactions to this very text. Up until 170 years ago, messages between America and Europe moved at the speed of ships. For centuries this hadn't been different from anywhere else. Messages had always moved only at the speed of people carrying them, with only very limited exceptions. Signal fires and flags could be used to convey a message if the recipient could see the sender, but these messages tended to be simple and with extremely rare exceptions couldn't go over the horizon.² It wasn't until 1792 that the first large-scale system for moving messages faster than a horse was created, when the Revolutionary French government built a system of towers with arms on top that could pass complex messages across France in hours rather than days. Similar systems were built in other countries, but building and maintaining a tower every 5-10 miles was expensive, it only worked in daylight and the need to repeat the message so frequently made it somewhat prone to error.

A French optical telegraph

The discovery of electricity, and the realization that it moved through wires far faster than anyone could measure, quickly sparked interest in using it to send signals. A number of different efforts were made, although most were hindered by attempts to send each letter separately and unambiguously, which in turn meant lots of wires and complex machinery. The first commercial electric telegraph was of this type, but it was an American painter, Samuel Morse, who finally devised a truly practical system. Morse's great innovation was less in what he did than what he didn't do. Instead of multiple wires and complicated equipment, he used a single wire³ and a manually-operated "key" to start and stop the flow of current, relying on a trained operator and a code he had devised to send and receive messages.⁴ Read more...

Having kicked off the war at Pearl Harbor, our book club for Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two-Ocean War, a history of the USN in WWII, continues into Chapter 4, a survey of what else the Japanese were up to in the Pacific in the first few months of the war.

This chapter opens with a section that I almost really like, pointing out the execrable performance of MacArthur in the Philippines. And then the last word has to go and spoil it. Now, MacArthur is a complicated character, and I think his campaign in New Guinea was one of the great overlooked military masterpieces (unfortunately, it looks like it gets about 4 pages in Two-Ocean War, but the account in Morison's New Guinea and the Marianas is very good) but I also think he should have been sacked the instant he set foot on Australian soil. Based on this account, the performance of the Japanese air attack on the Philippine airbases is one of the very best of the entire war, and the sort of thing that even fairly rudimentary defensive measures could have gone a long way to mitigating. Also, there's not even a hint of acknowledgement that the whole plan was bad from the start. Whatever people may have thought the B-17 could do in 1941, it was not an effective anti-shipping platform and probably couldn't have done all that much to the air bases on Formosa, either, even if MacArthur hadn't let them get destroyed on the ground.

For fairly obvious reasons, Morison gives only the briefest account of the Malaya campaign, which was if anything even more badly conducted than the defense of the Philippines. After reading a book on it, I came away with the impression that the RN had done the best of the three services, and they lost two battleships.

But then we come to the campaign in the Dutch East Indies, which is one of the bits I like best in History of US Naval Operations, as it's almost totally neglected in most histories of the war, even more so than the Philippines. His description of Java Sea is excellent, finding just the right balance between detail and brevity. The one thing that stood out to me is how ineffective the Japanese torpedo attacks are, as my main reference frame for that is the fighting around Guadalcanal, where they did significantly better. But it's nice to finally see Morison hit his stride.

In the late 40s and early 50s, the USN and RN struggled to deal with a new underwater threat. Previous ASW techniques, worked out to deal with the slow, battery-limited submarines of WWII, were inadequate in the face of underwater-optimized vessels like the German Type XXI and its expected Soviet descendants. Initially, these were based around better versions of the systems developed during WWII, with longer-range sonars and Limbo and Weapon Alpha replacing Hedgehog and Squid.

A DASH drone at Pima

But by the mid-50s, sonar ranges were getting close to 10,000 yards, way too far for those kind of depth-charge launchers to be effective. The submarine was moving, maybe unpredictably, and even if it was stationary, the sonar beams were wide and didn't give a precise enough location at range. Obviously, the homing torpedo was going to be at least part of the solution. First developed during WWII, it could handle quite a bit of uncertainty in the submarine's position by listening for the submarine and then homing in to blow it up. Initially, navies expected that the main long-range weapon would be heavyweight homing torpedoes, launched from the ship and wire-guided out to the point where their seekers could pick up the submarine. But it didn't work out that way. The big problem was simply that torpedoes were too slow for this to work well. A 40-kt torpedo, extremely fast for the time, would still take 7.5 minutes to reach a submarine 10,000 yards away, and the submarine could move significantly during that run. The obvious alternative was to deploy a smaller torpedo, probably one originally designed to be dropped by aircraft, through the air right on top of the submarine. Read more...

This is Chapter 3 of our book club for Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two-Ocean War, a history of the USN in WWII. It's finally time for the real action to kick off, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor:

One point I think Morison doesn't cover is the sheer improbability of the attack. It was a massive logistical stretch for the Japanese to pull off, with the carriers barely having practiced the necessary underway refueling techniques before departing, and the torpedoes arriving only two days before the attack. And it was only a few months earlier that the Japanese had even gotten enough carriers to pull off the attack. While it's easy to draw comparisons to Taranto, the British there were attacking at night, which meant they didn't have to worry about Italian aircraft, either over the target or attacking the carriers. The Japanese didn't have the ability to make a night attack like that, which meant that a lot of their force was going to have to be dedicated to hitting the American airbases, and Shokaku and Ziukaku didn't join the fleet until the second half of 1941. Without their airgroups, it would have been impossible to both hit the airfields hard enough to protect the carriers and do significant damage to the fleet.⁵ And the whole plan was insanely risky, and could have basically come unglued if, say, the duty officer had taken the radar operator's warnings more seriously. Ships would have been buttoned up and AA guns manned, and while we can't say for certain what would have happened, the vast majority of the damage done during the attack happened in those critical first few minutes. Read more...