David,
Okay, “The Price of Admiralty”! I checked it on Amazon and they do not have
that book in Kindle. I’ve given up reading books that aren’t in Kindle. My
eyes object.
On the other hand, in the past I was used to highlighting passages on the pages
of hard copies in case I wanted to refer back to them. Kindle offers something
like that. I can highlight Kindle passages, but I have never mastered
successfully referring back to them. Recently I have purchased hard copies as
well. Thus, I read the Kindle edition of Shattered Sword, but I had the hard
copy available to make checking references easier. I did not however highlight
the hard copy; so in our discussion I had to rely upon my (faulty) memory
instead of turning to hard-copy (or Kindle) highlighted passages.
I am doing the same thing with Ian Toll’s The Conquering Tide, War in the
Pacific Islands, 1942-1944. I set it aside to work on Weinberg, but I got as
far as the war on Saipan. So I set Toll aside, sent for and read Saipan, The
Battle that Doomed Japan in World II by James H. Hallas, 2019. Hallas book was
published later than Toll’s volume II (published 2015) but I was looking for
the best history, not necessarily a history Toll referenced – except in the
case of the Shattered Sword which toll praised. After a lot of trial and error
I found the reference not at the beginning of Toll’s volume II but at the end
of his Volume I, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942:
“Taken together, Operations AL and MI represented the commitment of almost the
entirety of the Imperial Japanese Navy, write Jon Parshall and Tony Tully in
Shattered Sword (2005), their groundbreaking study of the Japanese experience
at Midway; ‘all of its carriers, all of its battleships, all but four of its
heavy cruisers, and the bulk of its lesser combatants. Twenty-eight admirals
would lead those forces into battle, and they would log more miles and consume
more fuel in this single operation than was normally used in an entire year.”
Toll goes on to write [whether or not based upon Parshall and Tully I don’t
remember], “The Midway operation was not a product of sound military planning.
It was a farrago of compromises struck to quell internal dissent and to balance
the demands of rivals in the Combined Fleet and the naval General Staff. Not
surprisingly, it was shot through with contradictions, flaws, and unnecessary
risks. It exposed a fatal hubris and an unwarranted contempt for the enemy.
The plan spread Japanese forces too thinly over a huge expanse of the North
Pacific, and relied on dubious conjectures about how the Americans would react.
It asked too much of a few elite aviators who had been flying and fighting
almost without respite since December 7. Though the Japanese were loath to
admit it, the most experienced of their carrier aircrews were bone-weary, while
the newcomers lacked the training and seasoning to equal the skill of the
veterans. In his subsequent report on the battle, Admiral Nagumo would observe
that there had been ‘considerable turnover in personnel. . . . Inexperienced
flyers barely got to the point where they could make daytime landings on
carriers. It was found that even some of the more seasoned flyers had lost
some of their skill.’”
Lawrence
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On ;
Behalf Of david ritchie
Sent: Friday, February 21, 2020 8:29 AM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: On underestimating America
On Feb 21, 2020, at 7:11 AM, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
David,
Is this the Keegan book you are referring to: The Second World War, published
by Viking, 1989?
No, the title is, “The Price of Admiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare”
Viking, 1988.
In The Shattered Sword, published in 2005 it seems that Parshall and Tully
are breaking new ground: providing significant Japanese records about Midway,
in English, for the first time.
I agree. The Japanese records revised understanding.
If I was a dumb 17-year-old at the time the Vietnam War started (as I was when
the Korean war started) I probably would have still enlisted in the Marine
Corps. In my case the Korean war was winding down before I got to Korea.
That wouldn’t have been the case in Vietnam. L
Um, no. Two very different wars. Going to Vietnam twice last year was
enlightening. You have to look hard to find evidence not that the war
happened—there are museums full of equipment—but that the outcome was
supposedly some kind of domino added. They don’t like China and I noted no
evidence of Russian influence. People who know the economy and politics of
Vietnam better than I do will not doubt be able to explain what I missed.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
