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SEA WAR. The Story of the U.S. Merchant Marine in World War II. By Felix Riesen- berg, Jr. Rinehart: New York, 1956. 320 pages, bibliography, index. $5.00.
Reviewed by Captain John W.
McElroy, usnr
(After serving as an enlisted man in the Navy gun crew of the tanker Gulflight during World War I, Captain McElroy sailed for ten years as a merchant navy officer. In the late thirties he skippered the barkentine Capitana in the Harvard Columbus Expedition and subsequently held Navy commands afloat during both World War II and the Korean war. He is currently Commanding Officer of the U. S. Naval and Marine Corps Reserve Training Center, Treasure Island, San Francisco.)
No writer was ever better qualified than Riesenberg to write this remarkable book about the men and ships of the American Merchant Marine—whose exploits before and during World War II were little noted at the time and seldom remembered nowadays. It is remarkable because he has just about succeeded in condensing into a single volume the story of the sea war against Axis warplanes, submarines, and surface men-of- war which our merchantmen fought for six years across the global seas.
The lack of war diaries or action reports °f friend or foe, and the meagerness of records in government archives of the Maritime Commission and the War Shipping Administration have proved to be no handicap. Riesenberg has uncovered and used much original narrative material such as statements of Murmansk-run survivors, interrogations of victims of torpedoed tankers, and a voluminous correspondence with former shipmates and their families. In addition to this manuscript wealth, the colorful language, the irate “beefs,” and fantastic yarns in the Seamen Unions’ newspapers—printed fresh-after-the-event and unspoiled by professional rewrite-men—are primary sources in the true sense of the word. These historical records of merchant sailors, usually misspelled and ungrammatical but obviously sincere, seem far more authentic than some of the official reports, documents, and statistics he quotes.
Dedicated to the women and children who survived the merchant mariners lost in World War II, the book also represents Felix Riesenberg’s tribute to gallant shipmates— both living and dead. It is their story of ordeal and death by freezing in Arctic waters in swamped boats; of slower torture by thirst under the African sun on drifting liferafts; of sudden cremation off Miami Beach aboard blazing tankers; of dismemberment or drowning in every ocean by mines, torpedoes, bombs, and gunfire. Luckier sick and wounded merchant seamen returned from such hazards of cruel war and perilous seas to hear wild and inaccurate stores of their war bonuses or of near mutinous conduct from a misinformed public.
Riesenberg has captured the sense of crude courage, patriotism, and pride of these seagoing muleteers, who delivered the goods in spite of hell and Heil Hitler. The reader gets a good picture of the independent, “what-the-hell spirit” of the merchant service sailor, whose usual therapy for “combat fatigue” was a wild drunken spree before signing on in another “liberty” and shipping out again to keep overseas bases and fleets continuously fueled, fed, and fit to fight.
As expected in a single-handed research job of this scope, critical eyes (especially seamen readers) will find many minor errors of name, place, and time; but the book’s more serious defects are its relatively little documentation and its attempt to cover too much. Kamikaze attacks on the two Victory ships loaded with ammunition off Okinawa’s outlying islands days before the assaulting amphibious forces arrived off the beaches deserve more than passing mention as do the losses off Anzio and Salerno where “supporting” merchantmen seemed to be well up in the van. Usually trade follows the flag! As to tragic lack of early protection and other gripes about inadequate escorting, the author admits an incomprehension of the ways of the Navy. Like many others in the merchant marine, he met and unfortunately formed his first impressions of the naval service from fastidiously uninformed boarding officers or young ONI interrogators who were pathetically ignorant of the customs and traditions of the sea or even of the language of seamen.
These well-meaning “LMD naval officers” simply couldn’t understand the groups of profane, brawling merchant ship survivors arriving aboard some rescue craft, or fit them into normal patterns of migratory labor— any more than the Maritime Service could fit the old-timers into Navy-type uniforms. True seamen have a mutual respect for others who follow the sea—in or out of uniform. Riesenberg believes that misunderstandings between armed guard and merchant crews stem largely from sheer ignorance on the part of their respective Johnny-come-latelys; that the detailing of U. S. naval gun crews to 5,400 merchantmen simply wasted manpower, and that our American merchant mariners should have manned their own guns as was done in the British merchant navy.
By telling this fine story based on hundreds of first-hand witnesses’ oral and written accounts, the author has done more than reflect credit and glory on the men and ships of the “Fourth Arm of National Defense”-—as Secretary Forrestal once described the merchant marine. Riesenberg has reaffirmed Admiral Mahan’s doctrine of the influence of seapower on history. Let us hope that our people as well as Congress and the Department of Defense recall what resulted in 1942 when our Navy was struggling to recover from Pearl Harbor, first, to our merchant ships and then to our national economy. Let all remember what happened finally to the Axis nations as they gradually were driven off the seas. And let’s also pray that our own Navy never forgets that its traditional—as well as one of its most important roles in national defense—is to protect our merchant shipping by control of the seas, so that in time of war foreign-flag commerce and men- of-war are denied its use, while our own merchant marine continues to sail properly escorted and unmolested with the logistic support needed for overseas bases and forces.
THE SKY AND THE SAILOR: By Lieutenant Commander H. A. Calahan, usnr.
New York: Harpers’, 1956. 255 pages.
$4.00.
Reviewed by Captain Gilbert T.
Rude, usc&gs (ret.)
(Captain Rude was former Chief of the Division of Coastal Survey of the Coast and Geodetic Survey.)
The Sky and the Sailor should be read by every sea-farer, by the professional seaman and as well by the landsman planning a sea trip. The latter will at least not have to put foolish questions to the ship’s officers. The book makes fascinating reading; this, together with his own interest in navigation and nautical astronomy, made this reviewer begin the second reading immediately following the first. The book is that good.
The Sky and the Sailor is a well-written history of navigation and of nautical astronomy—from the astronomers of ancient Chaldea and from the early Phoenician seamen to the navigator on his skyscraper bridge of today. The hours upon hours of intelligent research is evident in every page.
You will not learn to box the compass nor to work up a time sight (the latter is left to
less imaginative writers), but you will learn the interesting history of the beginning of astronomy, of the earliest measurement of the size of the earth, of the earliest compasses, of the beginnings of the nautical chart. The author goes into the origin of the present-day sextant and of its predecessors, the back staff, the quadrant, and the octant.
The book explains in simple terms and in easy-reading latitude, longitude and time, and the history of the invention of the chronometer.
A chapter is given to “Bowditch,” now called The American Practical Navigator, but still known to all sailors as “Bowditch.” The chapter on the discovery of the “Sumner Line” by Captain Thomas Sumner is interestingly written. Commander Calahan ends this chapter with a plea that we keep alive as a monument to this great discoverer the term “Sumner Line,” and he decries the current fashion of withholding from posterity the names of those individuals who have added their bit to the art of navigation—as unfair both to the memory of the individual as well as to the task of the historians of the future.
A chapter is devoted to the work of Matthew Fontaine Maury, the founder of the Naval Observatory and of the Navy Hydrographic office, the naval officer who gave the first impetus to the science of the sea now known as Oceanography.
In his final chapter, “The Future,” author Calahan makes a prediction the present writer accepts, though with a touch of regret, as quite probable, that electronic navigation will eventually replace celestial navigation. We shall be able to push a button or two and m a few seconds get on a platter the position °f our ship in any of the oceans. In fact, we do that now to a limited extent in offshore hydrographic surveying—with the use of electronics we now obtain the location of the survey ship some 500 miles offshore with an accuracy of half the length of the ship.
Though all out for progress, the relegation to Davy Jones’ Locker of the fascinating art °f celestial navigation does leave with us a feeling of deep regret, an art evolved to perfection through thousands of years. In this age of wonders it can be predicted with equal certainty that the art of electronic navigation will evolve in a matter of years, not thousands of years. Let us express the hope, however, that the art of celestial navigation be kept alive, if for no other reasons than for checks on our electronic positions, and for its fascination—the use of rays of light from other worlds for our accurate location of position anywhere on the tiny oceans of this little grain of sand in the mighty Universe, the rays from the more distant stars having left their sources before the birth of Christ.
THE ZEPPELIN STORY. By Thor Nielsen. Translated from the German by Peter Chambers. London: Allan Wingate, 1955. 239 pages. 17/6. ($2.50).
Reviewed by J. Gordon Vaeth
(.During World War II, Mr. Vaeth served as a Naval Reserve officer with airship commands. At the conclusion of hostilities, he was assigned a research mission in Germany to obtain information on the wartime operations of the Zeppelin Company. The author of numerous articles on lighler-than-air craft, Mr. Vaeth is a contributor on this subject to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.)
In 1932 one of the major Italian newspapers polled its readers: “Who is the best known personality on earth today?” The overwhelming choice—Dr. Hugo Eckener.
The Zeppelin Story is the biography of that once-famous and now-forgotten German airman whose global exploits with the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg wrote many of the great news stories of the 1920’s and 30’s. Although its title isn’t indicative of the strictly biographical approach of the book, it is nevertheless an appropriate one. After Count Zeppelin’s death in 1917, the Zeppelin and the Eckener stories became one and the same.
The Zeppelin airship has always had a special significance to the U. S. Navy. The Shenandoah was a copy of a wartime Zeppelin. The rigid airships Akron and Macon \;ere designed and built by men, many of whom had once been members of the Luft- schiffbau-Zeppelin Company in Friedrichs- hafen. The USS Los Angeles, our only successful dirigible, was built by the Zeppelin Company and delivered to the United States by Eckener as a war reparations payment in 1924. And of course it was at the naval air station, Lakehurst, New Jersey that the Graf and the Hindenburg began and ended
some of their most noteworthy flights. American naval airship personnel knew these German ships well; they ground handled, moored, serviced, and often flew on them.
Those who remember the days of the “L.A.,” the Graf, and the Hindenburg, days when as many as a quarter of a million persons jammed the Lakehurst air station to see the Graf arrive, will find Thor Nielsen’s book has a nostalgic appeal. They’ll be interested in the narratives and anecdotes by which Nielsen describes the “behind the scenes” events which were part of every history-making flight but which were rarely reported in the press. The description of Eckener’s premonition of disaster that 1937 day the Hindenburg burned is thought-provoking and unforgettable.
The work contains, as any book does, some minor errors—two pictures of the Los Angeles are erroneously captioned as being of the Graf Zeppelin, for example—but these are not sufficient to detract from its value and its interest. Nielsen’s information is basically accurate; much of it was given to him by Eckener himself. The Zeppelin Story is a valuable contribution to the recording of aviation history. By its coverage of the World War II years and of Eckener’s subsequent post-war activities, it has completed the missing and last chapter of that aeronautic age known as the Zeppelin Era.
The story this book tells is a sad and tragic one, a story of one man’s brave fight against the forces of Nature in the air and against the forces of Naziism on the ground. Upon reading this account of Hugo Eckener’s 86 active years, there’ll be few who won’t say to themselves: “There was a man!”
THE CIVILIAN AND THE MILITARY. By Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. 340 pages, index, notes. $6.50.
Reviewed by John W. Masland
(Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, Dr. Masland has for several years been studying military education in the United States. With his Dartmouth colleague, Dr. Laurence Raduay, he has described his findings in a forthcoming Princeton University Press book.)
A perennial problem of professional military personnel is understanding public attitudes toward military affairs. The public not infrequently seems apathetic, ungrateful, and at times downright irresponsible to men concerned with the security and ultimate survival of the nation. The Civilian and the Military, by Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., Professor of History at The American University, helps to explain the underlying currents of these popular moods. The book is a chronological account of “the tradition of antimilitarism” in American history. It is not, as the title might suggest, an analysis of the authority, responsibility, and interrelationships of civilian and military agencies and individuals within our governmental structure. It does not deal with the respective roles of the civilian and the military in the formulation of national policies. Rather its central theme is the historical fear of many Americans of military power and authority. Military leaders today need to appreciate the basis of these fears.
Starting with roots in British experience, the book traces opposition to manifestations of military organization and power from the colonial period to the present. Of particular importance are the early chapters explaining the origins and intentions of constitutional provisions and political practices designed to maintain civil supremacy and prevent the exercise of arbitrary military power and the rise of a military dictatorship. The book is based upon a detailed analysis of statements of political leaders, churchmen, writers, and other individuals, of newspaper and editorial opinion, of the activities of organized groups including some labor, industry, and farm organizations as well as more specialized antimilitary groups, and of debates of Congress. It deals with such issues as the role of state militia and federal forces, the size of a standing army, military appropriations, conscription, compulsory ROTC training, and employment of forces overseas. The author shows that antimilitarism stems only in small part from pacifism and conscientious objection to the use of force. Rather it is derived from a variety of feelings, many of a contradictory nature. Americans have opposed military policies because they have equated them with other issues that they have rejected, such as strong centralized federal authority, interference with individual rights, imperialism and intervention abroad, high taxes, and regimentation of the economy. Leadership in this opposition has been provided by a strange mixture of bedfellows, including conservatives as well as liberals, isolationists, pacifists, labor unionists, and socialists. Generally, Americans have not been adverse to the employment of the armed forces to secure national objectives. But each war has been preceded by the vocal opposition of a widespread and usually well- organized minority, and has been followed by an attempted retreat to normal peacetime pursuits.
Unfortunately the value of the book is limited by the bias of the author. He appears to share the fears of the antimilitarists of whom he writes. While he fails to define precisely what is meant by “militarism,” he identifies it as undemocratic, arbitrary, authoritarian, aggressive, imperialistic, and antiliberal. He does not consider that military power can be employed for good as well as for evil purposes and that the armed forces serve as a shield for the protection of the democratic institutions and values that he would preserve.
Another weakness is the absence of any theory or systematic explanation of public opinion and its operation in the political process. Thus there is no measurement of the depth or breadth of the expressions of antimilitarism, nor any substantiation of the connection between these expressions and the policies that have been followed by the nation. Even in the discussion of certain actions by Congress, as for example, passage of neutrality legislation in the 1930s or the close vote on renewal of draft legislation in 1941, no direct connection with antimilitary sentiment is demonstrated. Moreover in his treatment of those periods of American experience when the public has supported large armed forces and the use of military force, the author seems to be at a loss to explain this support in terms of his theme of antimilitarism. Although he recognizes the paradox, he does not explain it. The focus of the book is too narrow; it is derived from insufficient attention to other streams of American thought and behavior. There remains a need for a more broadly conceived examination of civilian attitudes toward military authority and policy in the contemporary setting.
BOMBED OUT
Contributed by COMMANDER JEWETT A. BALDRIDGE, U. S. Navy
During the course of the rigid Refresher Shakedown Training conducted at Guantanamo Bay, the USS Fessenden was conducting her final Operational Readiness Inspection, and an observer from the Fleet Training Group inflicted a simulated bomb hit aft, by drawing a six-foot circle on the main deck with chalk, to indicate that there was a hole on the deck. A minute later one of the stewards mates walked across this area. When he was informed that he was “dead” because he had theoretically fallen into the hole, he retorted, “Oh, no, I ain’t. I put a plank across the hole!”
“Where did you get the plank?” asked the observer.
“Same place you got the hole!!”
{The Proceedings will pay $5.00 for each anecdote submitted to, and printed in, the Proceedings.)