Battle Report
By and , USNR
PREPARED from official sources. Battle Report, Pearl Harbor to Coral Sea, records the prologue to a great epic. It tells of endurance in defeat, of audacity in the face of overwhelming odds, of unconquerable spirit that survived all disaster. Those men would not be denied. They turned the face of victory. But that came later: in this dark prologue we see only flickering lights foretelling the day. Not until full six months after Pearl Harbor could the Navy say: “Very excellent news has been received.”
Secretary Knox had good reasons to instruct the authors of this Report to “tell the whole story . . . the good and the bad.”Commander Karig and Lieutenant Kelley sail close to that charted course. They give facts —not all the facts, but a great many not previously published — and they keep the human touch. Several actions are recounted through the mouths of participants. Ships live in the narrative as they do in the minds of sailors. Stray bits of humor break the general gloom. What is lacking in the Report is largely what is not supposed to be there — the why behind each situation, the balance of alternatives which confronted each decision; but the reader looks for it. And I also think the reader could do with more and better maps (charts, if you like).
The first 96 pages, on Pearl Harbor, bring a lump to the throat and a mist to the eye. Sheer heroism went for so little: those stricken ships, burning and sinking, yet beating off most of the attacks after the first strike — that is stark tragedy.
Then the disaster spreads from Hawaii to Singapore, from Wake to Darwin. Through a quarter of the circumference of the globe we meet defeat and serious losses. There is an excellent chapter on the loss of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, so soon after the British Admiral had dramatically flown to Manila to confer with Admiral Hart. That disaster was almost as serious as that of Pearl Harbor itself, for those great British ships were the only heavy naval units in the Far East, the only ones capable of offering any serious resistance to the Japanese. On what remained to the Allies four flags flew: the English, the Australian, the Dutch, and ours. To consolidate so heterogeneous a force into a fighting unit would have required much time for the exchange of tactical doctrines, signal codes, and all that makes for unity of command. No time was available.
But always there was the fight-back, always the seizure of every possible chance to cripple the enemy, to check his great wave of conquest. The Report carries on through the retreat to the Malay Barrier, through that brilliant riposte in Macassar Strait, through the pathetic attempts at Allied operations around Java. Then our own raids by air and sea, relatively puny in material results but gallant and important in spirit. And, as the prologue to the great Recovery should, the Report ends with a tough “Old Lady” and her tougher sons fighting on Bataan and meeting the final humiliation of Corregidor.
The account is avowedly not written for students of naval operations. The layman gets a factual story, very well written and of absorbing interest. Yet he wants more than is told. Behind our strikes at the mounting Japanese wave were those shifts in naval forces, those moves on the Big Board, which led, just beyond the period of the Report, to the Coral Sea and Midway — to the breaking of the wave and its eventual recession. That background is missing. It is presumably no longer secret. The next Report should build it up. Farrar & Rhinchart, $3.50.
MAJOR GENERAL SHERMAN MILES