"Sam Morison and the Navy"

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VOLTAIRE once noted that “history can be well written only in a tree country.”To those who doubt the validity of this epigram the late George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four will present horrible affirmation.

The distortion, perversion, and prostitution of truth in the service of politics is not merely a manifestation of totalitarianism; it is common to hustings and forum, podium and throne — for instance, the exaggerations of a Senator McCarthy. But in a democracy — a “free countryˮ — a lie can be challenged, exposed, and refuted; there are few “kept” historians. In a dictatorship the student, like the serf, is the servant of the stale; there is only one “truth” and it is spelled in italics.

Those who think that Orwell’s fiction caricatures fact might ponder the historical fate of Vlasov, the renegade Soviet general who deserted to Hitler, with thousands of his men, not long after the Battle of Moscow in 1941 — 1942. Vlasov had been something of a national hero, though of a minor sort, in Russia; he played a prominent role in the Russian stand that turned the Germans back from the gates of Moscow. Then he deserted to the enemy. In Russia today it is as if he never lived. Just as in the Orwellian fantasy, Vlasov’s name is erased from the Soviet history books. The thought is frightening, ominous; if the State can manufacture history like breakfast food, Man is forever slave.

To the student the inherent dangers of government encroachment upon the recording of history have long presented such a distasteful mien that there has been a tendency—until recently — to shy away, even in a “free country,” from government-sponsored history. “Officiaˮ histories were all very well, but would they present the whole truth, naked and unadorned? The understandable fear of the independent scholar was that his independence would be compromised by governmentsponsored history projects; there might be “Stringsˮ tied to his objectivity.

For these reasons, the wartime plans of the Army, the Navy, the Air Force —and other branches of government — to produce the most comprehensive history of World War II probably ever attempted by any government were at first greeted with some reserve by many scholars. But. this innate conservatism, a natural and healthy reaction against the “State Supreme,” was quickly broken downpartially because of the tremendous challenge of recording more fully than ever before in history a war that was the greatest in history; partially because of the fortunate personalities and broad outlook of the officers heading the historical projects; partially because of the full support the projects received from ihe high command; partially because of the principles of thoroughness, accuracy, truthfulness, and objectivity that governed; and partially because of the high caliber of the historians that were quickly attracted to the projects.

Such men as Henry Steele Commager, Douglas Southall Freeman, James P. Baxter, and Pendleton Herring quickly lent their names and the benefit. of their advice to the services, and many of their peers — Wesley Frank Craven, James Lea Cate, Kent Roberts Greenfield, and Samuel Eliot Morison — undertook the prodigious job of administering, editing, gathering, or writing the military history of World War II. Some of them did it perhaps at first with misgivings; all of them enlisted not only in t he service of the state but in the service of truth. The results so far published — Army, Navy, and Air Force — support incisively the validity of Voltaire’s epigram: that “history can be well written only in a free country.”

The service, history projects differ widely in concept, organization, scope, and length. The Army’s massive 96-volume project is straight forward narrative, written by various authors, edited by many hands but with few interpretations or analytical comments; it is precise and pedantic and detailed, at times to the point of reader exhaustion. It presents a tremendous array of facts but has little virtuosity of style, and I confess to some reserve about some of The things left unsaid in live volumes so far published. Published by the Government Printing Office it is a “straight" official history.

The Air Force operational history in seven volumes, of which three will have been published this summer, is also massive and detailed and meticulous; its analyses are more sharply drawn than the Army histories, but it follows much the same pattern. It is published by the University of Chicago Press bul it, too, is “straight" official history. These volumes—the Air Force and the Army histories — are plainly not for the general reader; they are prodigious efforts of research and assembly intended primarily to publish the full record and to make that record available for the future student of warfare, the historian and the analyst.

The Navy ‘s operational history is an altogether different kind of cat. Edited and written primarily by one man — who first suggested il to the late President Roosevelt — it represents not only naval history but “Sam" Morison history . There are to be fourteen volumes, of which five — the latest The Struggle for Guadalcanal — have heen published. But these are normal-length volumes and highly readable, plainly books for the general public as well as for the historian and the student, and into them the author has injected the savor of the salt. The Navy’s operational history, in other words, is the only one of the service projects written and intended for general, or “ popular,” consumption ; and it is the only one of the three which deliberately avoids the label — and the advantages and disadvantages inevitably incurred — of “official" history.

The Morison volumes, bearing the generic title of History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, are published by Atlantic Little Brown and carry a disclaimer of “official" responsibility; yet the author, as the late Secretary of Defense James Forrestal wrote in the first volume (The Battle of the Atlantic), was commissioned in the Naval Reserve with the sole duty of preparing this history. He was promoted during the war to the rank of captain, personally witnessed many operations, and was given full access to all documents and personnel. The opinions and conclusions, however — and let it be added, the inimitable style — are those of Sam Morison alone, and the royalties go back to the government.

This device, which smacks a little bit of Alice in Wonderland confusion (when is an “official” history not an “official” history?), has proved to be, however — judging from the first five volumes a happy compromise. Morison and his few but extremely able assistants — Henry Salomon, Jr., a former student of Morison’s at Harvard, was the most important and productive &emdash have studied nearly all available naval records, and yet there has been ample scope for distinctive style and reasoned analysis. The general result is highly readable, intensely interesting, and dramatic but withal thoroughly documented history, which at its best approaches t he brilliant.

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To understand the virtues and the faults — for there art some grave faults — of this historical project, as so far developed, one must know and understand its principal author, Samuel Eliot Morison, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University, author of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and numerous other historical works. Sam Morison is a “proper Bostonian” in whom war the instincts of the Calvinist Puritan and the Rabelaisian Cavalier. Generations of Harvard students have warmed their intellects before the dry wit of some of his lectures. His discourse on the advantages and disadvantages of standing armies has titillaled many a Cambridge youth, and some of his more formal speeches — notably an occasion lit by the spirit of good fellowship at the Somerset Club in Boston — are a cause for legend. He is a precise small-boat sailorrman; a scholar of high integrity , literary skill, and great industry; an urbane host; a person of vast selfassurance, his ego armored by heredity and environment.

To this man in his mature years came, I think, one of the great emotional experiences of his lifetime; his association with the Navy during World War II was, to Sam Morison, far more than an intellectual episode. In a sense, Morison is a frustrated admiral; if you like, a romanticist at heart, in whom the sound of the Brooklyn’s guns off Casablanca (the first action in which Morison participated) kindled the flame of passion, of excitement, of derring-do and devotion.

This experience is not new to men who go to war; Man lives more highly in danger than in calm, and yet for Morison the transition from academic contemplation of past violence to active participation in present violence was a mighty one.

I saw Morison after he had returned from Casablanca; it was clear he had been emotionally stirred. Volume II of the series — the second chronologically but the first published — Operations in North African Watters, betrays this emotion; in certain places it smacks more of a personalized chronicle than of objective history.

It is necessary, I think, to stress this deep feeling of affection, respect, and pride which Sam Morison came to feel for the Navy , for it is the key to much of the magnificence and to some of the faults of the History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. Morison has written these volumes from the heart as well as from the mind, and they have, therefore, the virtues and the faults of any such approach. Some of the beauty of writing and felicity of phrase stems from the heart, but in certain places — sometimes in the North African volume, and occasionally, as a jarring note, in The Struggle for Guadalcanal — the heart betrays the pen of the skilled writer, and sticky metaphors, Horatio Algor phrases, or colloquialisms that protrude like a sore thumb emerge from otherwise fine and flowing passages. What, for instance, can one say to the “queenly Augusta . . . [with] her 8-inch guns booming a deep ’woof-woof’ˮ Or to such digressions as: “ This may shock you, reader: but it is exactly how we felt. We were fighting no civilized, knightly war. We cheered when the Japs were dying.”

Such passages or false metaphors, fortunately rare, are, I think, in part the product of real emotional feeling, in part the unconscious (or perhaps conscious) identification of the author with his history —so strong an identification that from time to time Morison distracts the reader or destroys the effectiveness of a page or a paragraph by inserting the personal pronoun “I or “we" into a sweeping panorama of Homeric events.

Annoying as these foibles are, they are minor. More serious, I think, is Sam Morison’s sometimes gentle treatment of the Navy s gross mistakes, errors, or inefficiencies. I do not mean for a minute that Morison distorts; his intellectual integrity and his high scholarship pull all the bones in the skeleton out of the closet, and in each of his volumes he has recorded all the major pertinent facts that could be dredged up from l .S. or other records. It is with some — but only some — of his post-mortems, his analyses of the actions he has described, that I feel a vague dissatisfaction.

To the average American, for instance, the impact of Morison’s recent book, The Struggle for Guadalcanal, will come as a shock. Here, night after night and battle alter battle, Morison in graphic, epic sequences presents the Navy that we Americans (I among them) proudly considered the best in the world taking a terrible shellacking from Japanese forces that were sometimes inferior in strength.

In torpedoes, gunnery, night battle tactics, Heel handling, communications, and in “ battle-mindedness” the Japs time and again proved their superiority. The successive impact of Morison’s calm but dramatic narrative of these actions is almost staggering to the American ego, shattering to our self-complacency. The facts are all here; Morison does not conceal them. But it is baffling and disturbing to find no one, or rather everyone, blamed. For the Battle of Savo Island, perhaps the worst American defeat in naval war in our history, the “blame . . . was so evenly distributedˮ that Morison agrees “it would be unfair to censure any particular officer.ˮ Perhaps he is right. And yet Morison’s own narrative, buttressed by an important footnote citing a Naval War College analysis, clearly turns a spotlight of major blame on Frank Jack Fletcher who withdrew his carriers at a crucial moment from Guadalcunal-Savo waters for what Morison admits were “flimsy “ reasons.

It is easy, of course, to be a Monday morning quarterback, and a good historian like Morison always resists the temptation to play God, and to be omniscient after the event, to expect superhuman deeds from human beings.

But there is still a myth abroad in the land — the myth that one American is as good as five Japs, that one Yankee can lick six Germans. The war proved this was nonsense. We did not win because of better tactics, better techniques, higher morale, more skillful leadership, or better weapons; we won because God, in modern war, is on the side of the big factories and we swamped the enemy with quantity. Today, faced with a potential enemy who has both big factories and big battalions, we cannot afford again to risk inferior tactics, inferior weapons, inferior leadership. This, I hope, is a lesson which Sam Morison will underline and emphasize in future volumes.

My dissatisfaction with the lack of incisiveness In a few (and I emphasize the word few) of Morison’s analyses in his first volumes is perhaps unreasonable, not only because Morison may be right — the blame for our bitter defeats in “Ironbottom Sound" may be broadly American, rather than narrowly naval — but also because the author has envisaged this work as a whole, not to be judged solely by any one volume.

It is, indeed, therefore somewhat premature for the publication of this appreciation since the best is still to he. Yet enough has been published of History of United States Naval Operations in World War II to demonstrate the high quality, marred only bv the exceptions noted (none of them sufliciently serious to mangle or mutilate), of a history unique—so soon alter the war it describes — for its general thoroughness, accuracy, and drama.

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Morison opens his 14-volume Iliad with a volume on The Hattie of the Atlantic from September, 1939, to May, 1943. This describes the strengths of the naval antagonists, the diplomatic and political mancuverings prior to our entry into the war, the neutrality patrol, and the initial phases of the submarine and antisubmarine campaign in The Atlantic. The weaknesses of our Navy in anlisubmarine techniques and equipment at the start of war are accurately described, and a concise but fair summary of the behind-the-scenes fight between the Navy and the Air Force for control of antisubmarine aviation is probably the best brief exposition of this intramural conflict — predecessor to even sterner post-war strife —yet published.

Operations in North African Waters is the title of the second volume, and the reader will find in these pages, in addition to a narrative of the naval operations, an excellent epitome of the “diplomatic contest over North Africa.”

The Rising Sun in the Pacific: 1931 April 1942 is political and diplomatic history as well as naval; some reviewers, indeed, have criticized it as devoting too large a proportion of its space to the political and diplomatic preliminaries leading up to actual shooting war. I cannot join in such comment, for I know that Morison envisaged this political introduction as a preface to all his volumes on the Pacific war — and as such the scope of the political narrative is by no means excessive. Moreover, the author’s practiced skill as political historian is so evident in these pages that the dry-as-dust maneuverings which led to the bloody hell of December 7. 1941, assume a viability and reality that make them seem of the present, not the past. The account of the attack on Pearl Harbor is a model of precise and accurate description; and the author minces no words in his stark report of the Wake Island fiasco. He covers much less satisfactorily a great deal of ground in a short space in tins volume when he deals with the sprawling series of sea and air actions around the Philippines and in the Western Pacific shortly after Pearl Harbor.

Volume IV of “Sam Morison and the Navy” is devoted to Coral Sea and Midway and to submarine actions between May, 1942, and August, 1943.— a decisive period of the war in the Pacific, when the tide of American defeat started to turn and a handful of U.S. naval pilots off Midway stood between Japan and theempire of the Pacific. Morison has a great facility for (and has had admirable help in) sifting the kernels of wheat from the tons of chaff in research; he possesses an orderly mind, and consequently his gift for making a clear and intelligible, and dramatic, presentation of disorderly and chaotic actions is extraordinary. Student and lover of the classics, Morison works aptly into his descriptions those ringing and redolent phrases of ancient Greece or Rome, so that his battle descriptions like that of Midway — assume at times an Olympian excitement.

But to my mind The Struggle for Guadalcanal, which covers a period of Pacific lighting from August, 1942, to February, 1943, is the best of the volumes yet published despite the reservations I have felt. Perhaps it was because Morison was there, and by this time—unlike his first experiences on The Brooklyn &emdash: his emotions were tempered. His writing is more controlled; his descriptions are precise; his skill at eliminating the nonessential and weaving a consecutive narrative from complex multi-ship actions is at its best. Volume V holds high promise for the volumes to come, for it seems to me each book has offered in some ways better fare than those that have gone before.

Ultimately. History of United States Naval Operations in World War II can be judged only in its entirety. It is not the definitive history of the Navy though it is the most definitive the public is ever likely to see; Morison deliberately chose to publish now rather than to await the time which for so many pedants never comes, when every item can be completely checked, every paper ransacked. It does not possess — save in spots &emdash: the Biblical grandeur of the Churchillian phrases; Morison has deliberately sacrificed this for the common phrase, the active verb, the argot and the vernacular, and he speaks, therefore, not to the literati alone but to the man in the street. The first five volumes are not great history; but despite, or perhaps because of, Sam Morison’s emotional attachment to the Navy and his occasional “Reader,

I was there, they are good history, very good history; good reading, very good reading. They will be, I venture to think, good reading for many years to come, and they are a proud monument to Samuel Eliot Morison of Harvard and the Navy — historian and seaman.