Evan Thomas's Sea of Thunder is one of the
latest books written by largely amateur historians about the Pacific
War. More particularly, Thomas's work focuses on two American and
two Japanese commanders at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944:
Admiral William Halsey and Commander Ernest Evans of the U.S. Navy
and Vice Admirals Kurita Takeo and Ugaki Matome of the Imperial
Japanese Navy (IJN). Thomas's book takes one or two new interesting
turns in its coverage of this battle, but does not develop those new
areas, leaving the reader with another Pacific War account that
simply rehashes old material.
Thomas covers the prewar and wartime periods by
tracing the lives of the selected officers. He especially looks at
their formative years as midshipmen at the U.S. and IJN Naval
Academies at Annapolis and Eta Jima, respectively, and how naval
education at those institutions created "warriors" for the two
nations. Thomas also devotes considerable space to the "inner
conflicts" in these officers' lives, especially the Japanese, who
had divided loyalties to the Throne, the IJN, and the men under
their command. The book goes back and forth between the American and
Japanese officers as the two nations become interwar rivals and then
wartime adversaries. The majority of the book is then devoted to the
progression of the Pacific War itself, and especially the Battle of
Leyte Gulf.
One or two new and interesting subjects are
unfortunately not developed at all. For instance, Thomas's book, to
this reviewer's knowledge, is the first from which we learn a great
deal about Commander Ernest Evans, the daring commanding officer of
the destroyer USS Johnston. Evans's actions during the Battle
of Leyte Gulf were truly exemplary and Thomas is rightfully in awe
of the man, but he does not deal with the context of Evans's life as
fully as he could. We learn, for instance, that Evans was Cherokee
Indian and raised in fairly horrible conditions typical of American
Indian reservations in the 1910s and 1920s. Thomas lets it be known
how rare it was at that time for someone of Evans's ethnic heritage
to gain entry into the U.S. Naval Academy from the Navy's enlisted
ranks. But that is essentially where he stops on this part of his
subject. The reality is that Evans must have been highly
extraordinary to get off the reservation in the first place. Even
more unusual is the fact that he obtained entry to Annapolis from
the Navy's enlisted ranks, something that almost never happened in
those days. Not only did Evans break all kinds of racial barriers in
his entrance to the Naval Academy, he overcame institutional "glass
ceilings" as well. Thomas mentions these things but without
developing them. One would like to know more about factors in
Evans's family background that helped him in his education,
motivated him to join the Navy, and enabled him to overcome the
prejudices in the fleet to obtain an Academy appointment. Again,
these are all mentioned by Thomas but not in as thorough a manner as
the rarity of the accomplishments requires.
Having said this, there is not much more that is
new in this book. In fact, one wonders why it was written. Thomas
employs a variety of primary and secondary sources, but most of the
former are diaries, memoirs, and even interrogations of former
officers, some written right after the war but some decades
afterward. While such sources can be valuable, they are also highly
self-serving. Moreover, they are not necessarily the best material
to draw on, since at least the U.S. primary source documentation
from the battle itself, such as after-action combat reports, is now
declassified and readily available. Just as problematic is that
Thomas uses many of the secondary sources on the battle as body for
his text instead of exploring those sources as a route to a new
interpretation of the battle. In fact, except for the new material
on Evans, the book is largely a repetition of work by previous
historians.[1]
Another potentially interesting point is that Admiral Kurita may
have withdrawn from the battle against Taffy Three so as to spare
his men a meaningless death, but even that idea was first posited by
Ito Masanori.[2]
Additionally, Thomas clearly does not understand
the contexts about which he is writing, either the American naval
one or the Japanese cultural one. His early references to the four
officers as "warriors" fit the two Japanese commanders, given that
the Japanese military did habitually refer to themselves as such.
But Thomas's reference to Halsey and Evans as warriors does not at
all fit the context of mid-twentieth-century American naval
professionals. To those two men, "warriors" denoted savagery and, at
best, un-professionalism; neither would have so referred to himself
or his colleagues. Evans, in particular, would have been
extraordinarily sensitive to this. Being known as "the Chief" at
Annapolis was one thing, but he would never have wanted to be known
as anything but a professional naval officer in other contexts. "Warriors" is a term from 1990s, post-Vietnam,
"greatest generation"
American rhetoric rather than the 1940s U.S. Navy. The word's very
use indicates a serious lack of contextual knowledge on the author's
part.
Other problems also ensue from this lack of
contextual awareness. In the introduction, Thomas states that Japan
was the "clear" aggressor in the Pacific War. That quick conclusion
is fine for the reactionary side of the history culture wars of
post-Cold War America, but scholarship on the Pacific War (see
below) more accurately indicates that Thomas takes a very biased,
American perspective on the start of the war. The Japanese saw, and
still see, the war as a defensive one on their part in opposition to
U.S. Open Door imperialism. Given that these points are obviously
debatable, Thomas has a responsibility to communicate divergent
perspectives rather than simply assuming U.S. moral rectitude.
Similarly, Thomas sees the war as essentially a cultural clash
between the U.S. and Japan, an idea probably borrowed from John W.
Dower.[3]
However, primary source research[4]
has shown that the war was much more a strategic clash between two
powers that wanted to dominate East Asia and the Western Pacific.
Culture was important but not the sole cause of the conflict.
Another shortcoming is Thomas's reliance on
outdated sources. For instance, he asserts that the Japanese base at
Truk was "illegally" fortified by Japan in the 1930s in violation of
its League of Nations mandate. This despite his interview with Mark
Peattie, the historian who demonstrated in the 1980s,[5]
using extant IJN planning documents, that Japan did not begin to
fortify Micronesia until after it had withdrawn from the League in
1934! At another point, Thomas speaks of the Japanese Decisive
Battle doctrine being focused on battleships, failing to use the
latest primary research from Asada Sadao,[6]
who has shown that the doctrine changed in the 1920s and 1930s with
the addition of submarines and shore-based naval air forces. Poor
research again shows when Thomas states in Chapter 15 that
land-based bombing of Japanese cities by the U.S. Army Air Forces
led to Japanese starvation before the dropping of the atomic bombs.
The reality, as Clay Blair has shown,[7]
was that the U.S. submarine blockade shut down the Japanese economy
and brought on the collapse. It has become "politically correct" in
the last few years to pay homage to the "bomber boys" and the U.S.
Air Force's claims about strategic bombing "doing it all," but
Thomas's research would have shown something different had it been
competently done.
Given these serious weaknesses in scholarship and
originality, it is unclear why this book was published, other than
for monetary purposes. Of course, many books like this one have been
published in the last few years, largely by amateur historians who
really do not understand what scholarly or even good popular history
based on primary sources is about. Furthermore, editorial staffs at
major, for-profit publishing houses are just as ignorant about what
has been written on the war and what still needs to be covered. This
situation is made worse by an American public that voraciously
consumes newly-written World War Two history without understanding
that much of that history has already been written by previous
authors in a more thorough and professional manner. History for the
general public is a positive thing, whether it is written by
professionals or amateurs, but blindly putting out poorly done and
unoriginal material is not the best route to take.
Henry Ford Community College
friedman@hfcc.edu
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[1] See, e.g., Edwin P. Hoyt, The Men of the
Gambier Bay: The Amazing True Story of the Battle of Leyte Gulf (1979; rpt. Guilford, CT: Lyons Pr, 2003) and
The Battle of Leyte Gulf: The Death Knell of the Japanese Fleet
(NY: Weybright & Talley, 1972); Clark G. Reynolds, The Fast
Carriers: The Forging of an Air Navy (Annapolis, MD: Naval
Inst Pr, 1992); Elmer B. Potter, Nimitz (Annapolis,
MD: Naval Inst Pr, 1976), Bull Halsey (Annapolis,
MD: Naval Inst Pr, 1985), and Admiral Arleigh Burke (NY:
Random House, 1990); Thomas Buell, The Quiet Warrior: A
Biography of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance (1974; rpt.
Annapolis, MD: Naval Inst Pr, 1987) and Master of Sea
Power: A Biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1980); John Toland, The Rising Sun: The
Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945 (NY:
Random House, 1970); Thomas J. Cutler, The Battle of Leyte
Gulf, 23–26 October, 1944 (NY: HarperCollins, 1994); and H.P. Willmott, The Battle of Leyte
Gulf: The Last Fleet Action (Bloomington: Indiana U
Pr, 2005).
[2] The End of the Imperial Japanese Navy,
trans. Andrew Y. Kuroda & Roger Pineau (NY: Norton, 1962).
[3] War without Mercy: Race and Power in the
Pacific War (NY: Pantheon, 1986).
[4] See esp. Herbert Feis, The China Tangle:
The American Effort in China from Pearl Harbor to the Marshall
Mission (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U Pr, 1953); Dorothy Borg,
The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of
1933–1938: From the Manchurian Incident through the Initial
Stage of the Undeclared Sino-Japanese War (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard U Pr, 1964); Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The
Japanese-American War, 1941–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U
Pr, 1981); Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt
As Wartime Statesman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U Pr, 1991);
Michael Schaller, The U.S. Crusade in China, 1938–1945
(NY: Columbia U Pr, 1979); Waldo Heinrichs, Threshold of
War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II
(NY: Oxford U Pr, 1988); and Robert Dallek, Franklin D.
Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (NY: Oxford
U Pr, 1995).
[5] See esp. Nan'yo: The Rise and Fall of the
Japanese in Micronesia, 1885–1945 (Honolulu: U Hawaii
Pr, 1988).
[6] From Mahan to Pearl Harbor: The Imperial
Japanese Navy and the United States from Mahan to Pearl Harbor
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Inst Pr, 2006).
[7] Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War
against Japan (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1975).
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