Abstract
In May 1942, when the Axis was in full cry and seemed unstoppable, the American propaganda message to the German people was very clear: The Allies control most of the oceans of the world, so Allied victory ‘was inevitable’. The Germans might not have agreed, but they knew that the outcome of the war depended on denying the Allies the ability to muster their resources. And in the west these Allies were all great maritime empires. Their campaigns in Eurasia, Africa and the Pacific depended entirely on the use of the sea. Few historians have attempted to capture the scope, the scale and the detail of this immense struggle in a single volume. Evan Mawdsley’s The War for the Seas is just such an attempt, and he has crafted a wonderful book.
Mawdsley is best known for his work on the Russians in the Second World War, and so he brings a fresh perspective to his subject, including the occasional tone of discovery (for example when he digresses into discussion of seapower theory). In the event, Mawdsley’s approach is Mahanian in concept rather than Corbettian: The War for the Seas is a ‘military history’ of seapower, a book about combat between men, ships and aircraft, and the wider consequences of their collisions. Battle drives the narrative. As a result, The War for the Seas is essentially a chronological operational history, focused on campaigns and battles, the men who commanded and fought them, and the impact these actions had on the wider war. The book is organized into five parts, starting with ‘Seapower and the European War September 1939-June 1940’ and ending with ‘Commanding the Sea and Defeating the Axis, June 1944-August 1945’. A brief conclusion sums up Mawdsley’s main points: the Pacific was more dramatic, the Atlantic was more important. Mawdsley’s great strengthen lies in pulling together a vast and disparate literature into a new an compelling narrative that is virtually seamless.
There is much to laud in this 600 page book. Mawdsley provides excellent coverage of the main events, but balances this nicely with lesser-known campaigns. The Anglo-Italian struggle for the central basin of the Mediterranean, and the ways in which this affected the land campaigns around the littoral, is excellent. In particular, his coverage of the intense struggle in late 1941 and early 1942 (see for example the Mezzo Giugno battle mid-June 1942 (293–4)), which is typically overshadowed by the Pacific war during this period, is especially good. And his synthesis of the Japanese and American struggle for the southwest Pacific in 1942–43 is finely done. He balances the battle for the Solomons – the more famous US effort in the early stage of the war – with good coverage of the American (although not the Australians, of whom more below) naval and amphibious campaign in Papua-New Guinea (chapter 11). Perhaps more than any other work, Mawdsley conveys effectively the sudden and devastating impact of America’s enormous surge of naval power on Japanese fortunes by 1944 (see Chapter 18). The completion of 13 Essex class carriers – with 10 more on the way – plus two Midway class and nine light fleet carriers by 1945 vaulted America’s naval power onto an entirely new (an unprecedented) plateau by 1945. Here was naval power in its purest form.
Then there is the Atlantic war, this reviewer’s speciality. In fairness, the war in the Atlantic was long and complex, and – as Mawdsley argues – critical to the outcome of the war. He gets the tone right: despite all the contemporary and historical hype about the beginning of Wolf Pack operations in the North Atlantic in the fall of 1940, very few convoys were actually intercepted and the loss rate that year (0.8%) was tiny (85). This remained generally the case through much of the war. Since this is an operational history, Mawdsley only briefly dips into the specialist literature on shipbuilding and carrying capacity with references to the work of Kevin Smith on the Allied battle over the use of shipping (and Mark Parillo’s work on the decline of the Japanese merchant marine) are exceptions. His conclusion that the Type XXI U-boat was ineffective and posed no threat in 1945 (432) would have surprised the contemporary British naval staff and the RN’s official historian, Stephen W. Roskill.
More importantly, The War for the Seas’ handling of the Atlantic reveals the unconscious Anglo-American propensity to see the campaigns of the Second World War as binary struggles between Great Powers – Britain versus Germany; Italy versus Britain; America versus Japan; or (in the Battle of the Atlantic) the Anglo-Americans versus the Germans. But the Atlantic war was never a simple binary campaign. Canada’s role was always big enough to shape the narrative. By 1942 it contributed significant operational forces, and the Canadians ran the Allied Naval Control of Shipping and intelligence organization in the western hemisphere north of the equator (which embraced America). They had the forces, infrastructure and wherewithal to act, and they did. The first convoys in the US coastal zone were not organized and run by Americans (see p. 256), but by Canadians (Halifax to Boston in March). And while the slaughter of tankers created an oil crisis in the USA, the RCN – using its own resources – simply ran Canadian tanker convoys (not mentioned) through the carnage without loss. And while it is true that the British sent ‘a number’ (256) of ships to help the Americans, the RCN assumed virtually all of America’s operational escort responsibilities north of Cape Cod – freeing nearly fifty destroyers for duty elsewhere. And it was not just the ‘long pause in the central Atlantic in mid-1942’ that gave the RN time ‘to re-equip and train their surface escorts’ (259). Canadian over-commitment to operations in 1942 also allowed British escorts time to refit: when Canadian politicians found out about that a year later they fired the Chief of the Naval Staff. There is an extensive literature on all this: all of it is available in English. Mawdsley ought to have done better.
In a book of this scale there are also bound to be some curious omissions. Mawdsley says nothing of the Australian naval campaign in the South West Pacific, probably for reasons suggested above. More surprisingly, he omits the battles between the USN and the Vichy French off North Africa in 1942 – the only time in two world wars that the Americans engaged in a gunnery battle against the enemy surface fleet (albeit French in this case) in the European theatre. And the absence of a brief account of the 10th Destroyer Flotilla in the Channel in the spring of 1944 leaves Mawdsley speculating about why the German surface fleet facing Operation Overlord was so small and ineffective (426).
The War for the Seas is nonetheless a compelling book. Mawdsley has done a masterful job pulling together his own immense selective bibliography to craft a new narrative. Despite its shortcomings mentioned, this will serve as the standard book on the war at sea between 1939 and 1945 for a long time. His style is crisp and active, and there is so much that is new – and newly integrated – that it will keep even those long familiar with this story turning the pages.