This looks like another grab-bag chapter, covering much of 1943 in the Pacific. Fortunately, he doesn't spend a ton of time on strategy this time around, going straight into the Komandorskis, an interesting and often-overlooked battle. There's an interesting note to his mention of the superiority of American gunnery. One of the reasons the Japanese made relatively few hits was that their patterns were too tight, turning a salvo that might have made a single hit into a miss. Other than that, we see the same sort of turn-away at the last minute that later happened at Samar. Other than that one action, the Aleutians campaign is most notable as being both extremely unpleasant to serve in and extremely unimportant strategically.

But the majority of the chapter is from Breaking the Bismarcks Barrier, the longest volume in the series, and one of the best in the series. (I know I've said that several times, but if I had to pick standout volumes, it would probably be The Battle of the Atlantic, Operations in North African Waters and Breaking the Bismarcks Barrier. Possibly not coincidentally, Morison personally observed all three campaigns and the latter two are covering campaigns that have otherwise seen little attention from historians.) I do find it interesting that Morison explicitly mentions codebreaking with regards to Yamamoto's death, as that's not done in the earlier volume, although it's pretty obvious in retrospect. But that's also probably the most famous incident covered in the entire chapter, despite half a dozen quite intense and interesting land and naval battles, to say nothing of Bismarck Sea, the most interesting action involving the B-25 Mitchell. Read more...

This is the conclusion of reader Michael Tint's series cataloging the history of the jet fighter, from the earliest days to the rise of electronics. Now, we'll take a look at the current fifth generation, and the sixth generation that is currently under development.

Gen 5

Development of Gen5 fighters technically began in the late 1980s, but the end of the Cold War meant large delays in development. As a result, the first Gen5 fighter did not enter service until 2005. As with every previous generation, these aircraft are larger, more expensive, and more capable than their predecessors.

There are also far fewer of them. Despite being in development since the 90s, only 3 true Gen5 fighters have been put into service, the F-22, F-35 and J-20. The sheer cost of development deterred a lot of countries from attempting the effort once the Cold War ended. Once countries began to need replacement aircraft, the sheer size of the F-35 program further discouraged competition. Developing the F-35 was a hugely expensive effort, but once developed, unit costs fell rapidly, and the fly away price of an F-35 is comparable with in production Gen4 fighters. Read more...

Today is the kickoff for our next Book Club book, Japanese Cruisers of the Pacific War.

Dean is participating, and you should, too

On the whole, I enjoyed this chapter. It's a good look at both some ships that I didn't know much about and at the Japanese procurement environment between the Russo-Japanese War and the start of the treaty era, although the recounting is very dry. More broadly, this is a good illustration of the difference between what you see in a lot of warship books and what Norman Friedman does so well. If I had to describe his secret sauce, it would be working in the details he gives of who is doing what in a way that makes the narrative at least somewhat more approachable than a textbook. Also, he's really good at preemptively answering questions you might have, or at least nodding to them and saying he doesn't know why, either. For instance, why was Tone fitted with two short 8 cm guns in addition to the 15 cm and 12 cm? My first guess would be that they were for firing starshells, but there's no mention of the purpose at all, and a later class has four, which probably rules that out. (This isn't unique to Japanese Cruisers. I've seen other books which missed fairly obvious questions, most irritatingly Dulin & Garzke's book on Bismarck.) But there's at least a lot of detail here, which is really useful should I decide to write on one of these cruisers at some point.

I have mixed feelings on the way the chapter was structured. On one hand, it's nice to see all of the different twists and turns the programs underwent in an era where Japan had an active budget office that didn't always give the Navy what it wanted. On the other, it's not exactly linear, and I kept getting confused early on about which programs were being built or punted down the road. Read more...

In November 1956, there was fighting over the Suez Canal, the vital artery for Europe's oil supplies. Long owned by Britain and France, Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalized it, and British Prime Minister Anthony Eden had decided that he and his French allies would not stand for this humiliation. The initial plan was to use an Israeli attack on Egypt as a pretext for intervention, with the two nations then acting to "secure the Canal" in the face of this threat. Nassar was unwilling to play along, and starting on October 31st, they began a sustained air campaign that wiped out the Egyptian air force and cleared the way for a ground invasion. Worried by mounting diplomatic pressure, the first wave were landed from the air on November 5th, securing vital areas on the outskirts of the city.

The landing beaches in Port Said

Finally, on November 6th, the Anglo-French force was ready to go ashore in strength. Pre-landing bombardment began shortly before 6, although it was restricted to a thousand rounds from the 4.5" guns of the destroyers for fear of collateral damage. Half an hour into the bombardment, the LSTs disgorged their cargo of LVTs loaded with the Marines of 40 and 42 Command for the 30-minute run to the beach. The bombardment continued as the amtracks swam in, pausing occasionally to clear the way for airstrikes, before lifting just before they crawled up onto the beach. It had done its work, and resistance on the beaches was minimal, with the main dangers being sniper fire and exploding weapons caches. Follow-on waves quickly followed in LCAs, which beached offshore. Fortunately, the troops already ashore had drawn the attention of what Egyptian defenders there were, so the process of wading to the beach was pretty straightforward. Read more...

Here we start Morison's account of the Mediterranean theater, one of the more overlooked of the war, at least so long as we're counting places Americans served.

This chapter seemed somewhat disordered, which isn't surprising, as it was drawing from three different books in the original, including all of Operations in North African Waters, which I remember as one of the more interesting books in the series. I also don't love the amount of time spent discussing allied strategy, and the (probably related) short shrift given to what may have been the only naval battle Morison himself witnessed. As a describer of strategy, Morison is not particularly brilliant, and I really wish we'd gotten more detail on the actual landings.

But he goes a long way to redeem himself at Sicily (helped by the fact that the account is quite a bit longer), where I really enjoyed the combination of "introduction to WWII amphibious operations" and the anecdotes about the landings (featuring my own hometown 45th Infantry Division). In particular, the callout to the landing craft crews felt appropriate, although he didn't mention that many of those were crewed by the Coast Guard.

The inclusion of a lot of the Battle of the Atlantic stuff was is particularly weird, and is making me wonder about the way this was written. There's no particular reason that the stuff here shouldn't have been in Chapter 5 except for length, and it was really weird to switch from amphibious operations to convoy battles and then back to amphibious warfare. My only real guess is that Morison was trying to keep the chapter lengths roughly equal, and couldn't afford to make Chapter 5 any longer than it already was. While that's handy for what we're doing, I think it makes the book weaker overall. Particularly weird is that the submarine campaign against Japan ended up shoehorned into the Philippines chapter.

A couple of other notes: first, the LCVPs were wood, not steel, and that's another error on the list of "that should have been easy for a competent proofreader to catch", and we see him again diving into politics c.1963 with the discussion on "Unconditional Surrender", although that one has aged better than most of the other examples we've seen, given that it's still live today. (I think he has the right of it, as the Japanese were proposing terms that amounted to "we're going to do this again in 10-20 years" right up until the end. But that's an issue for a later chapter.)

In 1956, war broke out in the Middle East. Britain and France had long owned the Suez Canal, and relied on it for much of their oil, but Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalized it. After diplomatic efforts proved fruitless, the two nations, humiliated and concerned about their energy supply, came up with a plan to recapture it in cooperation with Israel, who hoped to preempt an Egyptian attack. An Israeli invasion of the Sinai would give the two great powers the chance to issue an ultimatum demanding both sides withdraw, and when Nasser refused, they would have their opening to invade.

Initially, things went according to plan. The Israeli invasion kicked off on October 29th, and the other two powers quickly directed both sides to withdraw. Nasser was predictably unwilling to suffer the humiliation of bowing to his former colonial overlord, and two days later, the British and French began a sustained air campaign from carriers and nearby land bases, swiftly wiping out the Egyptian air force and clearing the way for a ground invasion. Read more...

Coming off the heels of Midway and Coral Sea, our book club for Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two-Ocean War, a history of the USN in WWII, heads to the South Pacific for our longest chapter yet, an account of the string of naval battles around Guadalcanal. While each is individually less famous, there's a strong argument that the whole campaign was even more pivotal than the actions discussed in the previous chapter, as well as the last time the two navies met on equal terms.

As usual, we'll begin with the recitation of the errors. Here, Morison spends less time on the Hudson that spotted the Japanese on the way to Savo Island than he did in The Struggle for Guadalcanal, and as such is less unfair to the crew. (In that one, he's so unfair to the crew that the US Navy officially apologized decades later.) Second, there's the bashing of Fletcher that we talked about last time, which is often hilariously over the top. We also see him disliking someone else, Capt. Bode of Chicago, although with somewhat greater justification. Still, it's kind of weird to see him speaking highly of Callaghan, who screwed up far worse than Fletcher ever did. I'm also confused by his claim about there being shells on the decks of the Japanese battleships in the opening stages of First Guadalcanal, which does not match my understanding of what happened there. I was under the impression that the Japanese initially opened fire with the bombardment shells, but couldn't find confirmation in later accounts either way. In any case, I can't see how you'd end up with shells out on deck while trying to get them back to the magazines, and suspect Morison got carried away here.

Beyond that, it's a very solid account of the battles, although with effectively no analysis of why they turned out the way they did, which gives me something to talk about. The Japanese, knowing they would be outnumbered in a war with the US, had sought to equalize this by fighting at night, and it had been a major pillar of their training in the interwar years. The Americans had not taken this nearly as seriously, and while their advantage in radar should have been enough to compensate, they were still figuring out how to use it. Also barely gestured at is the superiority of Japanese torpedoes, which were significantly larger than their American counterparts, and ran on pure oxygen for greater range and speed. These "Long Lances" (a name coined by Morison himself) had also been the beneficiaries of an extensive (and expensive) test program, which the Americans hadn't bothered with for their torpedoes. We'll see even more of this in future chapters.

And of course I would be remiss if I didn't say a few words about the battleship action we see here, one of only three times in the war when US battleships fought their Axis counterparts. South Dakota suffered a power loss due to the shock of her guns firing, and with the radar cut off, maneuvered into a position that silhouetted herself against a burning destroyer, turning her into a punching bag for the Japanese fleet and exacerbating the power loss as hits lead to shorts throughout the superstructure. And we have more exciting battleship combat to look forward to next week, when we go back to the Atlantic.

In 1956, Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, imperiling European access to oil and humiliating Britain and France, who had previously controlled it. Diplomatic efforts to solve the crisis failed, and the two nations came up with a plan to recapture it by force in cooperation with Israel, who hoped to preempt an Egyptian attack. Israel would invade the Sinai, and the two powers would issue an ultimatum for both sides to withdraw from Suez. When Nasser refused, they would have their pretext for an attack.

Eagle, Albion and Bulwark together

The Israeli invasion kicked off on October 29th, and Britain and France quickly issued their directive for both sides to withdraw. As expected, Nasser was entirely unwilling to suffer the humiliation of backing down in the face of Egypt's former colonial overlord, allowing the military plan to go into effect. Unfortunately, the plan was rather hindered by the lack of bases. While Britain had extensive bases in Cyprus, there was no harbor on the island suitable for the invasion force to assemble, forcing them to stage out of Malta, about four days steaming from Egypt. Read more...

It's time for our monthly open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

Overhauls are Classes, Weather at Sea, Auxiliaries Part 0, Revolt of the Admirals Part 1, Modern Propulsion Part 4, The Nimitz Class and for 2025, my reviews of the Naval Aviation Museum and Alabama, Measuring Fleets and Iowa and Kahoolawe.

After a brief detour into the Atlantic, our book club for Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two-Ocean War, a history of the USN in WWII, returns to the Pacific to cover the pair of carrier battles that are probably the most prominent of the Pacific War.

We open with the briefest descriptons of the Battle for Wake Island, which brings up one of the (mercifully short) list of major flaws that Morison has. Normally, he's extremely positive on US leaders, to the point that I was sort of expecting his half-page word kiss to Admiral Nimitz to end with "and he walked to work across Pearl Harbor without even getting his shoes wet". But for reasons that nobody has ever worked out, he really disliked Frank Jack Fletcher. The tonal dissonance this provokes in the main series is actually pretty amusing, where he goes out of his way to shower everyone else with praise, while Fletcher cannot do a single thing right. Obviously, this is an area where modern historians have taken a rather different approach, most notably in John Lundstrom's Black Shoe Carrier Admiral. Current views are that Fletcher was generally a competent and effective admiral, and in particular that he really did need to fuel before approaching Wake. Read more...