Naval Gazing Book Club - Two-Ocean War Ch4

Having kicked off the war at Pearl Harbor, our book club for Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two-Ocean War, a history of the USN in WWII, continues into Chapter 4, a survey of what else the Japanese were up to in the Pacific in the first few months of the war.

This chapter opens with a section that I almost really like, pointing out the execrable performance of MacArthur in the Philippines. And then the last word has to go and spoil it. Now, MacArthur is a complicated character, and I think his campaign in New Guinea was one of the great overlooked military masterpieces (unfortunately, it looks like it gets about 4 pages in Two-Ocean War, but the account in Morison's New Guinea and the Marianas is very good) but I also think he should have been sacked the instant he set foot on Australian soil. Based on this account, the performance of the Japanese air attack on the Philippine airbases is one of the very best of the entire war, and the sort of thing that even fairly rudimentary defensive measures could have gone a long way to mitigating. Also, there's not even a hint of acknowledgement that the whole plan was bad from the start. Whatever people may have thought the B-17 could do in 1941, it was not an effective anti-shipping platform and probably couldn't have done all that much to the air bases on Formosa, either, even if MacArthur hadn't let them get destroyed on the ground.

For fairly obvious reasons, Morison gives only the briefest account of the Malaya campaign, which was if anything even more badly conducted than the defense of the Philippines. After reading a book on it, I came away with the impression that the RN had done the best of the three services, and they lost two battleships.

But then we come to the campaign in the Dutch East Indies, which is one of the bits I like best in History of US Naval Operations, as it's almost totally neglected in most histories of the war, even more so than the Philippines. His description of Java Sea is excellent, finding just the right balance between detail and brevity. The one thing that stood out to me is how ineffective the Japanese torpedo attacks are, as my main reference frame for that is the fighting around Guadalcanal, where they did significantly better. But it's nice to finally see Morison hit his stride.