The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy’s Finest Hour by James D. Hornfischer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So we’ve reached the point in our discussions of WWII where writing about individual battles isn’t exciting enough, and we need to start breaking up the action even further. This book, for instance, is the story of the near catastrophe off Samar, which was one component of the naval action usually grouped together as the Battle of Leyte Gulf. It also covers, in some detail, the previous day’s Battle of the Sibuyan Sea and the previous night’s Battle of Surigao Strait, and Halsey’s decision to take the Third Fleet after the Japanese decoy carriers, so even though the focus is on the Center Force action off Samar, it gives a pretty good gloss on the entire battle.

So here’s the arc: the Japanese Navy, in an attempt to forestall the liberation of the Phillipines, and with no real naval air power remaining after the Marianas Turkey Shoot, concoct an elaborate plan to split their surface ships into two large fleets and catch the American invasion force in a pincer, while using empty carriers to draw off the main strength of the American Third Fleet. Halsey and the Third Fleet do take the bait and go chasing off, leaving the Army forces covered only by small escort carriers and a handful of destroyers and destroyer escorts. The Southern Force is destroyed in the Surigao strait, but after a brief retreat, Admiral Kurita’s center force falls upon the US Navy’s tiny escort carrier group with a far superior surface force of battleships and cruisers, including the massive Yamato. With no choice but to fight, the captains of the task force known as “Taffy 3” take their tiny ships into action and sink three cruisers, forcing the Japanese into retreat. The Japanese fleet spends the rest of the war in harbor and never threatens the American advance again. It is a big deal.

Like most recent books about naval warfare, Last Stand spends a lot of time detailing the events leading up to the battle, and a lot of time detailing the aftermath of the battle. The survivors of the crippled DDs and DEs spent a long time in the water, dealing with the elements, delirium, and shark attack, and it makes for pretty grim reading. If your interest is just in naval strategy and the timeline of the battle, you could, I suppose, skip the last several chapters, but you could also simply read the pretty detailed wikipedia page here and give the whole book a miss. The human story is important and well told.

All in all, a very solid read
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Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by Jonathan Parshall

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For 50 years, the story of Midway has been mistold in the English speaking world. The account of the Japanese plans and actions in the battle were based on a single source, which in the intervening years has been somewhat discredited in Japan. But this account remained, until this book, the definitive story of the Battle of Midway.

That’s the selling point, that’s why you should read this book. But maybe the idea of reading hundreds of pages describing a single naval battle in the less-popular theater of a 70 year old war seems quaint, like reading a book about Trafalgar. I know my wife can’t imagine anything less interesting. The fact of the matter is that this book, and the dozens like it, are simply fascinating. The Japanese Navy spent the whole war trying to arrange a decisive battle, to win a single crushing victory and bring the U.S. to the bargaining table. That’s the story of Leyte Gulf, certainly, but it was their plan here, three years earlier, at Midway, and at every battle in between. Their battle plans were always convoluted and obscure, relying on timing and surprise and racial superiority and the will of the gods. They were comical, and sometimes, as happened when Bull Halsey went chasing after empty aircraft carriers at Leyte, they came within a hair’s breadth of succeeding. It makes for a fundamentally interesting read.

And this was Midway. The Japanese were very near the height of their power, and the U.S. Navy very near its low point, and (spoilers, I guess) through better intelligence and a whole lot of luck, Spruance and the U.S. Navy sent four Japanese carriers, their first two divisions, to the bottom of the Pacific ocean. It was a huge disaster for the Japanese, and one they were in no position to recover from. So of course the Japanese account of the battle is wonderfully compelling.

That’s the focus of this book: the Japanese view of events. We never visit the deck of an American flat top, or follow torpedo bombers on their search for the Imperial fleet. We’re with Akagi when the waves of aircraft from Midway arrive, and we’re with Hiryu when she sinks. We see the frustration of every plan and we feel the shame of the final retreat.

And it’s a good read. It’s narrative where it needs to, it’s technical where it needs to be. It addresses deficits in our historical understanding of the battle.

One note. though: give the Kindle version a miss. The accented characters don’t come through well, and there are a couple of places where it seems an entire line has been dropped. That’s not a Kindle limitation, it looks like the result of a bad file preparation. There are charts and maps, too, so get a paper copy.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Continuing the trend of being last to the party, I finished the Millennium series this week. It’s an odd little series, two stories told across three books, about an investigative journalist and an antisocial computer hacker who bring down some awful men through the power of the press and also some violence. Either exposé or guns. It’s kind of odd.

The books were written by Stieg Larsson, (the main character, Mikael Blomkvist, is an obvious author insertion)himself an investigative reporter and journalist, and were published posthumously. Supposedly most of a fourth novel exists, which will give everyone a chance to cry about how bad it is when it’s eventually finished by someone else.

So no summary here. There are movies, and there will be more movies, and everyone’s read these anyway. But here are some things I liked:

I really liked the overall optimism of the books. They cover some dark subjects, and the second and third books especially get into some conspiracies and government misdeeds, but in fact the stories never become the-heroes-against-the-world, and in most cases, the cadre of good, trustworthy people outnumber the bad guys. Mikael and Lisbeth always have allies, and their allies never betray them. The fundamental threat the protagonists pose to the bad guys is exposure in the press, whereupon an indignant public and hardworking, honest politicians will spring into action. When the bad guys turn out to be a group of policemen, another group steps up to help. At no point is Larsson using overwhelming opposition to manipulate the reader’s emotions, and the overall setting of the book is one in which people are good and reliable on the whole, even if many many individuals are flawed.

I liked the writing. Of course I read them in translation, by Reg Keeland, so the credit here may not devolve to Larsson entirely, but some of the odd, clipped details must be in the original, because I cannot believe any translator would add them. Every discussion of computer software and hardware is oddly specific. We’re told on several occasions what the screen size and hard drive capacity are for computers that appear. We’re told every make of mobile phone that appears. We’re even given a little lesson in PGP encryption. It can be a little distracting, especially in the first book, but across the trilogy it establishes itself as a style, and I feel like the exactness of the description works to establish the reliability of the narrator.

The style is very matter-of-fact, and very little ink is wasted on descriptions of scenery or decoration. It works out wonderfully in the chapters describing Lisbeth Salander, who reads like a person with Asperger’s, but it also works when describing the life of an honest investigative journalist, because nothing feels embellished. The flipside is that there’s no poetry in it.

And that’s where I’m going to leave the praise for a moment to discuss the major disappointment of the series. It covers some weighty and important areas, and it can be grim reading at times, but it frankly wasn’t a series that made me think. The bad guys are bad, and there really isn’t a lot of opportunity to engage with them and come to understand how someone could become bad. So when I read it, I felt like those guys sucked, these misogynists and criminals, but hey, that’s not me, so I don’t need to feel bad. And I didn’t.

And what’s weird about that is that it’s clear that in some cases, it seems like Mikael Blomkvist does sort of understand and empathize, specifically with the main villain in the first book. It’s as if a halfhearted attempt to humanize certain of the villains has been made, and has fallen flat. That’s a failure of the writing, but I haven’t decided if it’s a failure of style or a failure of vision.

But read them.