20Mawdsley

[Mariners Mirror Vol 106 (1) pp. 114-115]

The War for the Seas: A Maritime History of World War II

by Evan Mawdsley.

Yale University Press, 2019, £25 (hb)

600p., illustrations, index

ISBN: 978-0300190199

Evan Mawdsley is a former professor of international history at the University of Glasgow. With a notable publication record on twentieth century Russian History and on World War II, he here turns his attention to the naval war. The result is a wide-ranging, comprehensive and lucidly written account of the war at sea, full of shrewd judgements, a wide perspective and strongly argued views. It is a masterly and authoritative work, which combines broad overviews with fascinating detail, such as the fact that perhaps the two greatest historians of the naval war, Stephen Roskill and Samuel Eliot Morison both took part in the Battle of Kolombangara in 1943.

Mawdsley is a firm believer in the view of the great naval thinker Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond: “Sea power did not win the war itself; it enabled the war to be won.” This mantra underpins his own thinking as he aims to demonstrate that the role of the Royal Navy is not held in sufficiently high regard compared with the exploits of the army and Royal Air Force. He also stresses the global nature of the conflict and how control of the seas was a necessary preliminary to the movement of men and materials safely to the battlefields of the world.

The book is divided into five major chronologically organised parts. But it is much more than an operational narrative and considers a host of background factors from naval capabilities and traditions, to the role and quality of individual naval leaders, inter-service rivalries, technical change, ship design, logistics and intelligence. Part 1 describes the first nine months of war in Northern European waters; Part 2 looks at mid-1940 to mid-1942 and the threat to Empire; Part 3 covers April to December 1942, the period when Axis expansion reached its limits; Part 4 covers 1943 to mid-1944, when he argues that the Allies won the maritime war, not least by gaining complete mastery of the shipping lanes; Part 5 moves from D-Day to the end of the war, when the Allies used their command of the seas to win the war.

The book is notable for its coverage of all the navies engaged and not only the major navies, considering the role of ships from the countries of the Empire as well as Italy, France and perhaps most notably the Soviet Union. Each Part has four or five chapters looking in detail at events ranging from the Norwegian campaign to the submarine war in the Pacific and Indian Oceans as well as the more obvious campaigns in the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Pacific.

Judgements are made firmly and unequivocally and many old myths are debunked. For example, he gives a full account of the Arctic convoys, while describing how far more Anglo-American supplies were shipped to Russia through the Iran and Vladivostok routes; the role of Bletchley Park is seen as important but not critical to the Battle of the Atlantic compared with developing radar, radio and sonar technologies; the American Japanese Pacific battles are fully described, but Mawdsley is at pains to point out that Japan’s focus on fleet battles ignored a reliance on imports, leaving it without the means to defend its merchant fleet. In 1943-44, Allied submarines wreaked havoc on those ships, a major factor in the defeat of Japan.

He takes the view that, while the battles of the Pacific naval war were more grand than those of the Atlantic, with America deploying more than 100 carriers by war’s end, it was the Atlantic which had much greater strategic importance. The invasion of France in 1944 was a critical endeavour, but could never have been launched without command of the sea, which allowed the safe transfer of vast quantities of men and arms to Europe.

There is an impressive array of maps and tables, exceptionally well reproduced photographs and an excellent and substantial bibliography. The book itself displays the very highest level of scholarship while being written with great clarity in a very accessible style. It is perhaps going too far to describe any piece of research as definitive, but this is a book which deserves to be read and re-read for a very long time.

DEREK LAW

GLASGOW