Old Friends, New Enemies Vol. 2

Old Friends, New Enemies: The Pacific War, 1942-45 v.2: Royal Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy: The Pacific War, 1942-45 Vol 2 [Hardcover]

Arthur J. Marder Mark Jacobsen John Horsfield

Arthur Marder has rightly been acknowledged as one of the great naval historians, with his magnum opus Fear God and Dreadnought recognised as a classic work. In the 1970's he turned to Anglo-Japanese relations and planned a two volume work covering the decade 1936-46. The first volume of Old Friends New enemies appeared just after his death, in 1981 and we have had to wait almost a decade for the second volume to appear. He had completed only one third of the writing, but most of the research by the time of his death. The work now published was then completed by two of his former students.

Somerville's portrait is chosen for the frontispiece and he is the hero of the first section of the book, albeit a hero beset by troubles and with quite inadequate support from Whitehall. There is also belated recognition of the quality of Layton. This support of Somerville leaves the book a little uneasy when considering Somerville's incautious attempt to bring the Japanese to battle off Ceylon. Although he suffered clearly from faulty intelligence and the author's diagnose an unwillingness to be treated again as he was for his refusal to chase the Italians at Calabria, the authors handle it uncomfortably. They also show an interesting blind spot in his attitude to convoy, an attitude more usually attributed to Admiral King. And by the time Mountbatten appears on the scene they have great difficulty in showing anything other than that both men behaved badly. This reversal of Somerville from hero to villain is compounded by his inability to work with the very able Arthur Power.

The striking feature of the debate over the Bay of Bengal as against the Pacific strategy is the exposure of the inability of Churchill and a number of others to grasp the sheer impossibility of the logistics of operating at the end of such a long supply chain. With the loss of Singapore bases were literally thousands of miles from the scene of operations and quite apart from the need for a fleet train the requirements of men, supplies, shipping and landing craft were quite beyond the capacity of the United Kingdom in the last twelve months of the war. Really the issue was not whether we should, but whether we could operate in the Pacific and it is not clear whether Churchill was unwilling or unable to accept the resource implications of what he sought. This debate between the Chiefs of Staff on one side and Mountbatten and Churchill on the other is well delineated, with Churchill's outright opposition to sending forces to aid the American Fleet in the Pacific fully brought out. However, as Japanese resistance began to crumble it was clear that British naval forces must operate with the Americans or nowhere. The divisions within American ranks on how British forces should be used is also clearly brought out.

There is an excellent account of Japanese naval planning and training failures; the refusal to set up a building programme predicated on a long war; the refusal to use submarines against anything but warships, since trade war was unworthy; the failure to institute convoy; a parallel failure to build adequate numbers of anti-submarine vessels since trade war was not recognised as an issue; the complete gulf between Army and Navy which operated almost independently of each other so that only at the every end of the war was joint planning instituted; the crippling effect of oil fuel shortages in 1945. The whole issue of kamikazes is also carefully and helpfully explored.

There is a very good account of the complications of the ABDA Command and its sad end, with a typically clear description of the Battle of the Java Sea. The book is scathing of the American role in ABDA and of their habit of withdrawing ships from the Command.

Inevitably the relationship of Mountbatten with the Royal Navy in general and Somerville in particular colours much of the middle section of the book. Mountbatten is shown to be about the fifth choice for the SEAC Command. At first Somerville was optimistic about the appointment, perhaps expecting to have a sort of avuncular relationship. But Mountbatten's habit of going directly to Churchill soon soured relations with his commanders and with a staff which soon numbered thousands, relationships became unworkable.

The issue is definitively settled that Mountbatten did not sack Somerville who had already been asked to move to Washington by Cunningham. Neither man comes out of the affair with much credit.

There is a long section on the deficiencies of the Eastern Fleet. Starved of ships and with a constant turnover of units it was impossible to do much more than trade protection, with the constant threat of annihilation by a Japanese raid such as that on Ceylon. While resources were diverted to excursions in the Mediterranean and Aegean, Somerville had quite unfairly to bear the wrath of Churchill for inactivity and sloth. Even when an adequate fleet was assembled its commanders were very doubtful of its fighting ability and commitment. As the war in Europe drew to a close, the commitment of hostilities only conscripts to a war in the Far East was seriously questioned. The quality of the manpower of the fleet in 1944/5 is a very sensitive issue which is not adequately addressed, and the great bravery of those who fought with that fleet would seem to give the lie to this assertion.

Perhaps inevitably with three authors the book appears unbalanced at times. There appears an imbalance between the space given to some themes over others, for example the sinking of the Haguro occupies sixteen pages, almost the same as the space devoted to Nagumo's raid on Ceylon in 1942 and much more than that devoted to Rawlings astonishing feat of keeping the fleet at sea for unheard of periods in July and August 1945 (It should be remembered that Admiral Fraser had at first suggested that the fleet could remain at sea for eight days and as Nimitz laconically reported they compromised on twenty - while Rawlings finally achieved forty-seven days) and what seems a disproportionately long account of the internal Japanese government manoeuvres to bring an end to the war. It is also regrettable that there is absolutely no mention of the Royal Indian Navy. Long neglected by historians it played an undeniable role in this theatre of operations, but Admiral Godfrey is never mentioned, nor is there even space for that most gallant action of the minesweeper Bengal against two Japanese auxiliary cruisers. In the first volume Marder gave distinctive pen portraits of his characters and some of these remain. More often the pen portraits seem to descend to the simple repetition of adjectives, with an unhealthily high number of flag officers on both sides who are described as portly flabby or ponderous.

Nevertheless, the literature of the war in the Far East is not so rich or large that this work can be set aside. If it fails to grip in the same way that Marder's writing did at its best, it still contains so much original material from participants and so many well argued cases and new insights, that it is and will remain an important work on the Forgotten Fleet.