Book Review: 'World War II at Sea: A Global History'

© 2018 Oxford University Press

On May 2, 2018, the New York-based North American division of Oxford University Press published World War II at Sea: A Global History by Craig L. Symonds. As the title implies, Symonds' nearly 800-page book is a one-volume account of the naval battles that took place during the Second World War from the beginning of the war in Europe on September 1, 1939, to Japan's surrender (fittingly) aboard the battleship USS Missouri six years later. Written by a renowned naval historian and Professor Emeritus and former history department chair at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD, World War II at Sea: A Global History tells the story of history's largest clash of arms from the perspectives of the Axis and Allied navies, the admirals that led them, and the officers, sailors, Marines, and airmen that fought - and often died - in such diverse places as the River Plate, the Denmark Strait, Cape Matapan, the Coral Sea, Midway, the North Cape, Savo Island and "The Slot," Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa.

World War II at Sea: A Global History tackles its subject chronologically, beginning with an account of the London Naval Conference in 1930 all the way to the fall of Hitler's Third Reich and the death of the Imperial Japanese Navy 15 years later. Early on, Symonds informs the reader that the tensions building between the Anglo-American naval powers and up-and-coming Japan are evident just one year before the Japanese start on their disastrous road to war with their takeover of Manchuria.

The five parts of World War II at Sea: A Global History are:

Prologue: London, 1930

PART I. THE EUROPEAN WAR 

1. Unterseeboote 

2. Panzerschiffe

3. Norway

4. France Falls

5. The Regia Marina

6. The War on Trade, I 

7. The Bismarck

PART II. THE WAR WIDENS

8. The Rising Sun

9. A Two Ocean Navy

10. Infamy 

11. Rampage 

12. The War on Trade, II 

PART III. WATERSHED 

13. Stemming the Tide 

14. Two Beleaguered Islands 

15. A Two Ocean War 

16. The Tipping Point

17. The War on Trade, III 

PART IV. ALLIED COUNTERATTACK

18. Airplanes and Convoys 

19. Husky

20. Twilight of Two Navies 

21. Breaking the Shield 

22. Large Slow Target

PART V. RECKONING 

23. D-Day 

24. Seeking the Decisive Battle 

25. Leyte Gulf 

26. The Noose Tightens

27. Denouement 

Epilogue: Tokyo Bay, 1945

Afterword

Symonds tells the story of World War II's diverse campaigns in chronological order, beginning with the Nazi invasion of Poland and the start of Admiral Karl Doenitz's attempts to starve Great Britain by attacking Allied merchant shipping with a growing fleet of submarines - the infamous U-boats. He also covers the efforts of Doenitz's superior, Fleet Admiral Erich Raeder, to find a suitable role for the Kriegsmarine's surface fleet; these include the dispatch of Germany's pocket battleship Graf Spee on a search-and-destroy mission against British ships in the South Atlantic, the invasion of Norway in April 1940, and the ill-fated cruise of the battleship Bismarck a year later. 

World War II at Sea: A Global History gives equal treatment to all of the theaters of operation and all of the major belligerents' navies, including the lesser known stories of the Soviet navy and Italy's Regia Marina, which not only fought in the Mediterranean Sea but also contributed a modest force of small warships to the Baltic in order to support Nazi Germany's war in the Eastern Front. 

Author of Lincoln and His Admirals (winner of the Lincoln Prize), The Battle of Midway (Best Book of the Year, Military History Quarterly), and Operation Neptune, (winner of the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature), Craig L. Symonds has established himself as one of the finest naval historians at work today. World War II at Sea represents his crowning achievement: a complete narrative of the naval war and all of its belligerents, on all of the world's oceans and seas, between 1939 and 1945. 

Opening with the 1930 London Conference, Symonds shows how any limitations on naval warfare would become irrelevant before the decade was up, as Europe erupted into conflict once more and its navies were brought to bear against each other. World War II at Sea offers a global perspective, focusing on the major engagements and personalities and revealing both their scale and their interconnection: the U-boat attack on Scapa Flow and the Battle of the Atlantic; the "miracle" evacuation from Dunkirk and the pitched battles for control of Norway's fjords; Mussolini's Regia Marina-at the start of the war the fourth-largest navy in the world-and the dominance of the Kidö Butai and Japanese naval power in the Pacific; Pearl Harbor then Midway; the struggles of the Russian Navy and the scuttling of the French Fleet in Toulon in 1942; the landings in North Africa and then Normandy. Here as well are the notable naval leaders-FDR and Churchill, both self-proclaimed "Navy men," Karl Dönitz, François Darlan, Ernest King, Isoroku Yamamoto, Erich Raeder, Inigo Campioni, Louis Mountbatten, William Halsey, as well as the hundreds of thousands of seamen and officers of all nationalities whose lives were imperiled and lost during the greatest naval conflicts in history, from small-scale assaults and amphibious operations to the largest armadas ever assembled. 

Many have argued that World War II was dominated by naval operations; few have shown and how and why this was the case. Symonds combines precision with story-telling verve, expertly illuminating not only the mechanics of large-scale warfare on (and below) the sea but offering wisdom into the nature of the war itself. - Dust jacket blurb, World War II at Sea: A Global History

My Take

The American carrier USS Wasp in her death throes after being hit by three torpedoes fired from the Japanese submarine I-19 on September 15, 1942. Torpedoes from the same salvo crippled the battleship North Carolina and sank the destroyer O’Brien. Image courtesy of the U.S. National Archives, no. 80-G-16331.

Since the late 1960s, when I saw a few episodes of the long forgotten NBC-TV series Convoy as a boy in Colombia (Jorge Baron Television imported the 13-episode run of the black-and-white World War II - dubbed in Spanish, naturally-  drama for the country's state-owned television network Inravision), I have been fascinated by naval warfare, especially the ones Craig L. Symonds writes about in World War II at Sea: A Global History.

Symonds, who in addition to having taught history at the Naval Academy for over 30 years is a retired U.S. Naval Reserve lieutenant; when he was an ensign, Symonds gave a lecture at the Naval War College in Newport, RI, the first officer of that junior rank to do so at that prestigious institution.  His books on naval history have earned many awards, including the Lincoln Prize (Lincoln and His Admirals) and the Samuel Eliot Morrison Award for Literature (Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings).

World War II at Sea is a massive and ambitious project; the war's outcome was decided not just by Axis blunders such as Hitler's decision to fight a war on two fronts (a mistake that he had criticized Wilhemine Germany's leaders for doing during the First World War) by invading Russia in June of 1941 or by the entry of the U.S. into the war six months later, but by Allied domination of the seas. Explaining the "hows and whys" in detail is a monumental challenge with logistical and creative obstacles that need to be overcome. 

As author John Prados wrote in his advance review, "World War II at Sea somehow manages to distill this entire naval history into a single volume without missing a beat. How Craig Symonds accomplished this while keeping the story interesting and the narrative engaging is a fine feat. This book is a treat!" 

I enjoyed reading World at Sea and I agree with the advanced readers - including actor Tom Hanks and retired Admiral James Stavridis, USN - who also gave the book rave reviews which are cited on the book's dust jacket. Despite its length - 700 pages not counting the bibliography and index - and sheer scope of the project, Symonds is not only a dogged researcher, but a masterful storyteller.

However, be aware that even the best authors do make mistakes, especially in a book this ambitious. The most annoying one is in one of the chapters about the Pacific War; while discussing one of the serious setbacks suffered by the U.S. Navy during the Guadalcanal campaign in the fall of 1942, Symonds mentions the loss of the British battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battle-cruiser HMS Repulse to Japanese torpedo bombers off Malaya and says it had occurred "nearly two years before." 

In actuality, the sinking of the Royal Navy's Force Z took place on December 10. 1941, roughly eight months before the Battle of Savo Island and 10 months prior to any of the Japanese naval victories in the Solomons before their ultimate defeat in the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal on November 13, 1942.