Document created: 1 December 2007
Air & Space Power Journal - Winter 2007
Carriers in Combat: The Air War at Sea by Chester G. Hearn. Praeger Security International, Greenwood Publishing Group (http://psi.praeger.com), 88 Post Road West, P.O. Box 5007, Westport, Connecticut 06881-5007, 2005, 336 pages, $49.95 (hardcover).
Chester G. Hearn has published 18 books, most of them about maritime affairs and the American Civil War. Carriers in Combat purports to be the history of naval aviation, mostly that of the United States, with some attention to the subject in the Japanese and British navies. The first combat for American naval aviation came in 1914 at Vera Cruz, Mexico. That makes the story over 90 years old. Hearn discusses the first 30 years or so in 228 pages and the last 60 in 52 pages. The whole book is not authoritative, but that part covering the postwar period is strictly superficial.
The author devotes the bulk of his attention to World War II, and it certainly behooves Air Force professionals to know something about naval aviation in that period. The naval officers that they will meet in joint assignments will be well versed in that part of their history, and Air Force officers can develop good relations if they too are conversant with the story. Moreover, since World War II, command of the sea has hardly been contested, and the mission of the Navy has increasingly become power projection ashore, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thus, aside from the takeoff and landing location, the missions of the two services have largely converged. But Air Force officers should look elsewhere for their knowledge.
At least Hearn does nothing to hide his prejudices, identifying aviators with all that is good and true in the Navy and painting everybody else as incompetent or worse. He is especially hard on Adm Raymond Spruance but is a stout fan of Adm Marc Mitscher. Spruance was not an aviator; Mitscher belonged to the first generation of aviators. Yet Spruance—victorious air leader of the Battle of Midway—comes in for criticism with regard to the Battle of the Philippine Sea because all of the Japanese carriers were not sunk, though by far the greater part of their airplanes went down, and three of the flattops followed them to the depths of the ocean. That was really the last chapter in the winning of air superiority in the Pacific (aside from the kamikaze problem). As Hearn reluctantly admits, the point is that Spruance’s mission was the protection of the landing forces in the invasion of the Mariana Islands—which was accomplished. The author criticizes Adm Harry Fletcher for abandoning the landing forces at the time of the Guadalcanal invasion, and here he condemns Spruance for not abandoning them. It now appears that Spruance could have chased off after the retiring Japanese, but that is easier to see now than it was then. That is but one example of Hearn’s blatant bias—never sufficiently recognizing that Adm Chester Nimitz was the Pacific commander. He too was not an aviator but seems to have done well enough. Furthermore, Adm Ernest R. King—chief of naval operations, stationed in Washington—escapes the author’s wrath. King won wings, but he never served as a crew member since he was an O-6 (captain) when he went through pilot training at Pensacola.
Like the Bible, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) is so voluminous that it can be used to justify all sorts of sin. Hearn, who seems not to have delved very deeply into it, uses it to buttress his claim that aircraft carriers are the greatest conventional weapon in history without noting that the USSBS credits a combination of the submarine campaign and strategic bombing as being decisive against Japan. According to Hearn, the Army and Air Force (when he recognizes them at all) also ran in a minor way in that war, as well as in the combat we have had since then.
Bias and imbalance are not the only problems with this book. Every reviewer can nitpick every bibliography there ever was for its omissions. However, there are simply too many important ones here to ignore that problem. Hearn frequently refers to Adm U. S. Grant Sharp in connection with his tirades against Pres. Lyndon Johnson, who gets all the blame for the Vietnam fiasco. Yet he does not refer at all to Sharp’s own book on that subject. He sides strongly with Sharp’s view of things but does not point out that the good admiral was not an aviator any more than Spruance had been. Both the Navy and Air Force came out of the Vietnam War with the determination to change many things about their approaches to air war, yet Hearn seems to be building a stab-in-the-back legend, heaping all the blame on politicians in Washington. Here, he depends heavily upon secondary sources (almost all of them coming from naval people), especially articles in the US Naval Institute Proceedings (a worthy journal that every Air Force professional should know, but there is more to research than that). The author also omits Clark Reynolds’s fine biography of Adm John Towers, whose story covers most of the same ground as this work—but does so authoritatively. Granted, Hearn cites the definitive work of Norman Friedman in his bibliography but does not show much evidence of having read it, as is the case with the work of Norman Polmar. I could go on and on with this, pointing to the works of Jeff Barlow, Eliot Cohen, Robert Futrell, and Conrad Crane, all of whom would make much better fodder for the Airman’s professional reading program.
Finally, Carriers in Combat is full of mistakes of both a technical and historical nature. To cite only a few, Hearn at least implies that the Saratoga and Lexington of 1927 were powered by diesel engines; in fact, both were driven by steam turbines. He later says that the Saratoga suffered the flooding of three firerooms as a result of torpedo attack—without wondering why a diesel-powered ship would need a fireroom! He mistakenly seems to identify the Navy’s conversion from coal to oil with conversion to a diesel engine. Sometimes he calls the 20 mm gun a machine gun and elsewhere a cannon. (It is a cannon, with the dividing line at .60 caliber.) He suggests that the two great ships came on the line with 16 five-inch guns each. Actually, they did so with eight-inch cruiser weapons that were removed at the beginning of World War II in favor of more antiaircraft guns, those of the five-inch caliber among them. Later he confuses the USS Enterprise with the Saratoga and elsewhere equips them with 22 mm (instead of 20 mm) antiaircraft artillery guns. He calls sonar waves “supersonic” even though we know that the speed of sound is much faster underwater than in the air. He calls the Skyraider an evolution of the Dauntless. Far from it; the latter was a scout bomber, and the former came along much later, designed not only for bombing but also for the delivery of torpedoes. He claims that Nimitz went to Germany to study diesel engines to facilitate the conversion of the Navy from coal to oil. Quite wrong; the conversion had begun long before and had nothing to do with those engines. Rather, they were being studied as the surface power plants for submarines in a Navy that had already largely converted to oil. The author claims that the TBD Devastators were old and sluggish at the onset of war; they were sluggish all right—but not old. They had come on the line in 1937 and were only four years old at the time of Pearl Harbor, when the Royal Navy was still flying open-cockpit biplanes as torpedo bombers. In one place, Hearn asserts that tactics determined the outcome of the Battle of Midway (from time to time, he made me worry about whether he knows the difference between tactics and strategy); elsewhere he credits the victory to luck or the breaking of the Japanese codes. He credits the escort carrier with winning the campaign against German submarines but ignores the importance of breaking their code. Hearn describes the Valley Forge as having a displacement of 36,000 tons and the Leyte 21,000. Both were of the Essex class, the standard displacement of which was 27,000 tons. When he gets around to the Korean War, he misspells Gen Matthew Ridgway’s name every time he uses it.
Again, I could go on and on. It is not good form to nitpick an author’s work, but the errors in Carriers in Combat occur so frequently that one must suspect that Hearn simply did not do his homework, a problem which disqualifies this book from inclusion on Airmen’s professional reading lists. Instead, they should try Raymond Buell’s biography of Ernest R. King or that of Reynolds on Towers, cited above.
Dr. David R. Mets
Maxwell AFB, Alabama
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