Battle Report, Volume Ii: The Atlantic War Commander Walter Karig, Lieutenants Burton and Freeland, Usnr

COMMANDER KARIG and his young assistants have, I think, hit the mark again with this second volume of their “Battle Report. Their mark they describe as “a narrative tour of the battle areas of the Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Arctic, and the Mediterranean.” In text and in illustrations they give an excellent picture of what stands in some jeopardy of being the Navy’s “forgotten war.”

We have for so long dated time from Pearl Harbor that few remember the undeclared war we fought in the Atlantic before the Japs attacked. But Lend-Lease had swept away our neutrality almost nine months before, and our first merchant ship was soon torpedoed by a German submarine. The Navy began its far-flung convoy work. Its landings in Greenland and Iceland followed as it reached out to the eastward. Then came that grisly “Murmansk run” with its armed guards who quite properly called themselves “fishbait.” Three months before Pearl Harbor the Germans made their first submarine attack on an American warship. The President promptly ordered the Navy to “shoot on sight.”

The chapters on the vital anti-submarine campaign are good reading, though much of the technical details of that sea-air hunt for the “Skipper’s pants” — the proverbial proof of the sinking of a submarine — are necessarily omitted. Not so the classic hand-to-hand fights with subs, of the U.S.S. Borie and Buckley, and the capture of the U-505.

The growing pains of the amphibious force are barely sketched in. It was a great job which should have been organized before we were at war. A landing on a hostile shore is one of the most difficult operations of war, and one which clearly faced us if we went to war. But for the better part of the first war year we floundered about such basic questions as that of responsibility for training and command.

The Report does not mention the great amphibious training centers of the Army Engineers in Florida and on Cape Cod, competing with the Navy’s on the Chesapeake and the Marines’ at New River. To this reviewer the confusion and rivalry between the three services over that prime responsibility, in the midst of war, is but another proof of the need of merger. But let that pass—one must admit that, from a very poor start, through the first landings (“We were damned lucky,” said Admiral Kirk), the Navy made a superb finish on D Day in Normandy.

The remainder of the Report covers those landings through which the war in Europe was won—first North Africa, then Sicily, Italy, and France. The authors do not miss the ascending curve of endeavor and success which history gives them. Nor do they omit many good yarns of the sea — the “cub-carriers” who wanted flight pay, the Admiral’s salute to the bedraggled LCT’s for their gallant work off Sicily, the Negro skipper of a “duck,” with only his white teeth showing in the dark night, who wanted to know “where at is land?”

SHERMAN MILES