Douglas MacArthur’s army up the coast of the island in one of the largest naval-amphibious offensives of the war. ![]() Kennedy writes that the battle for New Guinea was “not a naval one, of course, but one fought instead across mountain ranges and tropical jungles.” Sailors of the Seventh Fleet might be surprised to hear that, having lifted Gen. invasion (Operation Watchtower) was ordered by the Joint Chiefs in Washington and planned extensively by the Navy and Marines. In fact, the Japanese had landed three months earlier than the Americans on nearby Tulagi and two months earlier on Guadalcanal, and the U.S. Concerning the fight for Guadalcanal in 1942, Kennedy writes that the Americans and Japanese “stumbled into conflict” and “reached for their guns” after arriving on the island at nearly the same time, apparently without advance plans. Whether “Victory at Sea” can be said to include major errors involves a judgment call, but there are at least a few candidates. Minor errors, so long as they are not too numerous, are embarrassing but not fatal - in this case, fleets are misnumbered, ships mislocated, admirals misidentified, chronologies mangled and island groups confused. The chapters on the Pacific War are brief, sometimes wrong and mostly based on scholarship produced decades ago.Įrrors can be devilishly hard to root out of a long manuscript, and many otherwise first-rate books have gone to press containing more than a few. In any book presented as a global history of World War II, the theater demands extensive and expert treatment. ![]() But the Pacific was the scene of the largest, most complex, most varied, most technologically sophisticated naval campaign of the war. By and large, Kennedy is more sure-footed when covering operations in the Atlantic and Mediterranean than those in the Pacific. His account of the struggle against the German U-boats is a notable strength, although it bears a close resemblance to his chapters on that subject in a previous book, “Engineers of Victory” (2013). Kennedy’s passages on the British Royal Navy are more detailed and better documented than those on the other five services. There are no fewer than 80 Wikipedia citations in the endnotes but insufficient reliance on the most important historical scholarship of the past 20 years. To be blunt, the book is poorly sourced and blemished by many errors. Taken as a whole, however, “Victory at Sea” does not meet the high standard of scholarship sustained in Kennedy’s previous works. His prose never fails him he is always graceful and lucid on the page. When he is at his best, as he often is in these pages, Kennedy can be dazzling. He gives us a decade-long history of the British, German, American, Japanese, French and Italian navies - with attention to shipbuilding policies, prewar planning, maritime supply lines, amphibious invasions and the great sea battles of 1939-45. The narrative encompasses not only naval operations but also trade, diplomacy, finance, fiscal policy and technological innovations. He ranges widely and adroitly over many disparate fields and disciplines. The major themes of that earlier book, and of Kennedy’s more recent work, are reprised in “Victory at Sea.” He investigates the seismic shift in global power balances brought about by World War II, from the multipolar maritime world of 1936 to the singular naval hegemony of the United States in 1946. They are superbly reproduced in this volume. ![]() With a fine eye for detail and close attention to accuracy, the artist depicts ships of every fleet in scenes all over the world. ![]() Marshall’s minimalist watercolor brushstrokes create an immersive, impressionistic sensation you can almost whiff the salt breeze and hear the gulls. As the work proceeded, the scope of the book expanded, and the result is a sweeping history of the world’s six major navies between 19, accompanied by 53 color reproductions of Marshall’s paintings depicting warships of that era.įor the illustrations alone, “Victory at Sea” is worth the hardcover price. In 2016, as the project was getting underway, Marshall died unexpectedly, and Kennedy resolved to finish it. His friend Ian Marshall, a celebrated maritime artist, asked him to write a foreword and accompanying text for a new collection of original paintings. In a preface to this beautifully illustrated book, Paul Kennedy explains that he had not intended, at first, to write a new naval history of World War II. VICTORY AT SEA Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II By Paul Kennedy Illustrated by Ian Marshall
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