Sea of Thunder

Finished Sea of Thunder by Evan Thomas, an account of the Japanese and American naval leaders and their clash at Leyte Gulf in 1944.  Despite all the paeans and glowing recommendations from all the right people (Ken Burns, Herman Wouk, Rick Atkinson, Bob Woodward, and Ben Bradlee), the reviews are more a testament to the insidious incestuousness of Washington, D.C. mainstream media than to the actual quality of the book.

It is a decent and informative history but no Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, a magnificent account of the same conflict, but with a narrower remit.  

Thomas early on makes some initial missteps which work against him.  Being from the mainstream media, he is eager to make something of America's inherent racism and introduces a few stray charges and claims early on in the book.  But when you are writing about racism in World War II, it is just difficult to make anyone seem more than careless when compared with the racism of either the Nazis or Japanese.  

It also highlights the peculiar bankruptcy of academic American concerns about racism which are almost always about white racism against blacks rather than the full panoply of bigotry and bias against others of different ethnicities, religions, classes, etc.  Trying to force fit American concerns about racism onto a narrative where the Japanese are explicitly exterminating Chinese in the hundreds of thousands and millions (and Germans exterminating other white Europeans in the millions) just doesn't work all that well.

Thomas gets lost with regards to what constitutes racism versus what is fact-based prejudices.  There is no doubt that the Japanese military had an exceptionally low regard for the likely military prowess and courage of the American citizen soldier.  The militarist Japanese were convinced that Americans were soft and effete with no stomach for warfare.  

It is well established that that is what the Japanese believed, regardless of the accuracy of that expectation (as it turned out, they were astonished at how wrong they were.)

But, as a single example, Thomas makes the claim that the Japanese did not develop anti-submarine warfare because of their racist disregard and low estimation of Americans and the capacity of American submariners.  

I have never read such a claim before.  Is it possibly true?  I suppose, but I doubt it.  If you are about to read 350 pages of an author's history, it is unsettling to begin with improbable claims around an extraneous argument about racism.  

But after about 75 pages, Thomas abandons the pleading effort to introduce American racism into a history where it is largely irrelevant.  

Which gets to the second weakness which is also Thomas's strength.  Thomas has a lot of Japanese material and does a much better job than most at giving equal time to the Japanese naval leaders as well as the Americans.

So much time for both sides that it begins to feel like a bunch of inside baseball minutiae.  There's good material here but he struggles to bring it into focus.

In other histories, the conflict between the Japanese Navy and the Japanese Army is usually acknowledged as is the weakness that that conflict created for the Japanese military.  Thomas highlights not only the Army-Navy conflict but the many contending factions within the Japanese Navy as well.  

He does a good job of emphasizing just how exhausted were the respective Japanese and American naval leaderships at the time of the battles and how such exhaustion contributed to the mistakes made.

Thomas does an especially good job of acknowledging that part of the American challenge was that we needed two types of leadership at different times during the Pacific war.  We needed cautious leadership as exemplified by Admiral Spruance, particularly early in the war when America was playing catch-up.  We also needed aggressive risk-taking leadership as exemplified by Admiral "Bull" Halsey.  

Sometimes when we got caution when we needed aggression and sometimes we got aggression when we needed caution.  With tragic consequences.

However, absent a wondrous leader with just the right mix of both attributes, well deployed, we ended up with what we needed even though it was occasionally less than optimum.  That is simply the tragedy of war.

A worthwhile and rewarding read but it could have been better edited.