War Beneath the Sea is the comprehensive account of submarine conflict in the Second World War. Padfield covers all the major belligerents, going beyond the standard accounts of the Battle of the Atlantic and the 'clean sweep' patrols of Mush Morton in the Pacific to develop a systematic account of the submarines of Nazi Germany, the United States, Japan, Britain, and even Italy.

The submarine had made its significant debut as a weapon in the First World War, where unrestricted submarine warfare threatened the British empire and helped bring America into the war. The power of the submarine in commerce warfare was only systematically developed by the Nazis, and in particular Admiral Donitz, who combined high quality boats with a doctrine of aggressive surface night attacks. Nazi night optics were a cut above, and a clever binocular pedestal mount fed observations from the conning tower directly into the torpedo fire control center. By comparison, British boats were small and slow; their antisubmarine doctrine completely atrophied. American boats were the most impressive at the beginning of the war, with air conditioning for crew but were hindered by a cautious attack doctrine and the fatally flawed Mk 14 torpedo, with detonators that simply did not work. Japanese boats were large, but wedded to a doctrine of decisive fleet battle that reduce their flexibility.

As we all know, the Second World War started in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, and subsequent declaration of war by France and Britain against Nazi Germany. This was a problem for Donitz, since he had been promised that the war would start in 1942, when the U-boat building program would be completed and he'd have 300 U-boats. Instead he went to war with only a few dozen ready for action in the Atlantic. His forces ran wild in the First Happy Time against disorganized British defenses, but they lacked the numbers to be truly decisive.

The Battle of the Atlantic was one of the major campaigns of the war. Meanwhile, British submarines operating from Malta and Alexandria faced a miniature version of the shipping campaign against Axis transports to North Africa. The Maltese boats faced truly horrific conditions during the siege, but presented a perennial thorn in the Axis side.

Submarine actions depended on the courage and judgement of commanders, but it was also a technological war. It was in this area that the Allies succeeded, with development of centrimetric radar giving their submarines and escorts a major advantage. Convoy escort building, new weapons like the Hedgehog depth charge projector, and doctrine for pursuing U-boats tilted the submarine war towards the Allied side. The final days of both the Japanese and Nazi services were essentially suicide operations for little gain.

Padfield blends first-person accounts of actions with a synoptic view of the campaign. He has a generally positive view of the sailors who served, and isn't afraid to shy away from judgment of higher commanders. Donitz, though an avowed Nazi, understood the use of U-boats as a weapon. His failure to keep up with technological changes doomed his arm, and his men. On the allied side, their was a surprising lassitude at proper convoy tactics and aerial escorts. Britain forgot the lessons of the First World War, and the United States ignored what their Allies had learned months before, likely due to Earnest King's Anglophobia. The diversion of long range bombers and radars to the strategic bombing offensive, which delivered relatively few results early on, when as few as 100 planes could have tilted the balance in the Atlantic, is one area of folly. The obstinance of Pacific Command over the reliability of the Mk 14 is another area.

Having read quite a few of these naval histories, Padfield joins the top ranks of authors.

Having read some fiction about the South Pacific, I decided to switch up to some history. Lord is one of the titans of popular history, having written a widely read history of the Titanic sinking in the 50s, as well as an account of the Pearl Harbor attack. Like is says on the title, this is about the Coastwatchers in the Solomon Islands.

In 1942, with Japan on the advance everywhere, the last vestiges of British colonial authority in the Solomons were a handful of men attached to Australian Naval Intelligence. They were equipped with "portable" radios weighing 300 kg, plus batteries, generators, and fuel, and had little other support beyond that which they could wring from personal connections with the natives. Their mission was to elude Japanese patrols and report on naval and air activity. When the Americans landed on Guadalcanal, this mission became critical. The geography of the Slot between Rabaul and Guadalcanal constrained the Japanese to one strike a day at about noon, but the Coastwatchers could report how big the strike was and the exact timing, enabling the defenders of the Cactus Airforce to reach interception altitude and disperse their own bombers. In the long attritional campaign, this defensive intelligence advantage proved key. The Americans lost something like 120 aircraft, the Japanese 250 (fuzzy numbers from memory). As the tide turned, and the Americans began advancing, the Coastwatchers and their native allies turned into a vital resuce service, saving over one hundred pilots, and even more sailors. Americans knew that if they were forced to bail out or abandon ship, there were decent odds they would be found by friends, rather than the Japanese or fabled cannibal headhunters.

Lord wrote his book in the 70s, which has the advantage that many of the Coastwatchers were still alive. There's a vivid quality to the anecdotes which purely textual histories fail to capture. However, this comes at the expense of thematic unity or a real thesis.

Flags of Our Fathers hits firmly in the historiographic tradition of 'Boomers writing about their Greatest Generation parents', as James Bradley literally writes about his father John Bradley, Navy Corpsman and one of the six people in the famous flag raising photo on Iwo Jima. This book began in silence, the elder Bradley said almost nothing about his service or his role in the photo to his family, and exceeds the mold in a serious evaluation of the wounds of war.

Bradley follows the six people in the photo, his father James Bradley, Sergeant Michael Strank, Harlon Block, Franklin Sousley, Ira Hayes, Harold Schultz, and Rene Gagnon, from their Great Depression childhoods, through enlistment and training, and then into the Battle of Iwo Jima. Iwo Jima was a nightmare. The entire island was riddled with fighting positions connected by a network of tunnels. Bombardment from sea and air did nothing to the bug in defenders. They would have to be pried out by Marines with rifles, grenades, and flamethrowers, at horrendous casualties. The five week was responsible for 26000 American causalities and a third of the Medals of Honors earned by the Marines Corps in the war. It was a frightful slaughter.

The Photograph is famous, but in a grim irony, entirely unmemorable at the time. The flag was raised on Mount Suribachi four days after the initial landings. Marines who had spent three days in grueling combat climbed the mountain without contact, and set up a smaller flag without photographers present. Bradley and a platoon of Easy Company was sent up with a larger flag later in the day. While simply being on Iwo Jima was heroic, the moment that the flag was raised was one of quietude. The Photograph was taken by Joe Rosenthal as a lucky snap, and became an instant icon.

Three of the six men in the photograph were already dead, killed in action, but the others were whisked off the island and became publicity figures for the 7th War Bond Drive. The survivors handled the publicity in different ways. Rene Gagnon never managed to capitalize on it in the way he thought he should, and died at 54 of a heart attack. Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian, had a tragic descent into alcoholism which Bradley reads as driven by untreated PTSD. John Bradley tried very hard to forget the war, building a life as a funeral director and pillar of the community in northern Wisconsin. When reporters called, his children were instructed to say he was fishing in Canada.

Flags of our Fathers is a solid social and personal history of a key moment in the war, with some moving antiwar rhetoric.

Serenade to the Big Bird is a literary memoir of life as a B-17 pilot. It's short, and somewhat digressive as Stiles wanders through his childhood, dames, leave on London, but the passages in the air are non-technical and electric. Flying is easy and beautiful. Flying in tight formation through flak and fighters is anything but. Death is a constant presence in the air over Germany, a swift and violent in any number of ways as vulnerable ships fall out of formation and get shredded.

After his tour in B-17s, Stiles transferred to fighters where he was shot down and killed in November, 1944. It was a waste, as all of war is, but I can't help but be reminded of Ed Rasimus' thoughts, "Flying fighters is simply an assignment, but being a fighter pilot isn’t. Being a fighter pilot is a state-of-mind. It’s an attitude toward your job, toward the mission, toward the way you live your life. You don’t have to fly fighters to be a fighter pilot. You’ve simply got to have the attitude."

Destroyers are the workhorses of the fleets. While carriers might have the glory, battleships the honor, and cruisers a sleek elegance, destroyers get the job done where bigger ships are too expensive to risk. With 5" guns, torpedoes, and a potent mix of anti-aircraft and anti-submarine weapons, destroyers do all the dirty and dangerous jobs of the fleet.

Tin Can Titans focuses on the decorated ships of DesRon 21, primarily the Fletcher-class destroyers USS Fletcher, USS Nicholas, and USS O'Bannon. This ships were the frontline in the most desperate days of the Solomon Islands campaign, first escorting supply ships to Guadalcanal, and then pushing back the IJN along the Slot.

Wukovits writes a conventional WW2 hagiography, celebrating the heroism of the common sailor and their rapid professionalism. Senior leadership is called out for failing to use destroyers as independent units in night action, relegating them to a close screening role that invited confusion and reduced the effectiveness of radar in key battles in 1942 and 1943. The narrative focuses closely on the men of the ships, but as a military history it loses focus later in the war. As the Pacific Fleet swelled, destroyers were no longer Halsey's only punch, but merely once component of a massive amphibious war machine. This is a good book, and I appreciated the details on the Solomon Islands, but there are few surprises here.

World War II didn't end cleanly in 1945. The defeat of the Nazis occurred piecemeal in liberated territories from 1943 onwards, and stuttered forwards in civil war and internal purges for years after Hitler's death. While the Allied armies settled the key political question that fascism would not rule Europe, everything else was up in the air. So of course, after the war Europe came together as a community to ensure human rights and equality for all.

LOL, Nope. Europe faced massive challenges of rebuilding its shattered infrastructure, healing a traumatized population, and re-homing millions of displaced people. The refugee crisis was perhaps the first and largest problem. Most European cities had been wrecked by a combination of the combined bomber offensive and the Red Army. Millions of foreigners had been taken to Germany as forced laborers, and millions had fled their homes to escape the worst of war. Holocaust survivors found that they had no home to return to. Ethnic Germans had to flee areas where they had lived for centuries in Poland and Czechoslovakia. With agriculture and transit destroyed, famine ran rampant. In particularly grim comedy, gangs of orphans played with disused munitions, firing panzerfausts to see the bang. With millions on the move, and the economy and political system smashed, crime was omnipresent. Theft, sexual assault, and murder were so common as to be entirely unremarkable.

Occupied territory had to deal with a legacy of collaboration, and no one managed both a comprehensive and legally valid de-Nazification program. Nazi race laws had made Europeans newly aware of their mixed ethnicities, and particularly in Poland, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia, ethnic militias embarked on new programs of ethnic cleansing. Civil wars between Communists and rightist groups broke out in Greece and Italy, while Stalinist repression crushed Eastern Europe, particularly Romania and the Baltic states.

Lowe's thesis is that pretty much everybody was victim and perpetrator, often simultaneously. National mythmaking has served to cover up the ugly truths that most people collaborated, that ardent resistance fighters carried out crude and often deadly attacks on collaborators after the war, with women who slept with Germans suffering special abuse, and that these resistance fighters were then punished by the new governments as threats to resurgent state power. An accurate count of the dead is impossible, and revisionists on all sides have created outlandish figures of the dead, with right-wing parties who have uneasy ties to 1930s and 1940s fascist movements being at the forefront.

This is a heavy book, and as a continent-wide survey Lowe can't afford to dive too deeply in any moment. But he has a strong analytical frame, and manages to keep the grim material moving quickly.

Most Secret War is an account of British scientific intelligence in the Second World War, by it's foremost practitioner R.V. Jones, and is all around stunning. Jones was vital in a series of major turning points, and he's an engaging raconteur with deep insight into the messy busy of technical intelligence and bureaucratic infighting.

Only 28 years old, R.V. Jones was coming off a lackluster career in experimental physics, focusing on infrared detection of aircraft, when the outbreak of war in Europe catapulted him into a key role. A little thinking would show that in industrial total war, technology and applied science could be decisive, and while the British had a system for using their own scientists to advantage, most notably demonstrated in the Chain Home radar system, there was no central branch in charge of figuring out what the Nazis were up to, and how to foil it. Jones was it, with a skeleton staff and little formal authority.

Fortunately, he had the right background, with a wide knowledge of science, especially radio physics, and the tricky soul of an inveterate practical joker. Jones' first break was the discovery of a system of radio navigation beams aimed at England, which would allow the Luftwaffe to bomb accurately at night. While the Spitfire and Hurricanes could hold on by day, there were no effective night fighters in British service at the time. In a tense meeting with Churchill and the war cabinet, Jones conclusive demonstrated the existence of the 'beams', and a plan to bend them by generating false signals, showing up older and more senior scientific advisors Lindemann and Tizard.

While Jones made mistakes, including a careless oversight on guidance tones that he believes lead to the destruction of Coventry, his efforts blunted Luftwaffe night attacks. The next step was to figure out how to carry the war to Germany. Bomber command believed that traditional navigation techniques of dead reckoning and stellar fixes were sufficient to hit a city, but evidence piled up showing bombers were missing targets by miles, and losses were unsustainable. Jones developed techniques to foil the radar systems of the Kammhuber Line and direct Pathfinder crews to their targets. Even so, Bomber command had terrible radio discipline, and crews were lost unnecessarily. A particular pernicious pilot's tale was that the British IFF system acted as a jammer, when in fact the Nazis had figured out how to use it as a beacon, unerringly directing their defenses onto hapless bombers.

The final major battle was with the V-1 and V-2 missiles. Jones had been tracking the development of these weapons at Peenemunde, and had guessed their capabilities and effects with astounding accuracy. In one particular feat of guesswork, he figured that the V-1 would be used operationally on D-Day +7, with the first missiles hitting on June 13th, one week after the landings. Again, the more senior scientific establishment disagreed with Jones's claim, with effective countermeasures bounding up in useless committee meetings, and overseen by the incompetent Duncan Sandys, Chruchill's son-in-law. The V-1 could be intercepted and shot down, but there was no counter against the ballistic V-2 except conquering all launching sites.

Postwar, Jones was forced out of intelligence in bureaucratic turf fight, his job taken over by ineffective committees. He wound up with a chair at the University of Aberdeen and a host of decorations, which is solid for someone who had thought he had burnt his bridges with the academy years before, though less than he deserved. He returned to public service irregularly, continuing his friendship with Churchill, who saw him as a straight shooter who delivered the goods when others were wrong.

This is a long book, but it's full of delightful details and easy-to-grasp explanations of technical matters. The insights into bureaucracy, the difficulties of figuring out what is actually going on, and the importance of horizontal networks among the people who actually get things, are eternal. While Jones wields a hatchet against his seniors, he is unstinting in his praise of the people who made his work possible, the Resistance spies, photo-recon pilots, and signals analysts who gathered the raw intelligence. This is a top tier memoir and history in its detail, analysis, and quality of writing.

And one historiographic note. Jones cites David Irving in several places. At the time this book was written, Irving was known as a solid historian and expert on the Luftwaffe, who's pro-German bias didn't impact the validity of his data. Irving's discrediting as a holocaust denier didn't occur until several years after Most Secret War was published.

Quartered Safe Out Here is one the of the quintessential infantry memoirs, a tale of six months with Nine Section in Burma in 1944 and 1945. Fraser, of course has won lasting popularity as the author of the Flashman series, and he brings all his literary weight to this memoir. It's really about the ten or so men of Nine Section, grousing Cumbrian bandits in the finest tradition of their Boarder Riever ancestors. The rolling Cumbrian dialect, the complaints and arguments, the stand-tos and patrols and attacks, all come through.

Memory is a fickle thing, and tentpoles of fervent adrenaline in assaults on bunkers and desperate night actions and interspersed with long periods where nothing much happens, or nothing that could have stood out to be remembered 50 years later. And as with the Burma Campaign as a whole, it was the last brave show of the British Empire, where an army composed of Gurkhas and Sikhs and innumerable other Indian ethnicities, with madcap East African convoy drivers, and regiments from some tiny specific English county still half trapped in the Middle Ages, slugged it out with the cream of the Japanese army in the trackless jungle hills. There's glory, and humor, and jungle sores and malaria and dusty marches.

I could have done with fewer complaints about modern society having gone to the dogs, but Fraser is entitled to his pint and his grousing, because the story is incredible. Just a fantastic book.

By this point, the greatest secret of the Second World War is common knowledge. The allies had broken key Axis codes, and generals and admirals were guided by signals intelligence. Reading the enemy's mail provided insight into everything from strategic thinking to the readiness levels of specific fighter squadrons. The Emperor's Code is a biography, mostly of the British efforts against Japanese naval codes. It's livened by details about being a codebreaker then, boffins and retired diplomats and WRENS and Indian auxiliaries and other fringe types crammed together in sweltering radio huts, puzzling over grids of numbers in the hopes of finding some intelligence.

Imperial Japan took a characteristically arrogant approach to cryptography, assuming that Japanese was so complex no Westerner could read it. They were almost right, but they were also careless, using crypto systems that were barely random, re-transmitting messages in secure and broken systems simultaneously, and using stereotyped formats that provided easy 'cribs' for deciphering. The Allied effort was riven by technical and political difficulties. The main British codebreaking center in the East moved from Singapore to Sri Lanka to Mombasa in the course of the great retreat in 1942, with obvious implications for efficiency. Bletchley Park devoted most of its resource to crackign the Nazi Enigma cipher and winning the Battle of the Atlantic, and then swept in and demanded a leadership role. And if there's a villain in this book, it's the American Commander Rudi Fabian's FRUMEL unit, canny bureaucratic warriors who in Smith's telling preferred turf-building over breaking codes.

This book is long, and buries some key historical moments in the mass of details. Japanese codes were constantly changing, and could only be broken after sufficient depth of messages had accumulated. The diplomatic 'Purple' cipher had been broken by the Americans, and that combined with other breaks allowed Allied intelligence to conclude that something was up prior to Pearl Harbor, but not the specifics of the initial attacks. Conversely, the Battle of Midway came towards the end of code's period, and in fact several weeks past a scheduled turn-over in codes. This meant that the entire operational order for Midway was broken. At the end of the war, in the Summer of 1945, codebreakers caught a diplomatic message to the Soviet Union attempting to negotiate peace on terms that included the continued safety of the Emperor and the political integrity of the four home islands. These conditions were compatible with the actual American terms, no matter the harsh rhetoric of 'Unconditional Surrender', but for whatever reason (Soviet duplicity, Allied paranoia about signals intelligence), this message was not brought up at the Potsdam conference, and the atom bomb was dropped.

The Emperor's Codes is best as an oral history of codebreakers, and has some structural weaknesses, but it's still a fascinating and worthwhile military history.

Hornfischer excels at smaller, more intimate history, Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors being a shining example of what books can do. So how does his style translate to the massive undertaking that was the Allied victory in the Pacific?

Well, Hornfischer cheats. He focuses on three main characters, Admiral Spruance, who's Fifth Fleet was the decisive naval arm, Draper Kauffman, a naval officer who organized Underwater Demolition Teams to prepare the beach for invasion, and Paul W. Tibbetts, who dropped the first atomic bomb. Secondary characters, Marines, pilots, and Japanese soldiers and civilians, round out the history, providing a personal touch on great events.

The meat of the book focuses on the invasion of Saipan, a grinding campaign to force tenacious defenders out of a network of caves and bunkers. Saipan also served as the catalyst for the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, where skilled American pilots in F6F Hellcats tore the guts out of the IJN's naval aviation wing. From then on, kamikaze attacks were the best that the IJN could mount, but these desperate measures could still exact a terribly high cost.

Saipan dominates the book, getting over 20 chapters to something like 2 pages on Iwo Jima, and a similar slighting of the invasion of Okinawa. The big show was the planned invasion of Japan, Operation Downfall. Causalities were expected to be immense, exceeding over 100,000 deaths on the Allied side, and millions on the Japanese side. Chemical weapons were expected to be used. It would have been horrific.

Here, Hornfischer launches into his second major theme of the book, justifying the use of the atomic bomb. This is a subject of unending historical debate, and Hornfischer hews close to conventional wisdom. While Hiroshima and Nagasaki may not have been strictly military targets, the object was the dysfunctional psychology around Emperor Hirohito. Despite a hopeless military position, including blockade and regular firebombing attacks, Japan was unwilling to surrender. The overwhelming force of the bombs provided an impetus to end the war. It was atrocious, yes, but a final atrocity in a decade of horrors.

So with the caveats that this book is really about Saipan, with a long digression on the ethics of the atom bomb, it is still really excellent. Hornfischer is top notch as a storyteller, humanizing a powerful military facing a determined opponent. Well worth the read!