Anne T. Converse Photography
Neith, 1996, Cover photograph
Wood, Wind and Water
A Story of the Opera House Cup Race of Nantucket Photographs by Anne T. Converse Text by Carolyn M. Ford Live vicariously through the pictures and tales of classic wooden yacht owners who lovingly restore and race these gems of the sea. “An outstanding presentation deserves ongoing recommendation for both art and nautical collections.” 10”x12” Hardbound book; 132 pages, 85 full page color photographs; Price $45.00 For more information contact: Anne T. Converse Phone: 508-728-6210 anne@annetconverse.com www.annetconverse.com
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The Gun Club: USS Duncan at Cape Esperance by Robert Fowler (Winthrop & Fish, Los Angeles) 2017, 366pp, illus, notes, biblio, index, isbn 978-0-99907530-2; $15.99pb) The Gun Club is a heartbreaking and superb book about the American Navy’s first victory of World War II and the men who delivered it. The son of a crewman aboard USS Duncan (DD-485) who was killed in action, author Robert Fowler offers the reader an account of the flawed dynamics that existed between the officers and enlisted men in the opening year of the war as the US Navy learned how to fight a most determined and competent enemy. The first ten months of the war were not the US Navy’s finest. From the humiliating defeat at Pearl Harbor to ordering Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher’s relief fleet to abandon the Marines fighting on Wake Island when only a day’s steaming away, to fleeing Guadalcanal with all the Marine supplies after their crushing defeat at Savo Island, Navy morale and competence were low, as the results evidenced. This is an incredibly personal book. Fowler’s mother was pregnant with him when her husband, Lieutenant Robert Ludlow Fowler 3rd, was killed 12 October 1942 during the Battle of Cape Esperance. He was posthumously awarded a Navy Cross for firing the torpedo that was believed to be the first torpedo to sink a Japanese warship, the IJN cruiser Furutaka. Fowler writes about growing up thinking, as did his mother, that the Navy was hiding something about the Duncan’s fight at Cape Esperance. Their suspicions began to be confirmed in 1991 when they began attending reunion events and met some of the surviving crewmembers. Prior to that battle, it had been forty-four years since the Navy had planned a real-time combat attack, and as the Duncan’s fifty dead crewmen could silently testify, the Navy was not prepared for combat.
Were the Duncan officers ready for war? Of course—they were Annapolis graduates and several knew each other from playing Navy football and other sports. Were the junior officers and senior enlisted ready for war? How could they be?—either they weren’t Annapolis grads or they had just graduated. As Fowler attended reunion after reunion, the crewmen got to know and trust him, and fed him stories of what the Navy considered leadership in 1942. The term “Gun Club,” Fowler explains, was the social circle of officers who studied explosives at advanced ordinance classes before moving into various levels of command, before being given a ship. That sort of nonchalant leadership is what caused Admiral Norman Scott, Commander Task Force 18, to issue a poorly phrased order by which some of his ships turned immediately to starboard to engage the Japanese, while the other half dithered and continued ahead. Perhaps worse, Scott and some of his commanders were unfamiliar with—and thus untrusting of—radar, and had it turned off, preventing them from becoming aware of the onrushing Japanese ships. Growing up without his father was difficult, but imagine Fowler’s distress to learn his mother’s suspicions were correct; the Navy had not been completely honest with her. While her husband had indeed died of injuries from incoming heavy guns; it turned out that those heavy guns were American—not Japanese. USS Duncan was mortally wounded by the heavy cruiser USS Boise (CL-47) when Admiral Scott’s orders were misunderstood, a fact the Navy worked hard to keep hidden. Those with a specific interest in the WWII-Pacific theatre will find The Gun Club most engaging, especially with respect to US Navy leadership and personnel issues in the early days of the war, while the more casual history buff will find the personal accounts of the little-known fight at Cape Esperance of great interest. It is highly recommended. Prof. Andrew Lubin Rosemont, Pennsylvania SEA HISTORY 161, WINTER 2017–18