Secretary of State for War and Air. The rift between Fisher and Churchill took years to mend. Asquith had to form a short-lived coalition government, one that in 1916, in the midst of the war, was given over to Liberal David Lloyd George. Both Churchill and Fisher saw that the Royal Navy needed modernizing to keep up with Germany’s military advances, with her U-boat attacks at sea and zeppelin raids over land. For years Fisher had watched the growing Teutonic threat, and so oversaw the launching of HMS Dreadnought and other heavy battleships. He revamped naval training, and successfully positioned the Royal Navy fleets around the world for best strategic and tactical advantage. The new release by British publisher Pen & Sword and Naval Institute Press in the US has a few typographical errors, as one sharp-eyed reviewer has noted. Others have taken the author to task for some of his conclusions, but Gough is persuasive as he builds his case. His research is meticulous, and his praise of and criticism for these two great men facing the Great War is even-handed. The index by itself reveals Gough’s understanding of his subject’s complexities. In this latest of Gough’s books, we see his characterizations of youth and age kicking against the cross-currents of war and politics. Gough writes well, and his book is both good literature and solid history. Centuries earlier, Raleigh had written from his cell in the Tower that those who command the seas command its trade and hence the world. One can add that he who commands the seas has won half the battle, half the war. Gough fleshes out the two naval commanders, and gives them a local habitation and a place. No reader of Sea History should be without this book. James S. Dean Kenosha, Wisconsin On Desperate Ground: The Marines at the Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle by Hampton Sides (Doubleday, New York, NY, 2018, 394pp, illus, notes, biblio, index, isbn 978-0-385-54115-2; $30hc) Author Hampton Sides has produced the definitive history of the battle at Chosin Reservoir in North Korea and presents it in such detail that his reader should plan
to not read it all at once, but rather make time to take a deep breath and rest along the way. On Desperate Ground: The Marines at the Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle, while not an obvious maritime title, is worthy of attention from readers of Sea History. The United States Marines, for one, are America’s “soldiers of the sea,” and secondly, the US Navy, as always, played a strategic role in the conflict. The Navy carried the Marines to the shores of Korea at Inchon where the battle at the Chosin Reservoir began. Both carrier- and land-based US Navy and Marine aircraft supported the men ashore throughout the conflict, and the fleet carried out the survivors who reached the port at Hungnam. Moreover, US Navy physicians and corpsmen fought and died beside the Marines and soldiers of the US Army. On Desperate Ground is as much a sea story as a narrative account of a clash of fleets. And you will find no better writing. Sides has not offered a gung-ho narrative of US Marine glory, but a step-by-step account of how and why US armed forces were placed in a life-and-death situation created by hyper-egos and human frailty and how the men on the ground dealt with the sorry hand they were dealt. Sides carefully credits everyone involved, even to the thousands of Chinese soldiers thrown into the American meat grinder. Within the overall diorama of the Chosin conflict, Sides interjects a score of individuals and their experiences to illuminate the desperation of the fighting. And that desperation is the heart and soul of the book. If a novelist recounted fighting men trekking ten miles at night in mountainous terrain under continuous fire from a determined enemy, while enduring temperatures that at times reached a whopping seventy degrees below zero, would-be publishers would probably reject the manuscript. But On Desperate Ground is not a work of fiction, but an account of what the “Chosin Few” endured as they fought their way out of an envelopment by an overwhelming number of Chinese regulars. On Desperate Ground is recommended to readers interested in naval warfare, military history, the US Marines, or simply a good read. David O. Whitten Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina
New & Noted Adrift: A True Story of Tragedy on the Icy Atlantic and the One Who Lived to Tell About It by Brian Murphy, with Toula Vlahou (Da Capo Press, Hachette Book Group, New York, 2018, 263pp, isbn 9780-306-90200-0; $27hc) The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by Maya Jasanoff (Penguin Books, New York, 2018, 400pp, isbn 9780-14-311104-7; $18pb) Engines of Rebellion: Confederate Ironclads and Steam Engineering in the American Civil War by Saxon T. Bisbee (University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 2018, 264pp, isbn 978-0-8173-1986-1; $59.95hc) Incidents at Sea: American Confrontation and Cooperation with Russia and China, 1945–2016 by David F. Winkler, Foreword by John W. Warner (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 2017, 336pp, isbn 978-1-68247-1-975; $31.95hc) The Listeners: U-Boat Hunters During the Great War by Roy R. Manstan (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 2018, 352pp, isbn 978-0-8195-7835-8; $34.95hc) To Master The Boundless Sea: The US Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire by Jason W. Smith (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2018, 269pp, isbn 978-1-46964004-0; $35hc) Pacific Exploration: Voyages of Discovery from Captain Cook’s Endeavour to the Beagle by Nigel Rigby, Pieter van der Merwe, and Glyn Williams (National Maritime Museum Greenwich, Adlard Coles, Bloomsbury, Publishing Plc, New York, 2018, 256pp, isbn 978-1-4729-57733; $30pb) Picturing the Pacific: Joseph Banks and the Shipboard Artists of Cook and Flinders by James Taylor (National Maritime Museum Greenwich, Adlard Coles, Bloomsbury, New York, 2018, 256pp, isbn 978-1-4729-5543-2; $35hc)
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